Black Anti-Semitism
There have been a spate of attacks on Jews in recent weeks. The two most news-worthy took place in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Monsey, New York. In the first, a couple of blacks opened fire in a Jewish cemetery and moved on to a kosher supermarket, killing four.
There have been a spate of attacks on Jews in recent weeks. The two most news-worthy took place in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Monsey, New York. In the first, a couple of blacks opened fire in a Jewish cemetery and moved on to a kosher supermarket, killing four. In the second, a black man named Grafton Thomas broke into a home where a rabbi was celebrating Chanukah with friends and family. Five Jews were attacked with a machete.
In Jersey City, the criminals were members of the Black Hebrew Israelites. It seems uncertain if Mr. Thomas was also a member.
Apparently, there are many different sects and sub-groups under the heading of Black Hebrew Israelism, including the Commandment Keepers, the Church of the Living God and the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge.
There are at least a dozen of these sub-groups, which seems like an awful lot, since their overall membership can’t be more than a hundred thousand. The rumor is they are not all black supremacists and virulently anti-white, but it’s safe to say that most are.
Their very name sounds like a mockery. Nazis might as well have called themselves White Hebrew Israelites.
When I first heard about the Chanukah attack, I assumed the assailants had been members of the vile MS-13 gang since machetes are their weapons of choice, but I wasn’t surprised to learn that it was a black man. That’s because one of the unmentionable dirty little secrets of life in America is that blacks, by and large, are the most anti-Semitic people in the country.
It’s sadly ironic since half the folks who went South in the 1960s to help register black voters were Jews, as were two of the three Freedom Riders, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered by Klansmen in 1964.
The anti-Semitism that permeates the black community is probably traceable to the fact that Jews were often the only people who were willing to open stores or factories or own apartment houses in black neighborhoods.
As a result, any time a black person was arrested for shoplifting, fired for theft or incompetence or evicted for not paying his rent, it was “the Jew” who was resented. After a while, even if the person who owned the store, the factory or the apartment house was a gentile, it was blamed on the Jews.
I even knew a couple of Jewish men who owned businesses in Watts and they were despised because they charged more than whites were charged in ritzier parts of L.A. They charged more because they had to deal with so much shop-lifting and because they had to pay larger insurance premiums than did those businessmen operating in other neighborhoods.
Of course, when the Watts riots took place, theirs were the first businesses to be torched.
In the aftermath, the local residents complained they had to get on a bus to go grocery shopping. I confess I didn’t sympathize with their plight.
After I wrote about ways to overcome depression, I heard from a woman in Florida who let me know that “Most emotional responses probably are irrational. I don’t think one reasons out how he feels and consciously decides to stay sad or decides he simply won’t be sad anymore.”
I replied: “There’s a guy on the radio named Dennis Prager who, every week, devotes one hour to the subject of Happiness. He wisely suggests that people have a moral obligation to try to be happy. They not only owe it to themselves, but to their family, their neighbors and their co-workers.
"It is easy enough to focus on the ills of the world and on one’s own frustrations, just as it’s easy to become a couch potato. But just as a regimen of exercise is a solution to that physical condition, it’s possible to exercise one’s mental sloth. I think that to begin with, people should stop dwelling so much on themselves and begin thinking about other people, about helping them, interacting with them, amusing them. Depressed people tend to be lonely people, but they’re the ones keeping themselves lonely.
"It’s only a theory, but it sure beats sitting around thinking woe is me and assuming that others have nothing better to do than fret over your sad state of mind.”
In my own life, I am estranged from my son, who is now 47 years old. I haven’t seen or heard from him in at least 15 years. We originally had our falling out when he developed a gambling addiction and took up a criminal life to support his habit.
It’s no exaggeration to say that he is far and away the biggest disappointment in my life. But there is a positive element to the situation. Early on, when he first started getting in trouble with the law, I found myself wishing he had never been born. In time, though, I realized that as bad as it all turned out, if I had never experienced fatherhood, I would not only have missed out on the early joyful years, but I would have spent all these decades fantasizing how wonderful it would have been to have had that perfect father-son relationship that possibly exists more often in our dreams than in real life.
As regrets go, I prefer the one I have to the one I would have had.
So, even when it seems that life couldn’t get much worse, that your luck has all turned bad, and what, when you get right down to it, is the point of going on, remind yourselves that you’re not Democrats. See how much better you feel already?
I received a dissenting opinion after I took Abraham Lincoln to task for waging the Civil War. So far as I’m concerned, I had written, the blood of 700,000 Americans was on his hands. But even aside from that, he was hardly a constitutionalist. He shut down hundreds of newspapers in the North simply because they opposed the War. He also ordered the arrest of Chief Justice Roger Taney, who had ruled that Lincoln violated the Constitution when he suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus.
I always felt the South had the right to secede from the Union and that in waging war, Lincoln was simply doing the bidding of Northern business interests. Which was something he was accustomed to, considering he had previously worked as a lawyer for the railroad barons.
Apparently, a lot of people believe that when Lincoln destroyed a third of the nation in order to save the nation, it not only made sense but was a moral imperative. And here we are, a century and a half after Lincoln and a half-century after Martin Luther King’s insistence that we look beyond skin color, and we’re more divided politically and racially than we ever were.
(Right now I’m taking a deep breath and reminding myself that at least I’m not a Democrat.)
After I wrote about my being court martialed at UCLA for opposing mandatory ROTC attendance, it reminded me that once the pendulum starts swinging back, it generally swings way too far. I wasn’t fighting against ROTC being available, only against its being compulsory. But within the decade, the nincompoop students, thanks to gutless college administrators, had succeeded in driving military recruiters off nearly every college campus in the nation.
The best of the recent memes were these three:
(a picture of a MAGA hat) “This hat doesn’t stand for racism or hate. It only triggers it in Liberals.”
(a picture of a deranged young woman screaming “Judging people by their race or sex is wrong! Why can’t all you privileged white men understand that?”
“Can we trade our Liberals for those Hong Kong protesters? They want to be Americans and our Leftists all support Communism.”
I don’t think it’s too late to wish all of you a joyful and fulfilling 2020, culminating in Donald J. Trump’s re-election.
