Let me give you a piece of advice. If someone asks you if calling for the genocide of the Jewish people violates the standards of your organization, the answer is “Yes!” Do not equivocate. Do not hesitate. Do not turn to your lawyer and ask for a legal brief balancing the right of free expression against the fighting words involved in a call for the violent elimination of a race of people. Just say, “Yes!”
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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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I doubt I will go to witness the ceremony of remembrance at the 9-11 Memorial this year, the twentieth anniversary of the terrorist attack. I am never comfortable when I am at the 16-acre site of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. It’s not the memories. Those come and go depending on what is going on in the world. It’s the images which lingered before me for months after that day. Now they almost never return. Unless I am at the site.
On September 11, 2001, my wife Amy and I lived in Battery Park City in lower Manhattan. We had moved there from midtown just a few months earlier. Our apartment building was at the south end of the neighborhood, south and west of WTC Tower #2. I was the New York Bureau Chief and Senior Correspondent for public television’s Nightly Business Report and the newsroom/production facility/broadcast studio was just across West Street, even closer to the tower, due south of the site. Tower #2 filled the window of my bedroom, and of my office.
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Another record for the man who is everything. Donald Trump is now the only person to have been impeached twice by the House of Representatives. Whether or not he is found guilty when tried by the Senate, he also has the distinction of being a president of the United States accused by a bipartisan coalition. Ten Republican House members voted to impeach the titular head of their party. Four others abstained from the vote.
It is not difficult to see why. The impeachment came one week after a violent mob, encouraged by Trump, came to Washington and attacked Congress in an attempt to keep it from counting the certified election results sent in by all fifty states and the District of Columbia. Trump, leader of the executive branch of government, was demanding the mob stop the legislative branch from performing its constitutional and statutory function and instead disenfranchise millions of voters and install Trump as a literal dictator.
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Hard to believe but the fears I raised in my last column have now been realized and the situation is far worse.
The headlines exploded around the world on the morning of July 15th, summed up best by this Oregon PBS report, “Federal Law Enforcement Use Unmarked Vehicles to Grab Protestors Off Portland Streets.”
It is positively frightening. And it can happen to you. It can happen to me. It can happen to any one of us.
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The 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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