Monday, February 27, 2017

Never Again

Maybe the time has come for Jews to start arming themselves. The beast has been unleashed and I don't think Jared Kushner is going to save us. The alarming spike in anti-Semitic incidents has been tracked by several organizations. The Southern Poverty Law Center compiled a list of incidents drawn from media reports and submissions to the SPLC web page. In the seventy days following the election, 1,064 hate crimes, including acts of vandalism, assault, intimidation, and harassment, were committed. Forty-two percent included direct references to the election, the president or his policies. Swastikas have appeared in public places and private homes. A wave of bomb threats at Jewish centers caused the evacuation of Jewish Community Centers for the fourth time in five weeks. Fifty-four JCCs in twenty-seven states have received bomb threats, eleven in one day. The Anti-Defamation League Headquarters was targeted and the New York City Police Department reported that hate crimes against Jews have doubled in 2017. If you believe it can't happen here, that's what they said in Germany in 1933. So before the pogroms begin, it's best that the haters know we're armed and there ain't gon' be no Inquisition 'round here anytime soon.

The most egregious demonstration of hate occurred at the Chesed Shel Emeth Society cemetery in suburban St.Louis, where over two hundred headstones were toppled and hundreds of graves vandalized. Almost immediately, scores of volunteers showed up to repair the damage, including a group of Muslims from a nearby mosque which raised over twenty thousand dollars for the cemetery's reconstruction. Soon to be President Pence made an unannounced visit to help the effort and make a speech that said there is no room for antisemitism in a Trump administration. But where was the "so-called" president?  After receiving criticism for failing to address the rise in anti-Jewish sentiment, Trump was pressed on the issue while on "60 Minutes." When asked how he might confront the problem, this goon, this slob, looked into the camera and commanded, "Stop it!" Trump then claimed, "I am the least anti-Semitic person that you've ever seen in your entire life." Isn't that a double negative? He could say he was the most pro-Semitic person ever. That would embody everyone from Moses, to Muhammad, to Jesus, and that should pretty much cover it.  After all, some of Trump's best in-laws are Jewish. I don't believe Trump is an anti-Semite, but he sure is surrounded by them. It's ironic how much the evangelicals love Israel. It's just the Jews they don't like.

When acting President Steve Bannon was chairman of Breitbart.com, he declared the site to be a "platform for the alt-right." The term "alt-right" is a smokescreen description obscuring white nationalism, Islamophobia, racism and antisemitism. Senator Al Franken recently attacked Trump's Senior Adviser by quoting headlines from Breitbart.com when Bannon was at the helm. A sampling includes: "Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?" "Gabby Giffords: The gun control movement's human shield," and "Bill Kristol: Republican spoiler, renegade Jew." Bannon told the gleeful crowd at CPAC, the annual gathering of obstructionists, that his objective is the "deconstruction of the administrative state," whatever the hell that means. President Bannon said the cabinet officials who hate what their agencies do were "selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction." A conservative legal source claimed the plan was "to eliminate the vast administrative apparatus that does so much to dictate the way we live." In simple terms, they're trying to trash the New Deal and LBJ's "Great Society," and return power to the very same people who wrecked the economy and left hapless citizens destitute.

Just days ago, it was reported that more than five hundred headstones were overturned or vandalized in a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia. That takes some dedication. Within three hours, a contingency of Muslims arrived to help repair the damage. Maybe Trump is bringing us together- only in solidarity against hatred and evil. Imagine how you would feel if it was your family whose final resting places were desecrated. My mother is from St. Louis. My father went to Washington University. Those are my relatives buried in that Jewish cemetery. A list was posted of the names of families interred there. My great grandparents were among those listed. Thanks to social media, I was able to contact cousins who assured me that the graves of our family were untouched. I guess after the first two hundred headstones, the vandals got tired. My relief is cold comfort to those affected by the shock wave that convulsed the St. Louis Jewish community. In this toxic atmosphere, armed guards should be required at every Jewish center that's accessible to the public. To paraphrase Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, when the world's Jewry cries "Never Again," its not just a slogan, its a promise.

 

6 comments:

  1. Right on, Randy! Why isn’t Jared Kushner, or Ivanka speaking out!!!!!!! Instead of worrying about putting more properties up in the middle east, and focusing on their unending, insatiable greed.....why aren’t they outraged at what is gong on!!!! They claim to be “Orthodox Jews”, and I would never judge anyone’s claim to faith, but they aren’t like ANY Orthodox Jews that I know. The whole thing is so horrible, and yet so predictable....it happened before, IT CAN NOT HAPPEN AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!

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  2. My first reflex is anger. I'd like to see the perpetrators hung in a public square. My second is to go to the source, the sad real estate mogul whose pathetic ego abyss can only be filled by his own glorification (leaving no room for any other human beings at all). I wonder what outrage Donald Trump would be able to manifest if the stones of his parents were overturned. Pettiness in power is a symptom of a very sick society and what causes me so much rage is that I can't really be angry at most of the people who voted for him. I mean, you don't get angry at the guy who just lost everything in his pocket to the man running a three card monte game on the corner. The loser is just somebody's fool. Lot's of people know how to play with the fools. That's really a no brainer...it's all feel. A good con man reflexively feels just what his marks want to hear. And the charge in watching all the lemmings do exactly what you want them to do is electric. Remember this one >>>"I could shoot somebody in the middle of 5th Ave and they'd still vote for me"...or something like that. Guy needs to be sent to Devil's Island. I'm serious. He's the worst poison in the world.

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  3. I neglected to sign my comment. My bad.
    Gregg Grinspan

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  4. It took Hitler just 5 months to dismantle the German democracy and turn it into...we WE know what he turned it into...
    5 months.

    It does not take long to turn a democracy into a single party/single ruler state with NO civil liberties... FIVE months...that is ALL it took.
    FIVE MONTHS for Hitler to change the world, to change us.

    March: Outlawing the Communist Party, which had had 16.9% of the votes in the 1932 election, and threatening the Social Democrats (later forced to join the Nazi party), exploiting conservatives' fear of Communists.

    Still March: passing the Enabling Act, which enabled Hitler's government to henceforth pass laws without going through parliament and even without being subject to the constitution. The Enabling Act was supposedly limited to 4 years but always renewed.
    March/April: first and second Gleichschaltung laws, which de facto removed all power from the German states (Bundesländer) and gave it to the central government

    April-May: occupying major trade union offices and then outlawing these organizations (3.5 million Germans were members in trade unions at the time)

    April-July: negotiating a treaty with the Vatican that ensured the Catholic Church wouldn't use their sway to counter Hitler's plans (Reichskonkordat)

    Until June: outlawing the rest of the non-Nazi parties and making it illegal to found new parties

    June/July: killing or arresting many of vice chancellor von Papen's associates. von Papen himself was placed under "protective" house arrest and later resigned from his post. Apart from this move against the vice chancellor, the key purpose of this Night of the Long Knives was to get rid of the hooligans of the SA though, some of whom wanted power for themselves. Instead, the SS became Hitler's new favorite.

    So within 5 months, the Nazis transformed Germany into a single-party state with no civil liberties. Once President von Hindenburg died in 1934, not a single person could legally oppose Hitler anymore.

    "First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I wasn't a Communist..."
    "... then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist..."
    "... then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I wasn't a Jew..."
    "... then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me." -- famous quote by Pastor Martin Niemöller, who spent 1937-1945 in a concentration camp for opposing the introduction of Nazi ideology into Christianity

    NEVER AGAIN.

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  5. Do a little due diligence on the vice chair of the DNC,
    Keith Ellison............unabashed sympathizer of
    Louis Farakahn......and we all know the Russians hacked
    the Oscars...............

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  6. Way back in my day of feminist marches, the women's movement began to offer self-defense courses at NOW meetings and women's centers, etc. Most training was unarmed response, but some offered weapons classes, too. Israeli youth go through military training, right? Maybe a special program to have a couple of hundred of those who are good at teaching come to the U.S. and do high-profile education across the nation as an emergency effort? Of course, such an idea might lead the so-called prez to add Israel to the travel ban (weak joke).

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