[ad_1]
Earlier in the day, the New York Police Department arrested the man suspected of vandalizing the Union Temple in Brooklyn by scribbling "Hitler" and "Jewish Die" on his wall . The man, James Polite, is also under investigation for attempting to set fire to several Jewish institutions in the city.
Polite, 26, is not a white supremacist. He is African American and was raised partly by Jewish foster parents. He was sent to Brandeis University with the help of a charity run by the New York Times. He was a Democratic Party activist, a protege of former City Council President Christine Quinn and a former City Hall intern who, according to the Time, worked on "initiatives to combat hate crime, badual badault and domestic violence".
But Polite's journey through so many of the most vaunted paths of contemporary liberalism – university, politics, activism – and kindness on the part of the Jews was apparently not enough to prevent him from contracting the virus of anti-Semitism that numbed the mind. One day before he started vandalizing the synagogue, he went to Facebook and wrote, "The Civil War is here. Nobody must die. Mexico, Latin America, Black Pigs of the Caribbean and Jews. A person has touched all this shit while smoking.
<! –
->
On the same day, Polite also published a photo of himself lighting the American flag. Police suspect – and security seems to confirm – that later that night he also burned seven shuls and yeshivas in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Having just followed the murderous attack on Pittsburgh, the Polite affair deserves close examination. After the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue, which left 11 dead, some experts pointed out that President Trump had some responsibility for the attack, if only for fomenting the kind a chaotic atmosphere that gave power and vigor to the right hand.
This is a serious accusation, which deserves to be examined carefully and at length (Benjamin Kerstein does an excellent job in promoting this argument even here). But in Polite, we have an equally terrifying counter-argument, which suggests that in contemporary America no party has the monopoly of hatred and chaos. When the leaders of the Democratic Party, including a former president and a former Attorney General, stand alongside Louis Farrakhan on the stage at Aretha Franklin's funeral, is it any wonder that some are inclined to listen when Farrakhan qualifies? the termite Jews? And listen to them: Earlier this week, a rabbi, Avram Mlotek, was harbaded in the Manhattan subway by a supporter of Farrakhan who blamed the Jews for all the violence directed against them around the world.
And now, we are polite. If the left is honest, she will spend the next days and weeks wondering how a person educated in a beautiful liberal university, a good liberal newspaper scholar, could get a job with a good liberal politician – helping to fight against hate crimes. least – to try to intimidate and incinerate the Jews. This is a question that deserves to be addressed: Polite is not a lonely dissatisfied with a loose social network and no support system. Throughout his troubled life, he had an opportunity after the other to overcome his difficult beginnings. He took advantage of all aspects of the American Liberal dream, from a warm foster family to an all-expenses-paid scholarship, to a beautiful university and a position with a prominent progressive politician . It should have been, as the Time wrote when he talked about his success just a year ago, one to "challenge statistics". Instead, he tried to burn the Jews.
Those of us who are not held to blinding partisan commitments are saddened but not surprised. Anti-Semitism is so pernicious precisely because it eats by ideological convictions, afflicting the left as well as the right. And no matter what you think of the president's behavior, cases like that of Polite make it impossible to deny that the left has just as much a hate problem of Jew, if not much bigger: If the second man the most powerful progressive policy In the city that had the largest Jewish population in America, it was not possible to detect, let alone slow down, the arsonist who was part of his staff, the problem is much more serious that many would not admit. Before the most troubled maniacs do not attempt violence anymore, it's time for real introspection to begin.
Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine and host of the Unorthodox podcast.
[ad_2]
Source link
