By John Ruberry
In terms of numbers and in geographic reach, America is possibly suffering from its worse outbreak of anti-Semitism ever. I’m referring of course to the pro-Hamas and anti-Israel protests at many colleges. Many of these “spontaneous” events are illegal encampments filled with similar tents, exact-copy signs, that are populated with angry students and other interlopers chanting the same slogans.
Fortunately, for now at least, the worst outrages at these hate rallies are isolated incidents.
Last month, a protester at George Washington University held a sign with a Palestinian flag and “the final solution.” At Columbia, a protest leader, the pronoun challenged Khymani James, was banned from campus after a video surfaced where, James declared, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
Also at Columbia, a knucklehead there screamed, “Go back to Poland, go back to Belarus” at pro-Israel counter protesters.
Can you imagine the uproar–it would be a well-deserved one–if someone screamed, “Go back to Africa” to Black protesters? The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division would be there at Navy Seals speed.
The head of the Department of Justice is Merrick Garland, the US attorney general. When the situation fits, he likes to remind people that he is Jewish and had two members of his family perish in the Holocaust.
Last year, when questioned about the infamous FBI memo that suggested Catholics who favor traditional Latin mass services could connected to “the far-right white nationalist movement,” Garland responded emotionally. “The idea that someone with my family background would discriminate against any religion is so outrageous,” he said, “so absurd.”
In March, in an address to the left-leaning Anti-Defamation League’s Never is Now Summit, Garland was more specific about his family and the Holocaust.
“My family fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe at the start of the 20th century,” he said. “My grandmother, who was one of five children born in what is now Belarus, made it to the United States, as did two of her siblings.”
“The other two did not,” the AG continued. “They were killed in the Holocaust.”
Oh yeah, Belarus, the same place the hater at Columbia said, along with Poland, Jews should return to.
Garland is a native of Lincolnwood, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. He graduated–as class valedictorian-from Niles West High School in nearby Skokie. It was in Skokie, several years after Garland’s graduation, where Neo-Nazis attempted to march. Thousands of Holocaust survivors lived in Skokie at the time; Garland almost certainly was classmates with children of survivors of the Shoah.
Why hasn’t Garland specifically and forcefully spoken out against the anti-Semitism at these pro-Hamas protests? His boss, President Joe Biden, hasn’t either, of course.
When the time is right–or better, when the politics are right–Garland speaks out against anti-Semitism.
But is Garland even running the Justice Department? In the May 3rd Chicago Way podcast hosted by John Kass, the great Charles Lipson, a professor emeritus of political science from the University Chicago, had this to say about Garland: “The attorney general’s office right now is being running by a woman named Lisa Monaco, she’s the number two-person, Merrick Garland’s not doing anything.”
Well, he can do something now. Garland can unequivocally denounce the anti-Semitic protests at college campuses and the Biden administration’s weak response to them.
And then resign.
It’s up to Garland to convince me that he’s not a coward.
John Rubery regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.
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