At last count, 55 Jewish Community Centers receive 70 bomb threats. In Missouri, vandals overturn 150 gravestones in a Jewish cemetery. What accounts for the national pandemic?
Anti-Semitism has always lurked in the shadows of Western civilization, a constant menace made permissible by fear-mongering and demagoguery. In part, Trump’s embrace of extremism, nativism and reckless rhetoric account for the latest resurgence.
“I don't have time for political correctness” — incendiary words from a presidential contender. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose voters” — arrogant words pitched to an angry rabble summoning them from darkness. Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn — the president fills high profile cabinet posts with self-avowed bigots.
In a press conference last week, the president dodged questions from an Israel reporter — ordering him to “sit down.” Trolls from neo-Nazi websites applaud the snub.
President 45 finally denounces the scourge. “The anti-Semitic threats targeting our Jewish community and community centers are horrible,” he admits grudgingly.
For an egotist who turns every public stage into an “I” for an “I”, his torpid appeal is a day late and a dollar short. The Anne Frank Center of New York condemns his words as “a pathetic asterisk of condescension.”
In short order, this is how Donald Trump unleashed a wave of anti-Semitism unseen since the 1930s.
As several generations of my ancestors lived and died in St Louis, my heart sank when I saw this, but as best I can tell this cemetery is too new for any of them to be buried there. Still I'm sick. There are few lower, more reprehensible and deplorable acts than to disturb and deface the dead. It's one of the clearest marks of a civilization that it honors and protects the remains of it's ancestors. Is anyone so low as to feel elevated by turning over a grave marker? To feel triumphant about erasing traces of people who built America, who lived and died in America.
ReplyDeleteAm I a better man to take it in stride? Do I care? I'm an atheist, but I long for a cruel and vengeful God to rend and slash and drown and crush and burn and tear these vermin, flesh from bone forever. Would that be wrong, inhumane, degrading, contrary to my principles? I don't care. I want to hear the screams and the pain in their eyes as they die.