Another guest post this week. My friend Ari posted the thoughts below on Saturday, 27 October 2018, in the wake of yet another mass shooting, this one an anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue during services. He allowed me to share it here, as I was moved by his response, his unwillingness to give in to this darkness. It's presented here in full:
The anti-Semitic attack today doesn't take place in a
vacuum. Days ago, a white supremacist, unable to complete an attack on a black
church, killed two black people before being arrested in Kentucky. Obviously,
the echoes of the Charleston attack ring loud -- Dylann Roof, like the Tree of
Life shooter, was obsessed with stopping this fictional "white genocide".
Killing people at their most vulnerable -- at a house of worship -- is a
pattern of depravity the white supremacist shows fully.
It can't be stressed enough that the shooter chose Tree of
Life synagogue not just because the shooter hated Jews but because the
congregation was active in refugee resettlement, and he was particularly afraid
of Muslims coming into the country. Anti-Islam and anti-Semitism go hand in
hand.
Just a week ago, we heard news that the Trump administration
was ready to redefine gender to essentially erase more than 1 million
transgendered Americans. This is shocking not just because of the robbery of
rights that would take place immediately, but because it echoed so clearly how
the Nazi Holocaust unfolded, as the attack on sexual minorities was one of the
party's first shows of force. Once the cleansing of "deviants" was
accepted, everything else followed.
At the same time, the president is dispatching troops to the
border with Mexico to face off a "caravan" of migrants -- men, women
and children. The one-sided standoff has the potential to be catastrophic, the
latest horror in American immigration policy just after the crisis of migrant
family separations.
I think a lot of Jews get frustrated when they don't think
that anti-Semitism is not appreciated or taken as seriously by the left as
other forms of bigotry. What I think is becoming evident is all of these acts
of terrorism -- whether by the state or by individuals -- are united in hatred
of us who are not "normal" or "mainstream", whether we are
sexual minorities, immigrants, racial minorities, religious minorities or
political dissidents.
Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-blackness, anti-LGBTIA, and
so on, are all different heads of the same beast. This is not to lessen the
urgency of any of these struggles, but to identify a common enemy, and to
underscore that our fight must be united -- we remain fragmented at our own
risk. In a sense, the old labor saying becomes all the more real: an injury to
one is an injury to all.
Ecclesiastes 3:8 says there is a "time to love and a
time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace". I disagree. We will at
once love and support each other as we face and unite against fascism. Our
families will live in peace, we will laugh, rejoice, have children, drink and
be merry. But we will not be passive when our existence is questioned. We've
beaten fascism before. And we will again.
Good night, comrades. And good luck.
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