IS IT OUR TURN AGAIN ? GUESS WHO?
It should be clear to my readers that I am obsessed with the never-ending growth of hatred of Jews. Why? I cannot explain . At my age which is 93 the Jewish problem is paramount to me. I want to leave my readers with organizations that I am constantly in touch with, but I would be less than honest if I said that they are successful . I will give you the names of these organization but if you want to help and contact them, I have to ask permission to give further information. They all need money. CIJA, CISA,Friend of SWCENTRE Canadian I nstitute for Jewish research, Goldie Steiner, Allied Voices for Israel, Bnai Brith, UJA Judy Zelikovitz CIJA , AIPAC ISGAP. I can state with certainty that the Jewish communities in North America are not aggressively active but only reactive. It has never worked and nothing has changed. I was personally happy when Israel was formed. Our state is now just another reason for antisemitism. Nothing changes!
I cannot nor will I even try to make a logical explanation for the return in close to full force of American anti-semitism, but it has arrived. Now I want to make it very clear that anti-semitism has never been absent from the American state completely, but has made its presence known in one way or another. Surprisingly when Hamas an arm of the Palestinians , after the Israelis left Gaza completely, attacked the Jewish state at its borders with destruction, rape, and killings, this horror for a short period of time, made the headlines throughout the world. Let me emphasize that the pause on the October the 7th action was very short but instead of the world including the U.S.A. and Canada taking pity on Israel, it instigated a very physical and very verbal abuse on Jews all over the world. “IS IT OUR TURN AGAIN”
It is time for a short lesson on the history of American anti-semitism. There are many people to talk about but I will name only the people I think will be familiar. Huey Long became a senator and governor of the state of Louisiana. Huey Long was active at approximately the same time as Franklin Delano Roosevelt (known to all history buffs as F.D.R. Illegally at the time he became a Governor and senator at the same time. Huey Long was not a democrat by any measure.He kidnapped his enemies,and had his own brass-knuckled body guards. Long avoided impeachments and indictments and government investigations. He was well-liked by the people in his state and with todays terminology would be called a “populist” It is hard to believe he launched an invasion of New Orleans the biggest city in his state and escaped without penalty. At the same time as Long was active F.D.R. brought in the New Deal. He was the best and most well known opponent of the president and built a well-known entity at the time called “Share our wealth”. Everything in the land will be shared. Many people belonged to Share The Wealth. Long would take the money from the rich and parcel it out to those in need. The millionaires Morgan, Rockefeller and Baruch were the others and were the targets of his so-called benevolence. Long delivered roads, text-books for schools in the downtrodden areas, bridges ,and ran Louisiana like a gangster boss. Long forced the government to repeal the poll tax which raised the number of qualified voters that year by 76% and most were beholden to Long. Long made the statement that a perfect democracy can look like a dictatorship. He also said very forcefully that none shall be too rich nor too poor. I must mention Father John Coughlin a dual Canadian and American Catholic priest who was born in Hamilton but operated in the United States. He was very well-known and was prominent but actually was in the U.S.A.with the new invention of the time ,the radio. He was very popular and antisemitic talk was his specialty, but he did not leave out the blacks from his racist jibes. Father Coughlin made the outlandish statement that if FDR was reelected the USA would become either fascist or communistic. I should not neglect to mention that inter-marriage between races was outlawed by law. Many supporters of antisemitism were not just ordinary American citizens but were elected members of congress, both the senate and the house. Some even came from the army, a general George Van Horn Mosley who imagined himself as an American fuhrer but did not declare his allegiance because he did not want to lose the army pension. Mosley made a statement that the efforts of the Jews in the Hitler era was just to put themselves in power as they felt they had been, and the moneylenders of the Western world’ There were many more but I will end with senator William Langer called “wild bill” for good reason. He was the best friend a Nazi agent could have in congress.
With all the problems of the Jewish people the acts of anti-Semitism were not great in numbers in the United States. A Jewish businessman Leo Frank was lynched by a mob in 1915 for an unproven rape of one of his women workers. In 1977 a few Nazis in St.Louis shot a few Jews at random in front of a synagogue. 41 years later the “Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, ended up a real massacre.It would be four decades in the intervening years that Jews suffered any killings and American Jews felt they were not being specifically at risk. This respite changed after the Tree of life synagogue killings. The attacks spiralled in numbers including two synagogues in California and Texas. You Tube kept showing videos of those with black hats, beards and fringed garments attacked from behind on the streets of Brooklyn and elsewhere. A kosher grocery store was shot up in New Jersey. The home of a Haredi Jew was invaded by a man with a machete. Polls still showed that the United States remained the most philo-semitic country the world has ever known. But all was changing and and attacks became much more frequent than over the previous century . Even so, the dangers mounted but the more secular Jews not easily identifiable, felt they were relatively safe. Many Israelis were injured in a very short six hours of time. How could the Israeli government not have noticed the activity on the Gaza side of the wall . How? For a short time, maybe two days ,the world governments and the newspapers called it a barbarous action. Then it all changed. On October 9th two days after the monstrosity on the Israeli side of the Gaza border, student organizations at Harvard University which included Amnesty International and Harvard Jews for liberation issued a statement . They blamed Israel for the violence. They called Israel an apartheid state . The violence was Israel`s fault. But it did not end there. In Cambridge far from Harvard at Cal Polytechnic University in Humboldt the phrase was issued ” Free Palestine F— Israel and was written on a sukkah set up by the Jewish Union on campus . As well on the same day Black Lives Matter Chicago chapter put up a notice featuring a hang glider copying what the Gazans had done at the Nova Music Festival in Israel and murdered 260 people and committed more rapes and physical assaults . That first week two Israeli artists in New York printed up many posters of the Israelis held hostage and printed their pictures on the internet . Feeling traumatized other American people, not necessarily Jews put up many posters on New York streets and the posters were quickly taken down. Street scuffles emerged and the posters were taken down as fast as they appeared. It became a war between two groups in the USA, one in support of Israel and the other supporting the Hamas in Gaza.
As you read in the first section of this blog Anti-semitism is not new to the USA and Jews. A week after attacks on a NY subway platform a 28 year old Christopher D`Agular punched a 29 year old woman in the face. Stunned she asked him. WHY? Because I recognized you were Jewish. This was the beginning of assaults on Jews across the country. In Skokie Illinois a young man named Peter Christos was leading an elderly Jewish couple through a pro palestine demonstration to help them get to a pro Israel demo. He said on Twitter that he had been badly assaulted and kicked in the head Christos as you can surmise is not Jewish and it is quite apparent not all Americans hate the Jews.
Since that fateful day on October 7th The antisemitic attacks on Jews have increased by 337% in America. In Studio City, California, a young person, Daniel Garcia invaded a home with a mezuzah on the doorjamb early in the morning. A young man and his 9 month old pregnant wife were sound asleep. Garcia immediately stated that I am going to kill you because you are Jewish. brandishing a kitchen knife I knew because of the Jewish symbol on the door. Garcia`s wife said her husband fought with the attacker and the police saw him outside with a kitchen knife shouting” Free Palestine”. Only 11 days later about 15 miles from Studio City a man hit with a megaphone, fell to the ground and died. Paul Kessler was hit with the megaphone carried by the attacker but died by falling on the pavement. The killer turned out to be a computer-science professor at a nearby college.
But that’s not the end of the problem. Who would have thought on Monday October 9th Cornell university professor Russell Rickford spoke at a rally that now the Palestinians are able to breathe for the first time. I wish I could say the same for the Israelis murdered at the border with Gaza. A few weeks later a building that held the Center for Jewish life at Cornell had to be temporarily closed because of antisemitic threats by a student. At October 10th at the University of California Davis, an assistant professor made her views known. Here is what she tweeted. ” One group of ppl we have easy access to in our country are many Zionists journalist who spread propaganda and mis-information. They live near us, have houses and children and are not hidden.They may fear their bosses, but they should fear us more. We have the ability to shed their blood. There is no record of action taken by the administration. Jewish students felt vulnerable.
That attitude to a person like myself is completely surprising. Yale professor Zareena Grewal asserted that Israel, the state no less, is a murderous entity, and Palestinians have an absolute right to resist.These professors and administrators felt that is what the west bank Palestinians inhabitants were facing from settlers . Of course there is an element of truth on both sides
I am aware of the cessation of massive gifts to Penn and Harvard and MIT. The refusal of university administrators to clearly condemn the request for the elimination of the state of Israel and to concur that request constitutes anti-semitism is as I ,and other Jews see as a hurtful act of antisemitism In addition Claudine Gay of Harvard would allow a state but not necessarily for Jews who have suffered discrimination in other states all over the world. Specifically I have just been made aware that in the 1920s Harvard set a limit of 15% When the quota was lifted in the early 1960’s the Jewish population began to rise to as high as 25 – 30% .Thousands Thousands upon thousands were the children of previous university graduates. It makes sense as the students are the children of alumni. Who would blame young people who want to attend the university their parents graduated from. Someone at Harvard now is actively attempting to lower the admissions to one to tw0 percent matching the Jewish population in the United States. We are not returning to antisemitism as practised in the early years of the U.S.A. which I wrote about earlier in this blog. On Oct. 7th The Gazan Palestinians under the leadership of Hamas attacked the Jewish state, with rapes, killings hostages. For a limited time the world reacted with horror and then it started worldwide and in the U.S.A.An antisemitism never before seen with this intensity in America on October 10th in Fresno california a rock broke the glass door of a synagogue.Noah`s Ark bakery nearby had a window smashed. At least 19 Synagogues.across the country had been defaced with swastikas and slogans and had hanukkah menorahs vandalized. Very simply since October 7th Jews in America have suffered all over the country in a precedent never before seen in the life of the U.S.A. Canada has not escaped the horror. Where is North America headed?
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