To Block or Not to Block on Facebook in a Time of Trump, COVID-19, Black Lives Matter and the Slide Toward Fascism

I am fortunate to have almost 1,500 friends on Facebook. Today I unfriended 1 of them. He is a nice person but I could no longer grant him a forum for his deeply disturbing rhetoric.

At this horrible juncture in history, when our lives are plagued by an uncontrolled lethal virus and our nation is exploding with the long delayed struggle over racial injustice, while a petty despot sits in the White House, focused solely on his own narcissitic ego as almost 3 million Americans have been infected by the virus & over 132,000 Americans have died from it; a President who does not believe in science, is dismantling the pillars of democracy at breakneck speed, has demonstrated himself through acts of cruelty & malice to be a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, an Islamophobe, a homophobe, & if not an outright Antisemite, then one who surrounds himself with Antisemitic advisors; who is an inveterate liar, a vindictive bully, and has time & again chosen to embrace our nation’s totalitarian adversaries while he alienates our closest & dearest allies, no longer can I countenance those who defend him, his actions, his policies, and his ideologies.

With such a nightmare holding the reins of power in America, I can no longer tolerate listening to those who defend the horrors that surround us and the man who carries the most responsibility for either creating them or exacerbating them beyond and without end. Whether it be his tearing apart families & putting children in cages, his slamming the immigration doors to brown people literally fleeing for their lives, his dismantling the very laws that were set up to prevent to destruction of our natural environment, his attacks on the free press, his defunding public services such as the post office, his ordering of the tear gassing, pepper spraying, baton beating, and imprisoning of peaceful protesters for the “crime” of seeking equal justice under the law, his vigorous defense and exalting of those who have betrayed our nation and chose to take up arms against it in order to protect their “right” to maintain an entire people in a state of slavery, his active suppression of the American people’s right to vote in a national election, his actively provoking his fellow Americans to stand up in armed resistance to their own state governors and legislators, and, of course, in the face of the COVID-19 virus, his taking the life saving protocols established by our medical experts and presenting them to his followers as being some sort of political plot against America and against him so that they view their refusal to follow these protocols as an act of patriotism rather than as an act of complicity in murder, I can not longer countenance anyone who defends any or all of this.

Some will claim that I have denied this person his freedom of speech & thought. I disagree. He can share his beliefs with whoever is willing to hear him. I am not one of them.

I cannot look at the mass murder of what in the end will be 100’s of 1,000’s of Americans while the American democracy is being thrown into a freefall toward fascism and simply say that those who support what is happening just happen to have different opinions than do I. Just as I cannot say it about those Germans who filled the streets of their nation, offering the straight arm salute and shouting “Heil Hitler!”, I cannot say that now about those who cheer on Donald Trump as he marches our nation into the abyss. And I won’t. Not any longer. If you think Donald Trump is the Saviour of America, then you can unfriend me. If you evangelize about his “saviourship,” then I will be unfriending you. I can continue to like you as a person, I can continue to respect your LEGITIMATE conservative viewpoints, I can respect your allegiance to the Republican Party (in its ideal state), but if you choose to remain blind to all the horrible things that Donald Trump has done to America and the world, and you choose to sing his praises, I don’t want to hear it, not on Facebook, not anywhere. I cannot even say that we can “agree to disagree,” for if you believe in Trump, as far as I am concerned, you no longer believe in the America envisioned by our founders and our martyrs.

There will be those who call this statement a rant, and they will be right. I admit it. It is one. But it is better to rant now and try to make a difference than it is to remain silent until it is too late, when freedom is lost and blood is flowing on the streets of America. A dark image. Yes. God willing it never comes to pass. But as things stand now, with every passing day I sincerely fear that its realization draws closer.

The Shoah and Today 2019

Last Thursday was Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is 74 years since the liberation of the camps and the conclusion of the war, yet we still hold these memorials observances. As well we should, for we must never forget what happened in Europe when the forces of hate were released from the shackles of conscience and morality.

Yet what does that really mean in terms of our observances today, 74 years later? Are our observances just a memorial to the 6 million Jewish martyrs that perished in the Holocaust? That must not be, for there were 3 million non-Jewish victims that shared their fate. They were Roma and Sinti; gay men, women, and the transgendered; Jehovah’s Witnesses and the mentally disabled; Blacks, Communists and political dissidents. They, too, we must remember and mourn, or at least we should. Are today’s observances solely a deep dive into dark memory or should they be more than that? Are they merely a solemn celebration of the vanquishing of one evil at one time in history or should they be more than that as well?

There is no rhyme or reason to the sacrifice of those 9 million lives, nevertheless the millions of war casualties both military and civilians. No one can justify their suffering and their destruction. These martyrs were victims of what happens when mindless evil is allowed to run rampant and unchecked in the world. But if we are satisfied to treat their loss as this profoundly tragic stain on the fabric of human history, then we have not done their martyrdom justice. If all they have become is a painful yet vague memory of people too numerous to name, then they truly have died in vain. We cannot allow that to happen.

We must take their sacrifice and give it meaning; true meaning and not just some superficial meaning meant to assuage the human guilt of allowing it to happen. From their sacrifice we must learn vital lessons about what we need to do in order to prevent this from ever happening again. As the philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” These martyrs must be our teachers as to what we need to do so that this history is never repeated. These are the lessons of NEVER AGAIN! NOT TO THE JEWS! NOT TO ANYONE! NEVER AGAIN should we allow anyone to single out a group of people, or several groups of people, and declare them unworthy as human beings. NEVER AGAIN should we stand idly by while others are singled out for discrimination, for persecution, or for extermination, while we say to ourselves, “Well it’s not my problem!” NEVER AGAIN should we remain silent, and through our silence, allow those in power to pursue policies that dehumanize and demonize whole segments of society, and then justify the mistreatment of those segments on the grounds of their hate-filled lies and their degrading stereotypes. There is an old saying: “Silence equals Assent” and we must never give our assent to evil.

So where do we begin? We must begin at the beginning. You would think that is the obvious answer, but not really. Why? Because today, when we look at the Holocaust, we tend to look at is as through a “rearview mirror,” perceiving it as a whole, with Auschwitz predominating our view. But the Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. It ended there. Rather the Holocaust was an evolving process, starting with anti-Jewish laws which carved the Jews out of society and defined than as the “other.” It is with those anti-Jewish laws that we must begin, for that is where the Nazis began as they set out on their road which ultimately lead to Auschwitz and the Final Solution.

Between 1933 and 1939, the Nazis enacted more than 2,000 anti-Jewish laws. While in the 1930s most people, including the Jews, could not conceive of the gas chambers, still the road to genocide began with these anti-Jewish laws.

In the 1930’s, the Nazis transformed their bigotry into law, and sad to say, that process of transformation is still being practiced around the world, and some would say, even in our own country. As we consider some of the policies in place today in the United States and around the world, comparing them to some of the Nazi anti-Jewish laws of the ‘30’s, let us ask ourselves, “Do we hear in them echoes of the Nazi anti-Jewish laws?”

On April 7, 1933 the Nazis enacted the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service which forbid all Jews from serving the German government in any capacity.

Our society has long discriminated against the LGBTQ community. For the last several years, we have been reducing such discrimination. Yet recently our government announced that transgender men and women could no longer serve in the military. Captain Jennifer Peace was among trans service members who testified before Congress. She shared her reactions upon first learning of this ban. She said, “I think it was in that moment that for the first time I really questioned, ‘Why am I still waking up and putting on this uniform when time and again I am not able to serve?’ Why should I wait to deploy and risk my life again when the people I am serving do not even want me here?” In the pain in her words do we hear an echo of the pain felt by those German Jews who, in 1933, also were told that they could no longer serve their country?

On April 21, 1933 the Nazis enacted a law banning the practice of Kosher slaughter. In their propaganda, they portrayed Kosher slaughter as perversely cruel, and therefore symptomatic of what they claimed to be the inhuman cruelty of the Jews. Considering the fact that from ancient days, Kosher slaughter was specifically designed to cause the least pain and suffering on the part of the animal, the Nazi assault on it was just a veiled attempt to further demonize the Jews.

Today, in Europe, seven nations – Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, & Switzerland – all ban the Jewish and Muslim practices of Kosher and Hallal slaughter, also claiming to do so on grounds of cruelty. Do we hear an echo of the Nazi ban on Kosher slaughter in these current bans?

In July 1938, an international conference to discuss the issue of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany was held in Evian, France, with representatives of 32 nations attending. In the end, most countries, including the U.S. and Great Britain, continued to refuse to admit these refugees, claiming, among other reasons, issues of national security.

After a year of public debate and court battles, in December 2017 the Supreme Court gave its approval to a travel ban which primarily targets refugees from 5 Muslim countries; Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. The reason given for this ban is, like the one given in 1938, “national security.” However, when one examines the acts of terrorism, and the attempted acts of terrorism, that have taken place between the nightmare of September 11, 2001 and the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting on October 27, 2018, there appears a serious inconsistency with the reasoning behind the ban. During that time period, 78 attacks or attempted attacks have been recorded. Of them, only 15 involved foreign nationals. The rest were conducted by domestic terrorists. Of the 15 attacks or attempted attacks involving foreign nationals, only 2 of the 5 Muslim countries had nationals from their nations involved; Somalia and Yemen. Yet there were 15 other nations – Muslim and non-Muslim – that had nationals involved in these attacks or attempted attacks, yet none of those nations appear on the list of the banned. Several Holocaust survivors have spoken out against this ban. Aaron Elster, who was the speaker at my own community’s interfaith Yom HaShoah service in 2003, said, “For someone to come along and say, ‘These people cannot come in,’ I believe that’s a sliding slope. It starts that way. What group will be next?” Though the order claims the ban to be “Temporary” with a possibility of becoming permanent, Fritzie Fritzshall, who also was the speaker at my own community’s interfaith Yom HaShoah service in 2004, said that for those whose lives are in danger, “90 days is a lifetime.” Do we hear the echo of the doors that were closed by the nations of the world to the Jews fleeing for their lives from the Nazis in this travel ban?

As the Nazi persecution of the Jews intensified, countless families were torn apart, whether through parents making the heart-wrenching choice to save their children by sending them to England on the Kindertransports or turning them over to non-Jews willing to hide them, or during the selection process when they first arrived at the camps.

The issue of U.S. immigration reform has been hotly debated for many years. Unfortunately, trapped within this controversy are the children of aspiring immigrants and those whose families feel they have no choice but to send their children alone to our nation in search of refuge from the violence in their own lands.
In 2014, the former administration considered sending unaccompanied immigrant children from Central America back to the dangers of their native lands. However, nationwide protests convinced the government to set aside such plans.

But now our current administration plans to reinstate its Zero Tolerance approach to deterring undocumented immigration which includes a policy of Family Separation. Children of families crossing the border without proper documentation will be taken from their families and held by our government. This policy does not include measures to eventually reunite these families. Detainees have testified to Congress that even families lawfully requesting asylum were separated.

Members of the Hidden Children Foundation, representing children hidden during the Holocaust, expressed their deep concerns over the Family Separation Policy. Co-Director Rachelle Goldstein, who herself was separated from her parents at age 3, said, “Separation of the family is probably the worst thing that ever happened to us…When you take a child away from the parents, from the home, from everything that they know, they are never the same…Most hidden children are now in their late 70s, 80s, some are even 90, and they still think about it, and it still hurts, it still aches.” Do we hear the echo of the crying children, torn from their families as a result of Nazi persecution, in the sobs of the children impacted by our own Family Separation policy today?

Nazi anti-Jewish legalization culminated in January 1942 with the ultimate anti-Jewish policy – genocide. They called it the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

The Nuremburg War Crimes Trials outlawed genocide for all time. Unfortunately, genocide lives on, from the genocides in Darfur and Rwanda, to the ISIS massacres of entire Christian villages. Today, the Rohingya of Myanmar are victims of an ethnic cleansing. In December the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum said it found “compelling evidence” that this is yet another genocide. Do we hear the echoes of the anguished last breaths of victims of the Nazi gas chambers and killing fields on the lips of today’s slaughtered Rohingya?

When governments target whole groups of people, all humanity suffers. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. hoped, may we come to measure people as individuals solely by “the content of their character.”

In memory of the Holocaust martyrs, Yom HaShoah must not only speak of past transgressions but it must challenge the transgressions of today; transgressions that have become all to numerous, both at home and abroad!