For a few years now, I’ve been bothered by the “Alt-left,” and the hypocritical silence of the leftist liberal community toward it.
I fail to understand how people rationalize the extremism, the violence, the hate, the anti-Semitism and the terrorist sympathizing position.
I’ve wondered, for example, where has the national Jewish leadership recently been on Linda Sarsour or Black Lives Matter? Why has it gone silent and mute on violence that arises from the left, but only addresses violence or problematic verbiage when it arises from the right?
Shouldn’t all violence, all discriminatory and problematic verbiage, be condemned? Let alone the leadership of outed terrorist sympathizers? Why has violence or anti-Semitism become a partisan issue?
The recent double standard has bothered me.
But when there is a KKK-Nazi march through an American city in the year 2017, when you watch the absolutely skin crawling and bone chilling footage of the waves of that torch-lit Friday night march, with its chants of “Jews! Will Not! Replace Us!” as well as cries of the Nazi slogan, “Blood and Soil” (the Nazi Blut und Boden), you condemn it unequivocally.
No caveats.
It’s horrifying. Period.
You call evil by its name.
I don’t care that the leftist liberal community fails to do the same when it comes to the more widespread radical Islamist jihadists.
Nazism shouldn’t be a political issue.
Every person of conscience should respond with moral clarity, not with political considerations.
Is it really that nuanced of an issue, to come out against Nazism, black on white (no pun intended)?
The irony of President Trump’s “two sides” comment wasn’t lost on me, either. The liberal community invented this perspective, always seeing two narratives even in the face of pure evil, some going so far as promoting the idea that evil does not exist — the community that made former President Bush out to be some binary thinking moron for, in fact, not taking the two sides approach, but unequivocally and directly calling jihadist terrorism by its name of evil. The irony of Heather Heyer losing her young, beautiful and innocent life, by a Nazi white supremacist who adopted a recently popularized jihad method of murder: car ramming.
That tragic irony wasn’t lost on me.
Because evil is evil. There isn’t separate right wing evil and left wing evil. Eventually they meet on the spectrum of extremity. Why can’t all people of good conscience stand together against all evil? I don’t understand why evil is politicized. Why is it a right or left issue?
Shouldn’t violence be an issue that all decent human beings, regardless of political philosophy, can agree on and stand united against?
When it comes to evil actions that kill innocent civilians in a non-combat situation, it is crystal clear: there is only one side to condemn.
In a classroom, or in a meeting, or in government, when the crises have passed, one may reflect about the causes of evil, and how every action has a reaction and so forth, in order to increase understanding and hopefully fashion tools to de-escalate conflict.
But in moments of crises, especially when a life is lost, yes — simplistically — you call out evil for what it is.
I’m worried. These Nazis need to be stopped dead in their tracks. White supremacists and American Nazis seem to be on the rise. Right here in Denver, in April of 2016, we all woke up to a morning of over 36 cars on a five-block stretch on South Hudson Street spray-painted with swastikas and Stars of David, with slurs of “kill the Jews” and “I support the KKK.”
In the last number of years, shuls in Denver and Colorado Springs have been vandalized with swastikas.
You cannot let legitimate concerns that terrorist sympathizers and anti-Semites have infiltrated the extreme liberal movement prevent you from acknowledging the evil of Nazism with the moral clarity that it warrants.
All enemies of democracy, be they fascist leaning on the right or communist leaning on the left, pose a danger to our American democracy and way of life.
We all must stand on one side, the side of uniting against evil.
In this Charlottesville case, the possibilities of the interpretation of the Unite The Right March are closed. We are talking about the defeated Nazism of WW II rearing its ugly head in an organized, formal march, right here, right now.
If the sole purpose was to protest the dismantling of the Robert E. Lee monument, that’s a separate discussion for another time. Don’t join with Nazis.
When it comes to Nazis there is no nuance.
Torches. Marches. Skinheads. Sledgehammers. Guns. Ramming cars . . . murder!
The opponents got violent, too, throwing bottles of urine and excrement. The pandemonium, was potentially dangerous, and the anti-American and anti-Israel tropes the opponents promote make me sick.
But only one person was murdered in Charlottesville, and it wasn’t by someone flinging bottles of excrement.
Nazis marching means advancing their one true goal: murder of any non-Aryan they deem unfit for their “pure,” “uncontaminated” society.
Obviously, so many of us in the Jewish community live very personally with the painful legacy of this evil Nazi ideology. Many of our families paid the most painful cost because of this monster we know all too well; many, to this day, even three generations later, are on some level still impacted.
Nazism, then and now, is something all of us decent people of America can agree, must agree, to stand united against, no ifs, ands or buts.
I don’t want 2017 to go down in history as the new 1968, let alone 1938.
Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News
