The Biden Disaster
Three weeks ago, President Biden suffered one of the most disastrous public relations days of any...
Three weeks ago, President Biden suffered one of the most disastrous public relations days of any...
For the last few weeks, I have been diving into the issue of anti-Semitism in the Black community. Unfortunately, this is not a one-way street. Despite many Jews being at the forefront of both the civil rights movement of the 1960s and today’s BLM movement, anti-Black racism certainly exists in the Jewish community – and I would venture to say that it’s more common among Orthodox Jews than it is elsewhere.
One area in which progressives destroy conservatives is their ability to capitalize on polarizing incidents. As soon as a story makes national headlines, progressives jump on it as a way to prove their pre-held beliefs. Many times, this turns out to be a good tactic. If we’ve learned anything from the last month, we know how well progressives have capitalized on the murder of George Floyd. Calls for defunding the police have garnered actual support in major US cities. More Americans believe in the concepts of institutional racism and implicit bias than ever before. Of course, there are times where jumping immediately to the worst possible conclusion backfires on the progressive movement, like the case of Jussie Smollett, but these cases never do any harm to the progressive movement once they are proven to be false. It always is in the progressives’ best interest to jump on a story as soon as it drops as the publicity generated from the initial story is always more than the fallout from the reveal.
In the last few weeks, there have been a number of prominent people who have outed themselves as, at worst, anti-Semitic bigots or, at best, subscribing to some historically anti-Semitic tropes. We’ve seen rappers Ice Cube and Sean “P Diddy” Combs. We’ve seen pro athletes DeSean Jackson and Stephen Jackson (and to a much lesser extent, Dwayne Wade). And perhaps most prominently, we have seen television personality Nick Cannon. Before we get into this story, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the voices that have come out against these sentiments, especially in the sports world. Last week, I mentioned the NFL players who spoke out against DeSean Jackson; but since then, we have seen commentator Stephen A. Smith as well as NBA Hall-of-Famers Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Charles Barkley all condemn the anti-Semitic comments made by the offenders listed above. Barkley even went so far as to call out the individuals by name.
I don’t know how closely you pay attention to the news, but race is a pretty hot topic these days. Aside from police brutality and the COVID’s disproportional effect on minorities, the nation was treated to two more “racial hoaxes” in the last two weeks. I’d like to examine these stories as well as a number of similar racial hoaxes in recent history and determine what they say about the battle for racial equality today.
If history would have taught us anything, this question would be ridiculous. It was only about 85 years ago when white people were trying to wipe out Jews specifically for not being white. Obviously, there are other groups of people who fall under this category – Italians and Irish, just to name two. But in today’s day and age, the question needs to be answered. And for the ease of argument, let’s say that we are talking about all Jews. Ashkenazi, Sefardi, chasidic, Litvish, Orthodox, Reform, unaffiliated – all Jews regardless of whether we keep Shabbos, eat rice on Pesach, or have really long curls of hair tucked behind our ears. Are we white?
There, I said it. Someone had to. Because all I’ve been hearing for the last two weeks is how both men were murdered in cold blood by police officers for the grave sin of being born with the wrong skin pigment. But the conflation of these two cases has incredible ramifications for the future.