Americans Cannot Be Silent in the Face of Anti-Semitism in the U.S.

Townhall January 2019

Last Thursday, authorities disclosed that, included among items found in the Florida home of a man named Walter Stolper, 73, there were three mugs: one bearing an oath to Hitler; another with a Hitler Santa; and — were that not enough —yet another with a smiling Nazi holding a young girl.

And in rooms beyond his cozy kitchen, the police also found a knife bearing a Nazi emblem, an SS flag, a framed Nazi eagle logo, and — perhaps to provide Mr. Stolper some light bedtime reading — a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

This was the chachka seized pursuant to his arrest last year for attempted murder.

Allegedly, a security videotape recorded him pouring gallons of gasoline down the trash chute of his Miami Beach condo in order to — in his words — “burn down the building with all the f***ing Jews.”

Yet, were this unvarnished display of hatred not sad enough, sadder still is the reality that, in the America of today, it would appear Mr. Stolper is not alone in the way he thinks. Note the following open displays of anti-Semitism that have occurred elsewhere just since his arrest:

• October 2018 — The murder of eleven Jews in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue by a man whose social media bio included the statement "Jews are the children of Satan”;

• October 2018 — The beating of an elderly Jew in Brooklyn on his way to a synagogue by a man who stopped his car, ran over and began viciously attacking him while yelling “Allah”;

• November 2018 — The attempted murder of a group of identifiable Orthodox Jews standing in front of their Shul in Los Angeles by a man who, after driving past them, made an abrupt U-turn and began screaming anti-Semitic slurs as he then tried to run them over; and  

• December 2018 — The doctor in Ohio who was fired by the Cleveland Clinic where she worked for boasting on her social media of her plan to kill Jews by giving them the wrong medications.

And all this is before you get to the anti-Semitic revelations of people like Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour and her friend Louis Farrakhan, who only recently reaffirmed his long-standing hatred of Jews before an approving crowd in Detroit with his now infamous proclamation: “I’m not an anti-Semite. I’m anti-Termite.”  

To be sure, many in America have rightly condemned these people and their anti-Semitism for the evil it is. The questions that linger, however, are whether such instances of hate are merely deviant aberrations occurring within an otherwise healthy society? Or are they in reality only symptoms of an even more viral and potentially lethal form of such evil presently metastasizing in the inner core of America’s culture?  

Alarmingly, it would seem the latter is the case, as it appears that our society is allowing a strain of anti-Semitism to become normalized by those in leadership who are willfully choosing to either overlook or, in some instances, even embrace the evil it presents.

For example, in addition to the coverage given to Mr. Stolper’s Nazi paraphernalia last Thursday, consider two other items that — with no lack of irony — also made the news that same day.