Day 104.

This week in antisemitism that’s being ignored by the President:

1. A man in South Carolina planned an attack on a local synagogue, saying he was inspired to act “in the spirit of Dylann Roof.” He has a felony conviction and has suspected ties to white supremacists. He was arrested and is currently being held on weapons charges.
2. Today marks the fourth day this year that someone coordinated telephoned bomb threats to JCCs in North America. This time it was 11 calls to campuses in 10 cities. The centers were all evacuated and searched.
3. More than 100 gravestones were knocked over in a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis, MO.

It seems like hate attacks against Jews are becoming ubiquitous. Just how common are they?

This article puts the current situation into context. There are two charts in this article and they’re both remarkable, and terrifying. The first (which I can’t ignore) shows hate crimes committed on people of Muslim faith over time. There’s a huge spike in 2001. Levels remained elevated every year after that – at least 5 times what they’d been before 2001. The article notes that “[o]verall, anti-Muslim crimes now make up about 13 percent of religiously-motivated hate crimes, and 2 percent of all hate crimes in general.”

The second shows how often people are targeted for their faith (or atheism). Jews are targeted most often (over 600 attacks in 2013). The numbers have risen since then (over 900 attacks in 2015). Even with the five-fold increase in crimes against Muslims? Hate crimes against Jews are five times that. If you correct for relative percentages of the population, Jews are still more than twice as likely to be victims of hate crimes as Muslims.

Jews and Muslims share this undeserved unrest. We deserve peace. But instead, we’re seeing a wave. It’s rising, not yet cresting. And the president continues to be silent.

Day 103.

I have friends who live in Washington DC, so they don’t have a voting Congressman or Senator. That’s wrong, especially since this country was founded as a response to Taxation without Representation.

In the meantime though, here is a story about people in Washington partnering with their friends across the country. They’re delivering messages to Senators and Congressmen by hand. It’s a small advantage to being local. The article mentions a couple of organizations, including LoudDC, which are helping residents connect with the federal government to make their voices heard.

Day 102.

I took a look at the #NotTheEnemy hashtag on Twitter today. And there I was reminded of L. Alex Wilson.

If you’ve seen 13TH, Ava DuVernay’s documentary about the United States prison system’s racist history, you know Wilson. He is the tall, serious man in the suit and hat who is being chased and attacked by a mob. I didn’t know his name before I came across DuVernay’s tweet about him, nor what he was doing the day he was attacked.

Wilson was in Little Rock Arkansas that day covering the Little Rock Nine, the group of students then in the process of integrating Central High School, for the Tri-State Defender of Memphis, TN. It was September 23, 1957. The nine students had faced a racist mob at the entrance of the school and had, for the moment, returned to their homes for their safety. Seeking a target, the mob turned to Wilson instead, kicking, choking and beating him, pelting him with a brick. His injuries were severe – he sustained at least one blow to the head (probably the brick, according to witnesses) that probably brought on Parkinson’s disease, leading to his death three years later.

Every time they struck him he stood back up calmly, put his hat back on, and walked. He did not run. He did not see a doctor.

(The students returned to the school while the mob was assaulting Wilson and they were able to safely enter the building.)

Wilson filed his story on time. He wrote:

I decided not to run. If I were beaten, I’d take it walking if I could – not running. […] Any newsman worth his salt is dedicated to the proposition that it is his responsibility to report the news factually under favorable and unfavorable conditions.

The assaults on Wilson and on photographer Earl Davy were captured by a reporter from the Associated Press. They were seen in newspapers across the country the following day.

People in the press go through Hell to get the truth out. Rather than being the enemy, they’re putting themselves on the line in ways large and small to help citizens see as clearly as possible. I can think of no more important job than that.

Day 100.

I want to talk about the question Jake Turx asked the President today about the coordinated bomb threats against JCCs nationwide over the last month. And he was unable to bring himself to condemn the acts as wrong or to pledge to investigate.

Turx asked – and was answered:

“I haven’t seen anybody in my community accuse either yourself or anyone on your staff of being anti-Semitic,” Turx told Trump. “However, what we are concerned about, and what we haven’t really heard being addressed, is an uptick in anti-Semitism and how the government is planning to take care of it.”

He continued: “There have been reports that 48 bomb threats have been made against Jewish centers all across the country in the last couple of weeks. There are people who are committing anti-Semitic acts or threats —”

“He said he was going to ask a very simple, easy question. And it’s not. Not a simple question, not a fair question,” Trump said, interrupting Turx. “OK, sit down, I understand the rest of your question.”

Trump went on to talk about how he isn’t anti-Semitic, and he isn’t racist.

He continued:

“Quiet, quiet, quiet,” Trump said to Turx, after he tried to ask another question. “See, he lied about, he was going to get up and ask be a very straight, simple question. So, you know, welcome to the world of the media.”

“But let me know just tell you something, that I hate the charge,” Trump went on, returning to the question of anti-Semitism. “I find it repulsive. I hate even the question, because people that know me, and you heard the prime minister, you heard Netanyahu yesterday, did you hear him, Bibi? He said, ‘I’ve known Donald Trump for a long time,’ and then he said, ‘Forget it.’”….

“So you should take that,” Trump concluded, “instead of having to get up and ask a very insulting question like that.”

But then a second reporter pressed. He responded:

When a second reporter tried to press Trump on the issue, the president claimed, without evidence, that any anti-Semitic behavior was the work of his political opponents.

“It won’t be my people. It will be the people on the other side to anger people like you,” he said.

I do not believe the President is looking out for people who are vulnerable.

I do not know how to explain this any other way than that the President doesn’t care. And the tone is being set in his government from the top down. If they won’t stand up for us we must stand up for each other. Like those people standing up for us in East Tennessee.

We have to watch out for each other.

Day 95.

I didn’t get all I wanted to accomplished today, but I had a piece of good news. Yale has renamed a residential college that it had formerly named after John C. Calhoun, a repellent racist whose singular “contribution” to society was advancing the cause of slavery, which he viewed as a “positive good.” (This article, by my friend Betsy, was written after the first time Yale considered renaming the college – and it decided not to.)

Today Yale announced it renamed the college after Grace Murray Hopper, Ph.D., Naval Rear Admiral and computer programming pioneer. It was the right thing to do, and Hopper is a much worthier choice.