He should not have said that there are fine people on both sides. I have no doubt that he was referring to people who were simply making a case for leaving Confederate statues in place. I agree that those people should have gone home when they saw the swastika flags. Just like you should have left the women’s march when you saw it was being led by Linda Sarsour. How many of you spoke out when Jewish LGBT marchers were thrown out of the Dyke March for having an Israeli flag?
You’ve branded Trump as a leader in league with the worst of society – Nazis et al – for saying that there was violence on both sides. If you don’t see that Antifa came armed with bats, pepper spray, and urine-filled balloons, and used them liberally – then there is no possibility for real conversation between us.
Republican and black, Parson Hicks summed it up nicely in the NYT when she said that the moral outrage post-Charlottesville was a partisan event. “From Ms. Hicks’s perspective, the president simply pointed out a fact: leftists bore some responsibility for the violence, too…. the week’s frenzied headlines read to her like bulletins from another planet. ‘I feel like I am in a bizarro universe where no one but me is thinking logically,’ she said. ‘We have gone so off the rails of what this conversation is about.’”
If you, as Jews, rail on about the “racism” of Donald Trump but didn’t object when the BLM platform called Israel an apartheid state, we must go our separate ways.
You have the audacity to tell me that the time to “resist” is now. But you were silent in April when terrorist murderer Rasmea Odeh, a featured speaker in Chicago for Jewish Voice for Peace, told an adoring crowd to “continue challenging the “Zionists.”
Your social media pages were silent as virulent antisemitism spread like wildfire across college campuses, led by Students for Justice in Palestine.
You were silent when Black Lives Matter adopted BDS in its platform.
You were silent when Barack Obama denied that the attack on the kosher deli in Paris had targeted Jews. When he claimed that the Muslim terrorist attack on Fort Hood was really just workplace violence.
You were silent last month as an imam in California advocated for the annihilation of Jews.
And finally, you chose to cancel your annual call with the president before the High Holidays. This tells me that, contrary to Yom Kippur tradition, you don’t have “the willingness to talk with those who have wronged you.” You’ve abandoned the idea that difficult conversations have value. I’ll continue to look for those conversations, but they will not be with you.
I am ashamed that the leadership of the Jewish institutions I once respected have come to this. I am done with your selective outrage and your political agenda, cloaked in the majesty of my faith tradition. I am tired of politics from the pulpit. This is one Jew you will not shame into submission.
