Tag: Anti-Semitism
That was then, this is now

That was then, this is now

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is largely a personal account tracing my experience with events and dissent over the past 54 years, beginning with opposition to the Vietnam War and culminating with today’s anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonstrations sweeping the country. I don’t pretend that it is a comprehensive view or account, which could easily take multiple book-length volumes. But it does give my perspective of the transition of attitudes and beliefs and ways of expressing dissent over those years until now.

I don’t think I’m in that photo above, but I could be. That was the line of protestors marching by the Executive Office Building in Washington on the night of Friday, November 14, 1969, in what was called the Death March, the prelude to the largest anti-war protest in U.S. history. Holding signs bearing the names of U.S. servicemen killed in Vietnam, it was a somber but dramatic demonstration of the reality of the war going on on the other side of the globe.

It was a cold and windy night, and we struggled to keep the candles we also bore, in little paper protective cones, from being blown out in the persistent breeze. The march began across the Potomac, near Arlington National Cemetery, and wound its way in single file across Memorial Bridge, past the Lincoln Memorial, along the National Mall, up 17th St. NW, past the Executive Office Building to Pennsylvania Ave., and then along the fence past the White House. We wondered whether President Richard Nixon was watching from an upstairs window in the White House as FBI or Secret Service agents made no effort to hide themselves as they shot photos of the demonstrators filing by.

It wasn’t our first brush with the FBI. Earlier that day, on the charter bus down from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, people — young people, not unlike us, claiming to be with the march organizers — came aboard at the toll booth on the Delaware Turnpike and told us there was no room in D.C. and we should turn back. We had a quick consultation and decided these were government agents trying to dissuade protestors from making their way to the capital and we should go on. And we did. And they were.

People had come from all over the country to make their voices heard. That was the night, waiting in the dark across the Potomac for the march to start, that I met Sally, still a friend today, and Anne, to become one of the loves of my life, and later their friend Norman, who with some other classmates had come from St. Louis to participate. The next day, filling the National Mall and spreading out beyond it, a mass of humanity — officially set at a half million people, but by our count closer to a million — protested the war. Peacefully. With decorum. With hope and determination. With a presence that could not be ignored. Though Nixon said he watched sports on television as the demonstration unfolded.

Later in the day, when the crowd had broken up and people began fading back into the fabric of the country from which they had come, there were a relative few demonstrators who resorted to violent protest and drew tear gas from the police. But as The New York Times reported, “The predominant event of the day was that of a great and peaceful army of dissent moving through the city.”

Non-violence in protection of an ROTC building

In March of the following year I drove out to St. Louis with a friend to visit Anne and Sally. Arriving late at night with a wounded car, we were greeted by scores of people running over a hill at Washington University shouting, “They’re beating heads! They’re beating heads!” It was a tense time, the anti-war sentiment running high, and in the coming days we got caught up in the swirling events that seized the campus. Along with listening to open-air speeches by leftist professors — to dispel any idea that leftism on college campuses is just a recent development, it was alive and spreading even in 1970 — we also found ourselves in nighttime demonstrations.

Anne and Sally were committed to non-violence, which coincided with my own beliefs while further reinforcing them. One night during our visit I found myself with my friends in a line of non-violent people standing between other demonstrators of a violent persuasion and the Air Force ROTC building they were intent on burning down. We succeeded in holding our line and saving the building, but all the time I wondered why I was putting my life at risk to save an ROTC building. Violence just seemed to me, as it still does, the wrong way to go about things.

The result of our efforts were short-lived and the building was burned a couple of months later, on May 5, 1970. Earlier, on the preceding Dec. 9, an attempt had been made to burn down the Army ROTC building on my own campus. And a more successful attempt at burning it down occurred a year after my graduation from Rutgers, on April 25, 1972.

I’m not going to pretend that all was peace and light at that time. Those were, indeed, exciting and dramatic times, even at my own college. And across the nation, there was the Weather Underground, with its Marxist orientation and goal of the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, and other radical groups committed to violence and domestic terrorism. Years later, Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn — indicted, and in Dohrn’s case convicted, for inciting riot and bombing government buildings, including the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol — intersected with Barack Obama, who in 1995 launched his first Illinois state senatorial race at the Ayers-Dohrn home. Obama’s association with Ayers stretched over several years, and should tell you a lot of what you need to know about Obama.

“I don’t regret setting bombs,” an unrepentant Ayers told The New York Times in 2001, “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

“The traitor is dead!”

In the early 1980s I was in graduate school at the University of Florida. In my second year I was selected for a federal grant to study Africa, especially North Africa, and the Middle East, and also to study Arabic. Our Arabic instructor, whose name was Ilham, was Palestinian. On the day following the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, as we settled into our seats in the classroom, we saw what Ilham had written in big chalk letters on the board: “Great news! The traitor is dead!”

I recall very well how shocked most of us were to see this on the board. Many of us exchanged uneasy glances around the room, unsure of how we should respond. If there was any enthusiasm for that shocking display of her views it was among the few Iranian students in the room. At the time I was mainly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but I also knew that assassination of Sadat, who had made peace with Israel and agreed to a framework both for peace in the region and resolution of the Palestinian issue, was not going to be positive for anyone. It also seemed outrageous that Ilham, a guest in our country, could make such a statement, with no attempt at discussion or persuasion. It was a pure statement of her hostility, even hatred, and prejudice, and in no way pedagogical.

I contrast our measured, and probably better informed, response then to the kind of mindless support for Hamas and hatred for Israel and Jews on campuses today, and I can see how both the realities and the nuances of one of history’s most complex conflicts have been lost on much of a generation that has simply lost both historical knowledge and perspective, as well as a moral compass.

Rejecting terrorism

Fast forward from 1981 to Sept. 11, 2001. The nation awoke to the biggest terrorist attack ever mounted on U.S. soil. It took just 19 terrorists to kill nearly 3,000 people in a few hours, bring down two of the country’s most iconic buildings and seriously damage a third, and reveal to the country both its vulnerability to terrorism and the ruthless and inhuman nature of those who choose terrorism as the means to making their point, whatever that point might be.

I was living in Greece at the time and word of the attacks came to me by way of a phone call from an Irish friend. My Algerian girlfriend at the time, later to become my wife, and I rushed upstairs to turn on the tube and watch, in horror, as the events of the day unfolded thousands of miles away. One thing that stuck in my mind was how Farida was as horrified as I was, and how she said, standing there staring at the screen, “If these are Muslims, I am no longer a Muslim.”

At the time I think most Americans, and probably most Muslims, shared a common abhorrence of terrorism and what it wreaked on Sept. 11. Probably more than we should have, as a country we were collectively willing to give up rights in a shared will to prevent further terrorist attacks. And as Spain and France and the U.K. and Jordan and Indonesia and other countries suffered attacks, we remained relatively unscathed in the decades that followed 9-11. But time, apparently, has a way of eroding memory, along with resolve.

On a personal note, with 9-11 receding into the rear view mirror, Farida — still a Muslim — later would ask me if I thought she was a terrorist since she would express support for the terrorist acts committed by Palestinians, of whose cause she was a huge supporter.

“No, I don’t think you’re a terrorist,” I’d tell her. “But you support what terrorists do.”

I think the same can be said for many of today’s demonstrators and others who openly express support for Hamas, one of the most ruthless terrorist organizations in the world, whose brutality is inflicted not just on Israelis but on its own people.

And this is now

I don’t claim that all college professors are as blatant in their anti-Semitic hatred and advocacy of violence as UC Davis’s Jemma Decristo is, but as recent events demonstrate, they’re more prevalent than one wants to think. And those professors, and in many cases administrators, have a major influence on the vulnerable and ill-informed young minds in their tutelage. And rather than adhering to the precepts of what education is supposed to be about — to “lead forth,” not to “cram down” — they exploit their positions of influence and trust to indoctrinate, not educate, their students.

I could excuse those students, but I don’t, and neither should you. Just as we, many of us, questioned the indoctrination that professors of earlier eras attempted on us, these students also can question that indoctrination today. As much as we might have been fond of Ilham and others like her, our values and knowledge transcended that affection to question when she attempted to cram down her particular view on us. This issue goes well beyond the instant issue of Israelis v. Palestinians, but reaches to the kinds of values these kids are taught at home, what they get from social media, the peer pressure they’re subject to, and a general lack of instruction in basic civic and social values. As I presented in my last piece, The ugly reality of American education, there is a pervasive crisis throughout the entire American educational system.

I’m sure growing up, as I did, imbued with the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust, with half my extended family Jews who had experienced those horrors themselves, living in the New York Metropolitan Area and absorbing Jewish culture, I have a different view of anti-Semitism than many of these kids. But does one really have to have grown up with experiences such as mine to not know that prejudice and hatred of any sort is simply not acceptable? And what of adults who express the same kind of hatred? What can one say of them?

It was just 22 years ago that we recognized, on our own soil, the barbarity of terrorism and its infliction on innocent people. But somehow those sensibilities have been lost by many — even members of Congress — who now condone the murder and beheading of infants, the rape of girls and women, burning people alive, and kidnapping men, women, children, and even babies. What has short-circuited in these peoples’ brains? In their value systems? Is this the same process that took place in 1930s Germany, leading to the concentration camps and wholesale murder of millions, or in countless other societies, resulting in the most horrible barbarisms? Are we really at that point in contemporary America, or in numerous other countries formerly thought of as civilized around the globe?

In closing, let me say I am not unaware of various policy choices and implications that have shaped events and life on the ground in the Middle East. These are things I’ve lived with for most of half a century. There are legitimate arguments that can be made for different courses of action. Injustices have been committed, by both sides. And indeed, resolving the differences — as implausible as it seems at this moment — that have divided the Palestinians and the Jews for centuries is a matter of critical concern, if peace is ever to come to the region. But as long as hate and prejudice and violence are allowed to exist and to perpetrate themselves, no policy will ever succeed.

Featured image: Death Marchers pass Executive Office Building, Nov. 14, 1969, from Flickr, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

National Moratorium, Washington, Nov. 15, 1969, from Flickr, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

Assassination of Anwar Sadat, 1981, from rarehistoricalphotos.com, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

Twin Towers Attacked, from the Los Angeles Times, Chao Soi Cheong, Associated Press. Used under Fair Use.

Hateful Tweet, from X, SRS-One. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.
The ugly reality of American education

The ugly reality of American education

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If you’ve been following the news since the barbarous attack Hamas launched against innocent Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, you’ve seen the ugly reality of American education laid bare. One has to wonder what kind of education these kids are getting that they can openly support the butchering, burning, raping, and kidnapping of defenseless infants, children, women, and men. This goes well beyond one’s political views, which of course allow for policy disagreements over the seemingly endless and intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and goes to a profound darkness implanted in their young minds and souls.

Things we thought were laid to rest decades ago, such as Anti-Semitism — hatred of Jews for being Jews — have been on full display on college campuses and on public streets in cities across the nation. These same young mush brains — joined by some not so young — who cringe at mis-pronouning someone and demand safe spaces from so-called “micro-aggressions,” apparently have no problem with beheading babies, burning children alive, or raping, kidnapping, and murdering women, all in the name of the cause célèbre they have been brainwashed to believe is the One Twue Answer.

As awful and terrifying as it has been to observe this display of hatred, it is indicative of an even more dangerous tendency that begins not just at the university level, but long prior, in elementary and high schools across the nation. As we’re seeing in not just so-called blue states, but in red and purple ones as well, increasingly the emphasis by those who purport to be educators is on social issues and not the basics of education, actually teaching the skills needed to function effectively in society and (heaven forbid!) reasoning and analytical skills. I’ve been bitching about the latter ever since I was in high school some six decades ago, so that is not new, though I think it has reached new levels of mindless conformity. The other part, however, is relatively new, just a few decades old, and also is now reaching ever higher levels of incompetence.

Does anyone wonder why it is so easy to indoctrinate a generation among which many can’t read or write in cursive, if at all, can name the most obscure celebrity but can’t name their congressperson, senator, or even the vice president, have absolutely zero knowledge of history or American constitutional values, and get what passes for news (again, if at all) from social media?

Roots of the Problem

See those two tearing down posters with photos of kidnapped children and women and laughing as they do it? They’re students (along with a third not shown in the photo) at New York University, one of the nation’s preeminent institutions of “higher education.” The one on the left is Yazmeen Deyhimi, a junior and — frighteningly — pre-law student. She once worked for the Anti-Defamation League but now apparently has lost her way. This is her feeble excuse for doing what she did:

“I have found it increasingly difficult to know my place as a biracial brown woman, especially during these highly volatile times,” she wrote. “I have felt more and more frustrated about the time we currently find ourselves in, and that misplaced anger into actions that are not an accurate representation of who I am as a person.”

“In this age of social media and digital footprint,” she babbled on, “these moments of anger are selfish and self-absorbed, and not reflective of who I am as a person or who my family had raised me to be.”

Buried in the verbiage are all one needs to know about how these students’ minds and spirits have been hijacked:

“as a biracial brown woman” — read racial and sexual politics foisted on students from before kindergarten.

“highly volatile times” — read a lack of knowledge of world history and events.

“I have felt more and more frustrated . . . and that misplaced anger . . . these moments of anger are selfish and self-absorbed” — read as an unhealthy focus on the self, leading to free-form anger and rage, and the kind of mindless behavior she was caught engaging in.

“In this age of social media and digital footprint” — read where much of the biased and misguided “information” Gen Z gets originates.

“not reflective of who I am as a person or who my family raised me to be” — read as a failure to accept responsibility and acknowledgment of who she really is, who she has become. Her family may or may not have had anything to do with that, but it’s on her now and she need not deny that reality.

Blatant Hatred and Anti-Semitism

See the girl holding the racist pink sign that reads “Please Keep the World Clean” with a garbage can holding a Star of David and into which the Jews are to be placed? She is Fahima Karim, a 19-year-old high school student at the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women in Brooklyn. She was not alone in carrying that sign, and unlike Deyhimi, she makes no attempt at concealing her blatant racism.

“I really don’t give a fuck about white lives,” she said in a previous street interview. “I don’t like white people . . . I just don’t . . . for no reason.”

In response, her school put out a mealy-mouthed statement about how it had always supported “the voice and power of our young women.”

“Unfortunately today,” the statement said, “one of our community members made a serious error in judgment. She exercised that voice and power to spread hate and anti-semetism” — misspelling anti-Semitism. It went on to promise “a thorough investigation” (as if the visual and Karim’s former statements weren’t sufficient evidence of where her sentiments lie, and the “error in judgment” apparently was in allowing herself to be photographed displaying them) “and using our restorative justice tools to heal the harm in our community and outside our school.”

And there you see the other element of the problem. School administrators and teachers who tolerate and condone certain kinds of behavior, for which there are no real consequences, but have no tolerance for speech or behavior that is contrary to their own views. Call for racial cleansing of Jews — “investigate and use restorative justice (whatever that is) tools.” Mis-pronoun someone or say biological males shouldn’t be allowed to compete in sports against women or use school rest rooms of their choosing — grounds for the most serious sanctions.

The bigger problem

It’s not just a truism to say that the future of the nation lies with its young people and their education. Prejudice, hatred, repression of free speech and ideas don’t just exist on college campuses or within the walls of schools. Those same students graduate, get jobs, enter into professions, and their misguided notions spread throughout society. We see the evidence and results of that in virtually every walk of life: In the legal profession, among judges, among academics, in politics, in Big Tech, in journalism, in the military, in sports, in entertainment, and in the further propagation to new teachers.

If you have any doubt about where the sentiments of many school administrators lie, just ask Riley Gaines, whose photo is above. Riley Gaines was denied the honors she had earned on the University of Kentucky swim team, for which she had worked all her life, when being forced to compete against a transgender biological male, Lia Thomas, in intercollegiate competition. Gaines has taken it upon herself to speak out against allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports, in an effort to preserve their integrity. But after working for decades to further and protect the rights of women, the current generation on many college campuses — with the support of their schools’ administrators, the Biden administration, and many sports and other organizations — are now more than willing to gut those rights.

Gaines was physically attacked, maligned, and forced to barricade herself in a campus room for hours until police arrived to escort her out after giving a speech at San Francisco State University in April of this year. She was accused of transphobia — which she explicitly denies — and instead of listening to her position a group of student bigots chose to assault her. Bad enough, but the reaction of university administrators was far worse. Instead of condemning the violence and attempt at shutting down free speech, they came out in support of those things.

“Last Thursday, Turning Point USA hosted an event on campus that advocated for the exclusion of trans people and athletics. The event was deeply traumatic for many in our trans and LGBTQ+ communities, and the speaker’s message outraged many members of the SF State community,” SFSU President Lynn Mahoney wrote to the campus community. She called the attack on Gaines an “unfortunate disturbance . . . that delayed the speaker’s departure.” Nowhere was there any apology to Gaines for the attack nor any recognition of her position on preserving women’s sports. For their part, the police made no arrests.

Further doubts? Ask federal judge Kyle Duncan, who was heckled during a speech to — I’m not making this up — law students at Stanford University, supposedly one of the country’s preeminent schools of “higher learning.” His crime? Refusing to use an accused sex offender’s preferred pronouns during a 2020 opinion. And when Duncan turned to the dean officiating the event to bring order to the room, instead she sided with the hecklers, saying Duncan causes “harm” through his work as a federal judge and she was “uncomfortable” with the anger that Duncan’s presence on campus led to.

Perhaps no surprise, this was Tierien Steinbach, the law school’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. One might well interpret those words, which are spreading like a plague across the landscape, as Conformity, Selective Inequality, and Exclusion. In this case, unlike in the SFSU one, at least Stanford’s administration took some action and Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez and Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne eventually apologized to Duncan. Steinbach was reported to be “on leave.”

For his part, Judge Duncan was criticized for being argumentative and calling the students “appalling idiots.” Watching their behavior, I’m inclined to agree with that description, and given how conservative speakers have been treated on college campuses in recent years one might better understand why speakers like Duncan have their guard up.

“They are forcing you to think the way they want you to think”

That’s Yeonmi Park, who at age 13 escaped North Korea with her mother, in the photo. After being held by traffickers in China the pair made it to South Korea and then, finally, to the U.S., where Park is now a citizen. She came here expecting the country to be the beacon of freedom that had attracted her. And then she went to Columbia University.

“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park told Fox News in a 2021 interview. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”

The warning signs came during orientation. Park had the temerity, thinking it was a good thing, to tell a university staff member that she loved classical literature, such as novels by Jane Austen.

“Then she [the staff member] said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’”

Things only got worse from there, and in every class students were asked to express their preferred pronouns.

“English is my third language,” she said. “I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?”

“It was chaos,” she told the interviewer. “It felt like the regression in civilization . . . Even North Korea is not this nuts. North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”

Park’s experience at Columbia led to her second book, While Time Remains, published earlier this year. Her first book, published in 2016, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom, detailed her escape from North Korea and the journey that led her to America.

Watching the outpouring of support for the barbarity of Hamas coming from 31 student groups at Harvard, one need not wonder why what is supposed to be America’s preeminent university ranked dead last — 248th out of 248 schools — in FIRE’s annual rating of free speech on campus. The school, whose ironic motto is “Veritas” (“Truth”), officially scored zero, but FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — said Harvard’s actual score was -10.69, “…more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below the second-to-last school in the rankings, its Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania. (Penn obtained an overall score of 11.13.)”

Michigan Technological University, with a score of 78.01, ranked first.

There is a huge amount more than can be said about all of this, including comparisons with my own experiences in college and grad school in earlier decades that illustrate the stark differences then — even in times of major student protest and upheaval — with now, but I think this initial installment sets the scene and provides the background for an overview of the issue. I’m sure more will follow, and this problem is one that is going to be with us for a very long time.

Featured Image: Anti-Israel students protest at Columbia University, Jeenah Moon, Reuters, via Aljazeera. Used under Fair Use.

NYU students tear down hostage posters, New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

Hate on Display, Daily Mail. Used under Fair Use.

Riley Gaines, Outkick. Used under Fair Use.

Yeonmi Park, Fox News, via Insider.com. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.

Image by Hasan Almasi Unsplash
The Pretense Is Over

The Pretense Is Over

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We had an election this week but it would be hard to recognize that. Whether in the media or in the streets, in the halls of Congress or even in the counting rooms of electoral officials, one side seems unable to swallow the results of the voting, which didn’t turn out as it had hoped and been promised. And now, in the aftermath, the pretense of civility, as thin as it might have been, has been cast aside and the true colors of the left are out in the open for all to see.

The left had been expecting a blue wave, a massive Democratic renunciation of the current administration and all that it stands for, and instead the voters returned what, at best, might be termed a blue ripple. While the Dems took control of the House of Representatives – which the party out of the White House does more often than not in off-year elections – it was by a much thinner margin than they had been expecting. Meanwhile, the Republicans deepened their control of the Senate, something that historically has happened only a handful of times in off-year elections, and which in real political terms is far more significant than control of the House.

Even more galling to the Dems was that Republican candidates who had embraced and been embraced by the President did better than the ones who didn’t, to the point where voters cast out such Democratic stalwarts as Claire McCaskill in Missouri and Joe Donnelly in Indiana in favor of Trump-backed candidates. While it wasn’t a big surprise that Heidi Heitkamp, who had angered North Dakota voters by her vote against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, was soundly defeated – just as fellow Democrat Joe Manchin, who had voted in favor of Kavanaugh, was returned to the Senate in West Virginia – the loss of Missouri and Indiana came as a bigger shock.

Apparently, though, it wasn’t enough to simply respect the will of the people and lick one’s wounds and wait for the next election year. Instead, Dems are resorting to some of their old, tried-and-true ways, in places as diverse as Florida, Arizona, and Georgia. The idea, unspoken but obvious by the tactics being employed, is if you can’t win an election you do your best to steal it. We’ll get to that a little later in this piece, but there are more egregious assaults on our democracy under way at present I think need to be discussed first.

Antifa, that group of anarchists that bills itself as anti-fascist but actually embodies and practices fascist tactics, has escalated its violent and confrontational actions to target commentators and journalists it doesn’t approve of. On Wednesday night, an Antifa mob descended on the Washington home of Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. They threatened Carlson and his wife – fortunately their four children were not in the house at the time – vandalized their home and car, blocked off streets, and yelled about pipe bombs.

“Tucker Carlson, we will fight. We know where you sleep at night!” the mob chanted.

The group’s Twitter feed – which Twitter has yet to take down – carries the same threat in a sticky post, and the group used a practice known as “doxxing” to publish the addresses of conservative commentators Carlson, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and others. Meanwhile, left-wing commentators refuse to concede that the attack on Carlson’s home was staged by a “mob,” calling it instead a “protest.” Some protest. Meanwhile, this kind of threatening behavior has become a commonplace as so-called “protesters” drive public figures from restaurants and other public places, egged on by no less than members of Congress, most notably California Congresswoman Maxine Waters.

Building on the neo-fascist theme, if you weren’t locked in a bank vault all day today, you heard the phrase, “This was a glass-breaking moment,” or some version thereof, repeated over and over, ad nauseum, by the parrots of the mainstream media, as well as by some politicians. Ostensibly what they were referring to was the President’s decision to replace Jeff Sessions as Attorney General with Matthew Whitaker, Sessions’ chief of staff, who will be filling the post on an acting basis. Never mind that the ones using this expression are the same people who criticized Sessions and his initial appointment as AG. Apparently consistency has nothing to do with it when politics are concerned (I already discussed the whole issue of hypocrisy among the Dems, but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of it).

The real issue, though, isn’t consistency or its lack. The real issue concerns the utterly and irretrievably disgusting use of that phrase, “glass-breaking moment,” on the exact 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht – Crystal Night or, as it is otherwise known, the Night of Broken Glass, one of the darkest times in all of recorded human history. It was the night of November 9-10, 1938, when German paramilitary forces and civilians launched a massive pogrom against Jews in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. The exact number killed is not known, though it is estimated in the hundreds, and 267 synagogues were destroyed along with 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses that were damaged or destroyed. Additionally, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht, that Night of Broken Glass, is marked as the beginning of the Holocaust. And it is to this monumental atrocity that these despicable excuses for human beings compare the firing of Jeff Sessions. Given the lockstep lack of originality among most in the media, one has to assume that this choice of phrase was carefully chosen on this specific day. The inescapable question is, now, who are the real anti-Semites?

And just when we thought it was impossible to stoop any lower, Senator Richard Blumenthal, that notorious liar from Connecticut, himself said that this was a glass-breaking moment, this action that is every bit the right of any President, to change members of his cabinet. Let’s not for even the scintilla of a second forget that Blumenthal is Jewish, and Blumenthal’s father fled Nazi Germany for the United States when he was 17 to protect his very life from the evil that had taken over Germany. And now his son was reducing all that to a glib political sound bite. Again, do we have to ask who the real anti-Semites are?

It’s hard to swallow my disgust over all this, but I will hold it down so we can get back to the electoral shenanigans I mentioned higher up in the piece. I saved these for last since, as bad as they are, I think the other things mentioned are even more serious and, as newer developments, pose an even bigger threat to our democratic institutions and way of life. Not that the integrity of our elections isn’t important, since it is, but the threat to electoral integrity is part of our history, considering how many dead Democrats have come out of their graves to vote over the years in various parts of the realm.

Anyway, in my own state of Florida, Congressman Ron DeSantis came out on top Tuesday over his radical opponent, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, in what can only be described as a squeaker of a vote tally in the governor’s race, with less than 1 percent separating them. And Governor Rick Scott defeated long-time Democratic incumbent Senator Bill Nelson by an even more narrow margin in the senatorial contest, within the half a percent needed to trigger a machine recount in the Sunshine State. While Scott declared victory late on election night, even without Nelson’s concession, Gillum later actually conceded to DeSantis. Well, that was until those trusty stalwarts of Democratic electoral shenanigans, the Broward and Palm Beach county elections supervisors, took over. And their actions have thrown both key races into turmoil.

Most people in the country above the age of 21 remember the hanging-chad controversy of Palm Beach County that held up results of the 2000 presidential election for weeks. While those events predated the current elections supervisor, Susan Bucher, Bucher seems to be prepared to continue the tradition. And not to be outdone, Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes has a long history of issues going back through her 14 years in the position. Delayed counts, misplaced and missent ballots, and misprinted and destroyed ballots have been chronic issues and have led to several law suits filed against her over the years.

The most recent law suit, filed by Scott against Snipes since Tuesday’s election, has in just the past couple of hours gone against Snipes. Broward Circuit Judge Carol-Lisa Phillips found in Scott’s favor, saying in her ruling, “This court finds once again Broward County is under the microscope and being viewed by the entire nation. Hearing argument, this court finds that there has been a violation of the Florida Constitution, the Florida statute public records act and pursuant to the applicable case law.”

The question is whether the problems afflicting the count in Broward and Palm Beach are the result of corruption or incompetence. As the other Florida Senator, Marco Rubio, noted, the kindest judgment would be to say they are the result of incompetence. But after years of repetitive issues, that judgment might be far more kind than is justified. Even incompetents can show some sign of a learning curve.

Meanwhile, counting issues persist in the U.S. senatorial contest in Arizona between Republican Martha McSally and Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. You might recall that Sinema was telling people it was okay to join the Taliban while McSally was fighting combat missions over, among other places, Afghanistan, and also successfully suing the Defense Department over its policy requiring U.S. servicewomen while stationed in Saudi Arabia to wear the abaya when off-duty. In any case, three days after the polls closed Tuesday, some 600,000 ballots remain to be counted, mainly in Maricopa and Pima counties, home of Phoenix and Tuscon, respectively, both Democratic strongholds. And ballots continue to turn up in unlikely places. How can this be, one asks? Incompetence, or corruption? There is that great choice again.

In yet another hotly contested race, the Georgia governor’s race — you will remember this as the race that Oprah weighed in on, in support of Democrat Stacy Abrams — votes continue to be counted, too (are we seeing a repetitive common thread here?), and those pesky missing votes continue to show up. So far Republican Brian Kemp holds a narrow lead over Abrams, and if Kemp’s tally stays above 50% he will avoid a run-off election as called for by Georgia law. But days after polls closed, the counting (and vote finding) goes on. And now CNN has come out with a piece by Van Jones (now there‘s an impartial observer) urging Abrams not to let Kemp steal the election. So much for journalistic balance. But that’s a whole other subject.

We keep hearing from the Dems how they want every vote to count, but it seems the votes they want to count are those favoring their candidates. Disenfranchisement through extralegal and illegal means doesn’t seem to matter to them, except when its their candidates affected. As Nelson’s chosen attorney, Marc Elias – the attorney who retained Fusion GPS on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign to produce the infamous and largely bogus “dossier” that had Trump peeing on a bed in Moscow – said, he didn’t come to Florida for a recount but rather to see Nelson elected.

With all this going on, one has to ask who needs Russians to meddle in our elections when Americans are doing a perfectly respectable job of mucking things up on their own?

I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but all this continues to leave me deeply troubled, and things stay on course in a very negative direction. Negative, and scary.

Historical Footnote and Disclaimer: I know Bill Nelson personally from when I was a reporter in Brevard County, Fla., in the 1980s and he was a congressman, and I can’t imagine how anyone in their right mind could vote for this guy. There, I said it.