Yesterday, Shmuley Boteach posted the following disturbing clip on social media, in which a teenage girl (claiming to be 11 years-of-age but perhaps she was using the palestinian Arab age measurement system) walked over to him with her parents and told him to kill himself, all because he is visibly Jewish:
An "11-year-old" Muslim girl with her family walked over to me in Times Square and told me to kill myself because I’m a Jew. I am not making this up. You must watch this. They then had their small child kick me to humiliate me whole their daughter continued to say that I should… pic.twitter.com/36kxfmiCUX
— Rabbi Shmuley (@RabbiShmuley) December 24, 2023
Leaving aside Shmuley’s dramatic reaction (I think he should have remained more calm rather than engaging in a shouting match with her), this was truly disturbing, yet not really surprising. Neither were the reactions of her parents, from whom she clearly learned this vile behavior.
One of those to denounce this behavior was former tennis champion Martina Navratilova:
My initial reaction to seeing this is while she’s of course right, she’s also a hypocrite – given she has herself been one to spread antisemitism on Twitter/X. Like that time she posted an antisemitic blood libel (before deleting it):
So I took a look at her Twitter/X timeline post October 7, and noticed she is not afraid to call out Hamas, its atrocities, its supporters and their hypocrisy:
Does this mean she has turned a corner when it comes to her views on Israel? Not exactly. While she is willing to condemn Hamas and its evil, she still is way to willing to believe anything bad about Israel:
These recent tweets indicate Martina might actually mean well and is trying to be “fair” and “even-handed”, rather than holding deep-seated prejudice against Jews (although the older ‘blood libel’ tweet seemed to show some prejudice).
Either way, in doing so, she is still too readily believing the worst things about us without looking deeper at the veracity of the claims. I call on her to do better.
