If you’ve ever seen a symbol out there and wondered what it represents, wonder no more. Just turn to the ADL’s Hate on Display™ Hate Symbols Database. It provides “an overview of many of the symbols most frequently used by a variety of white supremacist groups and movements, as well as some other types of hate groups.”
Visit and check if the symbol you’ve seen matches any one used by a hate group.
If you’re the type who enjoys hating on immigrants, telling people, “Go back home!” or threatening to call immigration on somebody, well, a word to the wise. Whilst in New York City, best keep those thoughts to yourself, ’cause now it’s illegal to speak them.
If you really can’t stop yourself from hating immigrants out loud, there’s a remedy for that: be prepared to pay the city a fine of up to $250,000 smackeroonies.
Gubernatorial candidate Kim Guadagno released a TV ad on October 12 reiterating her statement from the first gubernatorial debate referring to undocumented immigrants as “murderers and rapists”, using disparaging language like that of Donald Trump.
“Phil Murphy was very clear in the debate that he condemns murderous acts committed by anyone and that the people who commit those crimes should be prosecuted,” said Chris Estevez, President of the Latino Action Network. “Guadagno’s Trump-like approach paints all immigrants and Latinos as murderers and rapists.” LAN has condemned Guadagno’s statement.
According to Rudy Rodas, another LAN official, “Programs that deputize local police to carry out federal immigration enforcement, like that instituted by Kim Guadagno when she served as Sherriff of Monmouth County, make communities less safe since law abiding immigrants are less likely to report crimes or cooperate with police investigations when they fear that they will also be detained.”
“We have faith that New Jersey voters are intelligent people who won’t fall for Kim Guadagno’s Donald Trump impersonation and her hateful and divisive speech toward immigrants,” concluded Estevez.
Photo source: Steve Rhodes via Flickr under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license
The Southern Poverty Law Center reports on the results of a casual survey administered online by Teaching Tolerance about the current presidential election. About 2000 teachers responded and submitted 5000 comments.
Students who identify with Trump’s hate rhetoric are using it to justify bullying behaviour, persecution of certain students and threats … while immigrant and ethnic minority students across the country are voicing fear, expressing thoughts of suicide and having meltdowns in class.
Some of the stories are heartbreaking. In Tennessee, a kindergarten teacher says a Latino child—told by classmates that he will be deported and trapped behind a wall—asks every day, “Is the wall here yet?”
Some teachers have felt obliged to abandon their customary neutrality on political issues in the classroom and take a stand, despite awareness that doing so may put their jobs in jeapordy.
A Renton, Washington, high school teacher said, “For the first time in my career, I state bluntly what is appropriate conduct for a candidate for this country’s highest office.” She spelled it out for students: “If it can get you suspended from high school, you shouldn’t be espousing it as a candidate.” Another Washington teacher wrote, “This is probably the first time I haven’t been unbiased about it. My students need to know that some of what they are witnessing is not okay.”
In schools where student partisanship leans heavily to one side, educators find themselves needing to speak up for students whose political values are in the minority. “The rhetoric has set up a school community that is hostile to conservatives and the Republican Party,” a Michigan high school teacher said. “It makes it difficult if not impossible to not take sides in my classroom because I can’t be silent in the face of this kind of rhetoric, lest I lose my students’ respect or trust.”
No one can fault an educator who stands up for values like respect, dignity and honesty—values that have long been central to character education and anti-bullying programs. But this year has pushed some educators to go further and take risks. “I have thrown caution into the wind and have spoken out against certain candidates which I have NEVER done,” wrote a Michigan high school teacher, “but I feel it’s my duty to speak out against ignorance!”
These are high-stakes decisions. Several wrote about parents registering complaints when they raised issues of values, fact-checking and critical thinking. But, as one Indianapolis high school teacher put it, “I am a point where I’m going to take a stand even if it costs me my position.”
In Washington state, one high school teacher admitted, “I am teaching off the hook before anyone ‘catches’ me and puts me in a Common Core box; we are reading Howard Zinn, Anne Frank, Haig Bosmajian, Jane Yolen, Ayn Rand, George Orwell and survivors’ testimonies from the Holocaust and the genocides around the world. … I am making it as real and as connected to my students as I can. I feel like I am teaching for our lives.”
It’s always remarkable to find those champions of justice whose job it is to confront daily incidents of hatred, bigotry and harassment … who take a stand on behalf of equity and fairness … and do so without losing their faith in the overall goodness of humanity. Etzion Neuer is one such champion. He now heads up the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) NY’s Regional Operations Department and was the New Jersey office chief for over six years, handling calls for both organizations for some time.
The Jewish Standard’s Larry Yudelson quotes Neuer:
At the ADL, “our office is a nexus for hate of all kinds. Virtually every anti-Semitic complaint crosses my desk. We get them from the state police. We get calls from children harassed in school. I’ve had parents who cry to me on the phone because their children are the victims of anti-Semitic bullying in their school. I’ve had people cry to me because they’re experiencing discrimination in the work place.”
“I see the worst Jew hatred, an unceasing flow of hatred.”
Neuer said he tries hard not to let this give him a bleak perspective on humanity. “It’s my job to make sure that I don’t become despondent.”
“I have tried to seize on the inspirational moment. It is seeing the incredible work done by Catholic teachers to teach Holocaust education in their schools. It’s the person from Louisiana who called me last week, an 82-year-old Methodist, who read about the incident online and called me to say that he felt for this young rabbi and wanted to add a thousand dollars to our reward fund.
“It’s those moments that remind me that while, yes, there are extremists, there are haters, they really represent the fringe, and the vast majority of New Jerseyians and indeed Americans are good people. I’ve seen that just as hate can be learned, it can be unlearned.”
Neuer takes pride in the success of two legal efforts the New Jersey ADL undertook: Helping pass the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights in 2010, and the 2008 New Jersey Supreme Court ruling in Cutler v. Dorn, which held that anti-Semitic harassment was not “mere teasing.”
There are an exponentially growing number of anti-Jewish incidents around the world, predominantly fueled by extremist Muslim dollars, the indifference of progressives and the silence of people whose reason and compassion might positively influence public opinion – except they won’t speak out. I don’t wish to enable hatred with my own silence.
However, disputing the viciousness of Jew haters makes me instantly frustrated. It seems a daunting task to confront the beliefs of people who when it comes to bashing Jews thoughtlessly spread rumour and innuendo against my people and hold onto an unreasoning hatred of Jews no matter what good we do. These people embrace an unreasoning support for Muslims no matter what harm or violence Muslim extremists commit … and show no interest in factual analysis of the rumours that are disseminated by propagandists, or the truth. In their hatred for Jews the unreasoning are eager to embrace information that fuels their hatred and show no interest in assessing whether the information is true or false.
When the Western press blatantly colludes with spreading baseless assertions meant to stir up hatred against Jews, it is clear that truth has become unimportant in the English speaking and European worlds.
HonestReporting Managing Editor Simon Plosker says:
When somebody accuses Israel of being a hidden hand manipulating world events and news coverage, this is the sort of bigotry akin to Nazi sympathizers, white supremacist websites, and fans of the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That the editors of these two newspapers were either unable or unwilling to recognize the rantings of a conspiracy theorist and chose to publish this letter is highly disturbing.
Of course, freedom of speech is a fundamental value. Nonetheless, this does not mean that common sense is thrown out of the window and anything and everything, including offensive material and hate speech, needs to be published in a credible newspaper.
Kasim Hafeez is a man raised in a fundamentalist Muslim household to hate Jews and Israel, who had a complete reversal of sentiment, and now loves my people. He established StandWithUs 12 years ago, an NGO that educates people around the world about why Jews and Israel are worth supporting rather than bashing.
Stand With Us reports on the transformation of Jordanian born Abe Haak from Jew hater to ardent Zionist and shares excerpts from an interview with him. Mr. Haak gives this explanation for why Jews are increasingly becoming targets of hate in the world today:
Having failed five times to defeat Israel on the battle field, the Arab world is now intent on tarnishing Israel’s name globally, he said. Muslims and others who hate Israel are working together under “an umbrella coalition known as BDS, boycott, divest and sanctions,” and the movement is targeting Jewish youths on college campuses, “the softest part” of our society.
Chloé Simone Valdary is young Black non-Jewish woman Zionist who believes that the current worldwide campaign to create unfounded hatred of Jews and Israel has been artificially engineered by Arab oil magnates, and is funded with their fortunes. Chloé established the group “Allies for Israel” at the University of New Orleans where she studies, to fight “anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Semitism on campus”.
In Tablet Magazine Chloé explains why an anti-Israeli/Jewish position is fundamentally wrong, especially for African Americans:
The student organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is prominent on many college campuses, preaching a mantra of “Freeing Palestine.” It masquerades as though it were a civil rights group when it is not. Indeed, as an African-American, I am highly insulted that my people’s legacy is being pilfered for such a repugnant agenda. It is thus high time to expose its agenda and lay bare some of the fallacies they peddle.
• If you seek to promulgate the legacy of early Islamic colonialists who raped and pillaged the Middle East, subjugated the indigenous peoples living in the region, and foisted upon them a life of persecution and degradation—you do not get to claim the title of “Freedom Fighter.”
• If you support a racist doctrine of Arab supremacism and wish (as a corollary of that doctrine) to destroy the Jewish state, you do not get to claim that the prejudices you peddle are forms of legitimate “resistance.”
• If your heroes are clerics who sit in Gaza plotting the genocide of a people; who place their children on rooftops in the hopes they will get blown to bits; who heap praises upon their fellow gang members when they succeed in murdering Jewish school boys and bombing places of activity where Jews congregate—you do not get to claim that you are some Apollonian advocate of human virtue. You are not.
• If your activities include grieving over the woefully incompetent performance by Hamas rocketeers and the subsequent millions of Jewish souls who are still alive—whose children were not murdered by their rockets; whose limbs were not torn from them; and whose disembowelment did not come into fruition—you do not get to claim that you stand for justice. You profess to be irreproachable. You are categorically not.
• If your idea of a righteous cause entails targeting and intimidating Jewish students on campus, arrogating their history of exile-and-return and fashioning it in your own likeness you do not get to claim that you do so in the name of civil liberty and freedom of expression.
• You do not get to champion regimes that murder, torture, and persecute their own people, deliberately keep them impoverished, and embezzle billions of dollar from them—and claim you are “pro-Arab.” You are not.
• You do not get to champion a system wherein Jews are barred from purchasing land, traveling in certain areas, and living out such an existence merely because they are Jews—and claim that you are promoting equality for all. You do not get to enable that system by pushing a boycott of Jewish owned businesses, shops, and entities—and then claim that you are “against apartheid.” That is evil.
• You do not get to justify the calculated and deliberate bombings, beatings, and lynchings of Jewish men, women, and children by referring to such heinous occurrences as part of a noble “uprising” of the oppressed—that is racism. It is evil.
• You do not get to pretend as though you and Rosa Parks would have been great buddies in the 1960s. Rosa Parks was a real Freedom Fighter. Rosa Parks was a Zionist.
Coretta Scott King was a Zionist.
A. Phillip Randolph was a Zionist.
Bayard Rustin was a Zionist.
Count Basie was a Zionist.
Dr. Martin Luther King Sr. was a Zionist.
Indeed, they and many more men and women signed a letter in 1975 that stated: “We condemn the anti-Jewish blacklist. We have fought too long and too hard to root out discrimination from our land to sit idly while foreign interests import bigotry to America. Having suffered so greatly from such prejudice, we consider most repugnant the efforts by Arab states to use the economic power of their newly-acquired oil wealth to boycott business firms that deal with Israel or that have Jewish owners, directors, or executives, and to impose anti-Jewish preconditions for investments in this country.”
You see, my people have always been Zionists because my people have always stood for the freedom of the oppressed. So, you most certainly do not get to culturally appropriate my people’s history for your own. You do not have the right to invoke my people’s struggle for your shoddy purposes and you do not get to feign victimhood in our name. You do not have the right to slander my people’s good name and link your cause to that of Dr. King’s. Our two causes are diametrically opposed to each other.
Your cause is the antithesis of freedom. It has cost hundreds of thousands of lives of both Arabs and Jews. It has separated these peoples, and has fomented animosity between them. It has led to heartache, torment, death and destruction.
It is of course your prerogative to continue to utilize platitudes for your cause. You are entirely within your rights to chant words like “equality” “justice” and “freedom fighter.”
You can keep using those words for as long as you like. But I do not think you know what they mean.
