Motley Moose – Archive

Three people are reported dead after a shooting at a Jewish Community Center and the Village Shalom retirement village in Overland Park, Kansas.  It is reported that police took a man into custody who was screaming “Heil Hitler” at reporters.  The Forward reports that the gunman “reportedly shouted Nazi slogans.”

This shooting occurred a day before Passover begins tomorrow night at sundown.  If the reports from The Forward are correct, then this represents an anti-Semitic murder as preparations for that upcoming holiday are well underway.

Michele Bachmann’s words about the Jewish-American community selling out Israel simply because we strongly support President Obama and the Democratic Party do nothing less than encourage one of the oldest, and most dangerous, anti-Semitic memes – that of dual loyalty.

Of Jewish support for President Obama, Bachmann said:

The Jewish community gave him their votes, their support, their financial support and as recently as last week, forty-eight Jewish donors who are big contributors to the president wrote a letter to the Democrat [sic] senators in the US Senate to tell them to not advance sanctions against Iran. This is clearly against Israel’s best interest. What has been shocking has been seeing and observing Jewish organizations who it appears have made it their priority to support the political priority and the political ambitions of the president over the best interests of Israel. They sold out Israel.

This is nothing more than Congresswoman Bachmann telling us that our primary loyalty should be to Israel because we are Jews and Israel is the Jewish State and that we should vote accordingly.  Bachmann is not the first Republican to engage in such behavior and she will certainly not be the last as Republicans have long tried to use this as a wedge issue to win more Jewish votes; a plan that heretofore has failed miserably, as we remain one of the most reliably liberal and Democratic groups out there.

The fostering of this perception, however, is very dangerous to the Jewish community.  It encourages people to treat us as outsiders.  After all, if we’re not completely American because we all have this dual loyalty, then we shouldn’t be treated as full Americans many would then proceed to argue.  Our loyalty would become suspect and the haven, and home, that America has been to us would disappear.

My great-grandparents fled Latvia and Poland so that they could escape the pogroms and the violence and the systematic oppression from the government.  Encourage dual loyalty on our parts, and then create that perception in the minds of our fellow Americans, and all that nastiness could quickly come back.  None of this, however, comes to mind to these Republicans because they don’t really care so much about Jewish-Americans or the safety and welfare of Jews in general.

In the end, Jewish safety and welfare is completely irrelevant to Bachmann because we’re just pawns in her desire to see the realization of the end times postulated in the Book of Revelation.  That is what Bachmann and her ilk are concerned with.  We are only here to help bring about the second coming of Jesus and the end of the world.  While it is not hatred of the Jews that we have seen in other corners of the world, it is certainly not love for the Jews that we see here.

What Bachmann, in her apocalyptic fervor fails to understand is that Jewish-Americans do not wish to be part of her schemes.  We vote on the issues that are most important to us.  All one needs to do is look at the various social and economic issues.  On pretty much each and every one of them the overwhelming majority of Jews come down on the liberal side.  That is why every Democratic presidential candidate has won the Jewish vote for nearly 90 years running.

Congresswoman Bachmann, I think I can speak for the vast majority of Jewish-Americans when I say I can’t wait until you’re back home in Minnesota for good at the conclusion of this Congress.

Many conservatives have invoked Holocaust comparisons – and claimed that if European Jews only had guns in the 1930’s and 1940’s there would have never been a Holocaust – when it comes to any effort to implement new gun control laws.  This time, the focus of their anger is Jersey City mayor Steven Fulop, himself a grandchild of Holocaust survivors.

Mayor Fulop’s offense is that he supports a measure which would require gun vendors that seek contracts with Jersey City to fill out a gun safety questionnaire.  For this, his grandparents ordeal in the Shoah was invoked by Scott Bach, a member of the National Rifle Association’s board.

Mayor Fulop’s response to the claim that if only his grandparents, and other Jews, had guns when the Nazis came for them:

If my grandparents had guns in their house when the Nazis came, my grandparents would be dead and I wouldn’t be here. (emphasis my own) So that’s probably the reality of the situation. But I don’t think that you can equate religious persecution to a manipulation of the intent of the Second Amendment.

These conservatives seem to forget exactly what would happen if you had one or two people go up against fully equipped soldiers.  Maybe one or two or even three soldiers would get killed, but, in the end, it would be the ordinary people that were killed.  No, it wasn’t a lack of guns that caused the Holocaust, but the complicity of millions of people in Germany and occupied Europe who actively assisted in the Shoah and those, throughout the world, that turned a blind eye to what was happening and the countries that closed their doors to Jewish refugees fleeing for their very lives.

I’m carrying petitions for a friend that is running for city council here in New York.  I’ve been going around with someone else and the two of us went into an apartment building tonight.  The building had already been done by another candidate’s petition carriers.  Since someone’s signature is only valid for the first candidate they sign for, we decided to leave the building and move on.  On our way out of the building there was someone standing in the hallway and we decided to approach him.

New York State has party registration and closed primaries.  In order to sign for a candidate to be on the primary ballot you must be a registered member of that party.  So we asked this guy if he was a registered Democrat.  He asked who the candidate we were carrying for was and we supplied the candidate’s name.  This guy then asked if our candidate was the “Cuban guy.”  We replied that no, he was not Cuban, but that he’s Jewish.  That’s when things took a turn for the worse.

This guy replied that “They [Jews] only take care of their own,” and that’s why he wouldn’t sign the petition to get him on the ballot.  Even after we explained to him that it was only to get him on the ballot, and there was no obligation to support him, he reiterated this position.  My fellow petitioner carrier answered back a bit and explained to this guy that he was dead wrong and that we care about everybody.  Before things could further escalate we left.  I admit that I just wanted to get the hell out of there.  We said our piece and it wasn’t worth getting hurt over in case this guy turned out to be particularly crazy.

Unfortunately, this guy’s thinking is reflective of the thinking of many.  There’s plenty of anti-Semitism out there, both here and abroad.  And if people want to know why we have so many community institutions and why there are stereotypes about us in certain jobs, then one only needs to look to history.  In the past, we weren’t considered citizens, but foreigners residing in the land.  Beyond that, there were restrictions on what type of professions Jews were allowed to work in, the most infamous of these being as moneylenders and bankers.  Even though those days are long past, the stereotypes remain.

And remember, this occurred in New York, the city with the country’s largest Jewish population and one of the largest, if not the largest, Jewish population of any city in the world.  This did not occur in some place where the government fans the flames of anti-Semitism or where there are few or no Jews.  This was in a city where we can feel relatively safe to be Jews.  It’s a stark reminder that there are plenty of anti-Semitic assholes out there (to say nothing of the many other assorted bigots).

One of the most debilitating and divisive aspects of the discourse surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the way constituencies engage the question of how anti-Zionism relates to anti-Semitism.  Very often, the division on this question is dichotomous and creates a binary of extreme positions that cannot engage with one another.  

One of these sides sees anti-Zionism, and indeed all criticism of what they call the settlement of Judea and Samaria, as anti-Semitism masquerading as political critique and individuals with humanitarian intentions being manipulated unwittingly by anti-Semites.  These folks emphasize how Israel, even when they grant its imperfections, is singled out for disproportionate criticism, that it is inaccurately depicted as the root of all discord in the Middle East and the primary source of tension between the Muslim world and the west.  And even when they grant that criticism of Israel doesn’t have to be anti-Semitic, at least in theory, they argue that it almost always is and must be viewed through the lens of this question.  Israel’s critics must be considered guilty of anti-Semitism or of unwitting and naïve collusion with anti-Semites, until categorically proven otherwise.

The other side, as is so often the case in this ideologically over-determined debate, seems its mirror image.  These folks argue that the accusation of anti-Semitism is a canard meant to silence valid criticism of Israeli policies and that the occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza are the primary causes of contemporary anti-Semitism.  Furthermore, they accuse the “Israel Lobby” of manipulating US politics, and thus international politics, to support Israel’s continued repression and exploitation of Palestinians against American interests and values.  This accusation strikes their opponents as all too close to the ugly conspiracy theories emanating from the anti-Semitic forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which depicted international Jewry as the ultimate source of all war and suffering in the world.  

I have asked many many people if they have heard of Irena Sendler.  I have not gotten any “yes” answers.  That’s a shame.  People should know about her.

Irena Sendler died on May 23, 2008.  She was 98.  During the Holocaust, in Poland, she saved Jews.  A lot of Jews.  Probably more than the better known Oscar Schindler.  We need a Thomas Kenneally or a Steven Spielberg to tell her story, too.

originally in orange

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