Category Archives: anti-Semitism

October 7

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For two weeks I have wanted nothing more than to look to the sky and scream like a banshee. Even though I long ago concluded I would never get an answer.

For two weeks I have sat down to write. And been unable to start. I am supposed to write. That is what I do. I am supposed to explain, to educate, to stimulate thought and debate. But nothing came. It has been as if the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel placed my brain into suspension and froze my fingers.

How do you explain the inexplicable? What lesson can be learned from a demonstration of cruelty so overwhelming that it leaves one shell shocked both literally and figuratively? Except that human history includes so many examples of this kind of barbarism that I must wonder why we should be allowed to continue to defile the planet by our very existence.

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The Truth is Out There

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This is the 21st century. The Russians deny they are responsible for the slaughter of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, claiming corpses were planted on the streets after Russian soldiers had left the scene. Satellite pictures clearly show bodies on the ground and Russian troops still on the scene.

There is a fiction making the rounds that says the average Russian does not know what their country is doing in Ukraine. Don’t buy it for a minute. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union worked hard to keep the truth out of their territory. Western news media were blocked, jammed, and banned. But the truth leaked in, and when the USSR fell in an economic collapse, the truth flowed in with a vengeance.

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The Preachers of Hate

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PittsburgMemorialThe last of eleven funerals was held today. Eleven people, shot dead in simply because they were Jewish.

A federal grand jury has charged 46 year-old Robert Bowers with 44 crimes including hate crimes resulting in death. Bowers has pleaded not guilty. So we’ll do the journalism thing and note that he is the “alleged” assailant and that he is considered innocent until proven guilty. We will also note that the indictment alleges that on the morning of the Sabbath, October 27, 2018, Bowers drove to the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, entered the building with multiple firearms, and opened fire. He also engaged public safety officers, wounding several before he was wounded and captured. While inside the Synagogue, Bowers made several statements indicating his desire to “kill Jews.”

It was the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history. But of course Jews have faced many millennia of persecution and oppression and even in America Jews are no strangers to anti-Semitic incidents, which an Anti-Defamation League audit found rose 57% in 2017.

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