“[B]ut it cannot be forgotten that violence does not occur in a vacuum” (Melat Kiros, Dear US Law Firms, Nov. 7, 2023).
We should not pretend that we have not been warned. Representative-elect Melat Kiros is not some hippie peacenik preaching flower-power and free love. No, she has been forthright in stating with her now famous “but” that all violence is equal, but violence against Jews is more equal than others.
Ms. Kiros is certainly right about one thing: violence does not occur in a vacuum. Violence, like fire, requires oxygen it cannot breathe in a vacuum. With fuel and kindling, violence grows and spreads until it becomes a holocaust.
Kiros has her defenders, even misguided souls within the Jewish community, who point to her many statements condemning anti-Semitism as evidence of her good will. But rationalizing their support, they blind themselves to reality by relying exclusively on Melat Kiros’ definition of anti-Semitism, which she artfully crafted to dupe her advocates into saying she opposes anti-Jewish bigotry as cover for delegitimizing the Jewish people.
Notably, in Kiros-world, Jews do not get to define who we are or what we believe, and we certainly do not get to decide what we consider hateful.
Our agency as individuals and as a community must be handed over to Melat Kiros and those like her who believe that they have an absolute right to determine when Jews may take offense, but there is nary a circumstance when an acceptably cowed Jew might legitimately assert anti-Semitism, not even when we are consumed by fire in the streets of Boulder.
Melat Kiros is a trained lawyer. That means she knows precisely the intent of every word she writes and says. Her letter and her media interviews all illustrate the careful, lawyerly choices she makes about the words she uses.
She begins, “To conflate such bigotry [anti-Semitism] with the geo-political question of Israel’s legitimacy is one of the greatest travesties of this conflict.”
Kiros establishes at the outset of her pleading that Jews are not entitled to decide what makes our national ambitions legitimate.
Our experience of persecution and suffering is irrelevant and inadmissible as evidence to support an affirmative argument for our claim for justice.
As Jews, we have no standing even in a case involving our own destiny, making us eternal slaves dependent upon our masters to tell us what is legitimate or not, what we are entitled to or not, and where we can live freely or not.
In accusing Israel of apartheid, she shares this quote “[t]hey took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years.” And, in accusing Israel of colonialism she states, “Colonialism, as we so intimately know, cannot take place without violence against its indigenous people.”
Here, Kiros cuts off the Jewish people from our history in the land of Israel. Indigineity begins when the “anti-colonial” Melat Kiros says it does, which is evidently 1,000 years ago (circa 1,000 CE), when Jews lived in, wait for it, Palestine.
We also lived in sizable numbers in Egypt, modern-day Iraq and Iran, as well as Yemen for 1,000 years before the first Muslim existed and before the Arab conquest of the Middle East and North Africa.
But to Kiros, indigenousness begins only after those events, making Jews permanently itinerant.
Our preservation of our Torah and the books of our Bible, which contain our origin story and our history of independent political life in the land of Israel is excluded from evidence since it contradicts her conclusion.
That we maintained our political and cultural cohesion as a people following imperial conquests, including the Arab conquest, which drove the majority of us out of our land is no proof that we are indigenous when the starting point for determining whose claim is valid must be made only after any period of Jewish independence.
“Colonialism” only refers to when Jews return to our historic homeland and not to any period when invading armies drove us into exile.
By selectively applying historical criteria to define the permissible terms for making the case, we are written out of our own history and identity, which is precisely the point of framing the argument as she did.
In perpetuating anti-Jewish hate, the most effective weapon used against us has been the usurpation of our right to define who we are. Our tormentors labeled us Christ-killers, baby-killers, heretics, globalists, warmongers, and vermin, which became the pretext for the violence done to us across centuries.
As Kiros said, “violence does not occur in a vacuum.” Violence incubates by first taking away our right to define who we are so that others can define us as they choose. Then, they choose definitions that make excluding us, discriminating against us, and ultimately murdering us not only legitimate, but acts of righteousness under their own terms.
Melat Kiros is a bigot. She is an intelligent, well-spoken, creative bigot, but a bigot nonetheless. The greatest threat that is posed to the Jewish community by anti-Semitic sophists like Melat Kiros is their agile use of language, which appears to condemn violence while continually providing context for it to the point that the use of violence against Jews is not only understandable, but necessary.
In her TV appearance when Kyle Clark asked her directly if the Boulder firebombing attack was anti-Semitic, she responded as though she was the murderer’s lawyer instead of our representative, saying she “does not know what was in his heart.”
Similarly, she explicitly made the case on Hasan Piker’s show that “the anti-Semitism all over the world is a result of what is happening to the Palestinians,” meaning that any violence against Jews must be understood in its proper context, which is not hateful, rather it is courageous because it is resistance against Israel.
Our neighbors have disturbingly elected a bigot to Congress. In response, we must be more vigilant and more vocal about our defense. Remember, “violence does not occur in a vacuum.”
