Tag: Antisemitism

Posted in Antisemitism, Hannukah, Judiasm

You’d Think After 5786 Years They Would Give Up

Posted on by debthumanblog

There were armed guards. There was enhanced police protection. Guards and police scanning the rooftops in search of snipers. Scanning the crowd of families looking for terrorists.

I wasn’t in a war zone. I was at a public Hanukkah celebration in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The day after a terrorist attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia. Before I left, I told Jim that I’d leave the celebration at the first sign of trouble. We both knew that I meant I’d leave when the first bullet struck.

People have been trying to wipe out the Jews for 5786 years. We are still here.

Hanukkah is the celebration of a tiny band of warriors defeating a huge army. A celebration when we threw them out of our temple, cleaned out their gods, and consecrated the temple. When we took back what is ours. The Torah. The right to study Torah. The right to pray. The right to be Jewish. There’s an eternal light in temples that must never be extinguished. Today, that light is electric. Then, the light was oil. But there was only enough oil for one day. Some went off in search of the proper oil. It took them eight days to get the oil and come back to the temple. That one day’s worth of oil lasted eight days.

Hanukkah is when I remember we are still here. We have never been defeated. We survived the Spanish Inquisition. We survived the Holocaust. We survived Hamas and Hezbollah. We survived being shut out of neighborhoods and jobs. My great-great-grandparents lived by the rule of never doing anything in public that would cause someone to think they were Jewish. They lived in secret because they lived beyond the Pale of Settlement. We’ve had setbacks, but we are still here. We have a homeland. Even in the middle of a war, Israel is still the only place on the planet where it’s safe to be a Jew. We are a mighty, tiny group. 0.2% of the world’s population. Since the beginning, we have had to fight for our right to exist.

When was the last time you went to a Christmas party and there were armed guards, extra police scanning the crowd looking for terrorists. Scanning the rooftops looking for snipers. Trying to stop trouble before the first bullet flew.

Posted in Uncategorized

Please God, don’t let the narcissistic sociopath win the election.

Posted on by debthumanblog

I’m having election anxiety. I grew up in the 60’s, but I had never seen the kind of hatred and divisiveness that has plagued this country since 2017 when the narcissistic sociopath was inaugurated. Since then, he has said there are good Nazis (there are, but they are all dead), and Hezbollah is smart. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization running Lebanon at the moment. But he claims to be a friend to the Jews. Yeah, the kind of friend Hitler was. Which is fitting because he publicly wished he had the generals Hitler had.

I’ve seen the peaceful transition of power turn into a violent, vicious riot later termed as “hugs” by the sociopath.

I’ve seen the blatant rise of antisemitism since October 7, 2023. Between October 7, 2023 and October 6, 2024, the Anti-Defamation League received more than 10,000 reports of antisemitism. Those are only the incidents that were reported. ADL has uncovered encouraging emails to the bigots encamped on college campuses coming from the ayatollah in Iran. Iran is also financing some of the encampments.

There’s a terrorist cell, calling for students to join them, on the campus of New Mexico State University. Who are these terrorists? Students for Justice in Palestine. Sounds like an okay group, right? It’s not okay. The group has encouraged and participated in antisemitic acts, and attacks on Jews across the campuses in the US.

I bring my service dog with me to my writing class. My writing was to be critiqued on October 7, 2024. I had to leave my dog home because I was afraid for her safety. I was terrified for my safety.

Today, I discovered that SUNY Buffalo, where I went to law school, has a group of bigoted students calling for the expulsion and firing of all students and faculties engaged in zionism. Out of all the antisemitic acts I’ve read about in the past year, this one hurt the most. Hillel and Chabad had a large presence on campus. I remember buying food from the kosher kitchen on campus. They had incredible knishes.

Zionism is merely the belief that Jews need a homeland and Israel has a right to exist. In the early 20th century, Zionists collected money from congregations around the world and bought land in Israel. I’ll type that again, they bought land in Israel. The land they were able to buy was swamp land. The early settlers brought in eucalyptus trees to drain the swamps naturally. They farmed the reclaimed land and built a country. During WWII, England, which ran Palestine and bought oil from Arab countries, severely restricted the number of Jews allowed to immigrate. WWII would have been different if European Jews had a place to go.

Israel has been forced to fight a war on three fronts. Remember, Israel was attacked. Israel was not the aggressor. Israel is fighting for the right to exist. It is not safe to be Jewish in the US now. If the narcissistic sociopath wins, it will be far worse than it is now.