Just in case you were still convinced that we are living in normal times, check out the dark corners at the highest political levels, last week’s Democratic Party convention and now this week’s Republican Party convention. The good news is that the minute the promoters of hate were discovered, both political parties couldn’t react fast enough to disavow the haters and distance the party from them. Good news? Yes, but also cold comfort. How did we devolve to this terrible point?
On the Democratic side Linda Sarsour, exposed for her anti-Semitic statements during the Women’s March, showed up at the Democratic convention to urge Arabs and Muslims to vote for Joe Biden. A party spokesman immediately noted that Biden rejected her views and the spokesman stated that Sarsour has no role in the Biden campaign.
On the Republican side, Mary Ann Mendoza was exposed as tweeting and retweeting notorious anti-Semitic falsehoods, such as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and many more ugly conspiracy theories about Jewish power and control. Mendoza was scheduled to address the convention that night. The very afternoon of her latest retweet, the party cancelled her appearance.
It would seriously detract from the critical need to fight anti-Semitism to indulge in a partisan tit-for-tat over which political party’s dark corner is the darkest.
One might argue that Mendoza’s views are worse than Sarsour’s. One might counter that Sarsour has real power and influence, while Mendoza has none. Back and forth . . . it is all irrelevant. Hate is hate. Anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism. The minute we start getting into whose hate is worse, we get into excusing some of the hate. We take our eyes off the enemy. We lose the battle. No hate is excusable, or mitigated by someone else’s “worse” hate. All anti-Semitic hatred has the potential to kill.
The battle transcends political parties. The battle is ideological and cultural, indeed civilizational. Anti-Semitism today rears its head from Brazil to Canada to Britain to Belarus to Iraq . . . it is around the world. When haters post a banner on a Los Angeles highway, “The Jews want a Race War ”, we have a problem that is so much larger than political alone.
When we have a growing number of synagogues attacked or defaced, and some Arab countries emulating the Nazi images of Julius Streicher, and Jews murdered in Pittsburgh, and Jewish cemeteries defaced around the world, and Palestinian textbooks inciting hatred of Israel, and some rappers and other entertainers spewing ugly words, and Iran threatening to destroy Israel, and Holocaust denial tolerated in a Florida public school (the Holocaust is a “belief”), and a recent anti-Semitic leader of a major political party in Britain, and Muslim preachers popping up here and there calling Jews descendants of monkeys —when we have all this, we have a civilizational problem. None of it can be written off as “occasional” or “local” or endemic to a single political, social, economic or geographical realm. Nor is there a single cause or one-dimensional explanation.
True, Jews have allies. True, people of good will stand up against each one of these types of anti-Semitism. G-d bless them. We are grateful for them and acknowledge them as a beautiful counterbalance to the hate. The problem is the need for people to stand up. The encouraging statements and acts of solidarity highlight the dimensions of the problem.
Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News
