As a devout Jewish child who grew up attending synagogue and Hebrew School, from a very young age I was constantly surrounded by stories of the Holocaust \u2013 how Hitler took advantage of economic conditions, found an easy-to-identify \u201cother\u201d for a scapegoat, and rose to power by preying on people\u2019s fear.\u00a0 Hitler started out with propaganda and ultimately built up to death camps that murdered millions of people. \u00a0I studied the journals of Holocaust survivors, solemnly walked through the Holocaust Museum in D.C., and silently crept around Anne Frank\u2019s secret annex in Amsterdam.\u00a0 I saw photos of the gas chambers, the emaciated bodies, the tattooed arms of the survivors.\u00a0 \u201cNever Again\u201d was burned into my psyche.\u00a0 My immigrant grandparents likely would have died in one of these Nazi death camps had their parents not already fled from the pogroms in Belarus around 1920.<\/p>\n
As an adult, I had assumed that opposition to and rejection of Nazis, fascism, KKK, and other forms of white supremacy were so widespread and generally accepted that they would not be a threat in this country in my lifetime. \u00a0Then last year, I watched Donald Trump take advantage of economic conditions and find easy-to-identify \u201cothers\u201d for a scapegoat (immigrants & Muslims).\u00a0 I watched Donald Trump rise to power by preying on people\u2019s fear. \u00a0I watched in horror as Trump refused to disavow the support of KKK leader David Duke. \u00a0I watched in horror as Trump demonized Mexican immigrants the same way that Hitler demonized the Jews. \u00a0I watched in horror as Trump called for a ban on all Muslims, similar to Hitler\u2019s ban on Jews.\u00a0 And I was stunned when millions of people nonetheless voted for this man who so clearly was stealing pages right out of Hitler\u2019s playbook.<\/p>\n
But for some reason, I still clung to a hope that Hitler\u2019s playbook was just Trump\u2019s election strategy, and that as President he would be different.\u00a0 To the contrary, Trump\u2019s response to the domestic terrorist attack by a white supremacist in Charlottesville last week has shown once and for all what he truly is \u2013 an apologist, enabler, and incubator for white supremacism.\u00a0 If the driver of the car had been Muslim, Trump would have called it a terrorist attack.\u00a0 Instead, because the driver was a white supremacist, Trump says there is blame on \u201cmany sides\u201d and \u201cboth sides.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump has not once condemned the action as a domestic terrorist attack, but instead has insisted that there were \u201cfine people\u201d at the white supremacist rally where participants marched with torches and shouted \u201cJews will not replace us.\u201d \u00a0A president of a local synagogue in Charlottesville reports that \u201cfor half an hour, three men dressed in fatigues and armed with semi-automatic rifles stood across the street from the temple.\u00a0 Had they tried to enter, I don\u2019t know what I could have done to stop them.\u201d\u00a0 He further reports:\u00a0 \u201cSeveral times, parades of Nazis passed our building, shouting, ‘There’s the synagogue!’\u00a0followed by chants of ‘Sieg Heil’\u00a0and other anti-Semitic language. Some carried flags with swastikas and other Nazi symbols.\u201d\u00a0 He also reports that Nazi websites had posted a call to burn the synagogue so the congregation took \u201cthe precautionary step of removing our Torahs, including a Holocaust scroll, from the premises.\u201d\u00a0 Worshippers were advised to exit from the back of the synagogue for their own safety.\u00a0 For all Jews who hear this story, there is a sickening feeling of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu.<\/p>\n
White supremacists have basked in Trump\u2019s equivocation, stating in their propaganda website the Daily Stormer: \u201cHe didn\u2019t attack us. He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us. . . When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.\u201d\u00a0 Likewise, KKK leader David Duke credits Trump as the inspiration for Charlottesville:\u00a0 \u201cWe are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump,\u201d Duke said at the rally. \u201cThat\u2019s what we believed in, that\u2019s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he\u2019s going to take our country back. That\u2019s what we gotta do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s equivocation and refusal to condemn and reject white supremacists, Nazi sympathizers, and the KKK demonstrate that he is not fit to be President.<\/p>\n
Without a doubt, Trump and the white supremacists are still in the minority \u2013 confederate statues are being pulled or knocked down all over the country, business leaders are fleeing from Trump\u2019s councils, charities are pulling their events from Trump\u2019s properties, Republican leaders are distancing themselves from Trump, and all 16 members of the President\u2019s Committee on the Arts and Humanities resigned in a letter that spelled out \u201cRESIST.\u201d<\/p>\n
We too must continue to resist. \u00a0We at CLDC will continue to provide legal support and education to all those resisting the dangerous racist and xenophobic Trump White House.<\/p>\n
Onward.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As a devout Jewish child who grew up attending synagogue and Hebrew School, from a very young age I was constantly surrounded by stories of the Holocaust \u2013 how Hitler took advantage of economic conditions, found an easy-to-identify \u201cother\u201d for a scapegoat, and rose to power by preying on people\u2019s fear.\u00a0 Hitler started out with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":5828,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[219,213,26],"class_list":["post-5827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-anti-racist","tag-charlottesville","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cldc.org\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cldc.org\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cldc.org\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cldc.org\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/90"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cldc.org\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cldc.org\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cldc.org\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cldc.org\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cldc.org\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cldc.org\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}