Monday, Feb. 7, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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After hate crime charges were filed against a man accused of spray painting swastikas on a Chicago synagogue, Rabbi Baruch Hertz with Congregation B’nei Ruven spoke at a news conference with police and said: “Light prevails over darkness. I encourage everybody to take this moment to bring more good and more light into the world.”
Those words should be heard — and that light brought in — not just here, where this recent act of antisemitic vandalism happened, but across the country, as hatred in general and hate groups in particular seem increasingly emboldened.
A group of neo-Nazis shouted antisemitic slurs and waved swastika flags in Orlando recently, and Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, chose not to flatly denounce them. Instead he accused Democrats of trying to “smear” him by forcing him to respond to Nazis, saying, “as if I had something to do with it.”
Last week, at the start of Black History Month, bomb threats were called in to historically Black colleges and universities across the country, leading at least 17 campuses to lock buildings and halt in-person classes.
Since the Jan. 6 insurrection last year, white supremacist groupssuch as the Patriot Front have been more publicly visible, even joining the annual anti-abortion March For Life in Washington last month.
Recent data published by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino showed there was a 339% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2021 comparedwith the year before.
In 2020, according to FBI data, more than 8,000 hate crimes were reported in the United States, the most in more than a decade.
Brian Levin, executive director of the California State research center, told the Los Angeles Times: “The invective on the internet of hate is being followed by vile acts on the streets.”
It can be hard for light to win out when darkness is so easily dispersed.
And while there’s no specific link between these recent acts of hate, we should be looking at them in total and doing everything possible to cut off the oxygen that animates them.
In Chicago, Shahid Hussain, 39, faces four hate-crime counts and other charges connected to acts of vandalism at synagogues. He reportedly has a criminal record and was on parole, and no motive has been disclosed.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot responded to the alleged hate crimes appropriately: “Make no mistake: This attack, as well as the deep hatred and bigotry that drives other antisemitic acts like it, is an attack on our city’s Jewish community and social fabric.”
All these hateful acts leave people living in fear, and it’s incumbent on those of us who are not part of the targeted groups to fully understand why.
That requires empathy and education, two things many in this country have decided to lambaste as “wokeness.” As if knowledge does not give us all power, and kindness is not part of the good light Rabbi Hertz was talking about.
In responding to the Orlando neo-Nazis by saying “as if I had something to do with it,” DeSantis was brushing off a brazen display of antisemitism as somebody else’s problem, showing a complete lack of concern for how Jewish people in Florida or elsewhere might feel.
Whoopi Goldberg of ABC’s “The View” was sharply and rightly criticized last week for saying the Holocaust was “not about race.” The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response: “Racism was central to Nazi ideology. Jews were not defined by religion, but by race. Nazi racist beliefs fueled genocide and mass murder.”
Goldberg apologized on the next day’s show, saying about the response: “I am deeply, deeply grateful because the information I got was really helpful and helped me understand some different things.” She also interviewed Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, allowing viewers to hear a broader explanation of why her words were offensive.
Goldberg was suspended for two weeks by ABC. While I wish she never made the comments in the first place, all that followed — sincere apology, educational public explanation of why what was said was offensive, appropriate punishment — was a good road map for getting people to understand the seriousness of the subject and why words matter.
Compare that with this: Fox News, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, aired a Tucker Carlson “documentary” titled “Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization.” As is the far-right trope, George Soros, a Jewish, Hungarian-born American billionaire and Holocaust survivor, is painted as a nefarious “globalist,” blah, blah, blah.
Greenblatt tweeted in response to Carlson’s show: “On the eve of #Holocaust-
RemembranceDay, it’s appalling to see Tucker Carlson & FOX invoke the kind of antisemitic tropes typically found in white supremacist media. There’s no excuse for this kind of fear mongering, especially in light of intensifying #antisemitism.”
Carlson didn’t apologize, Fox News didn’t suspend him and nobody there did anything that involved listening to people on the receiving end of antisemitism.
It seems certain people in America, for the past five or so years, have developed an increasing tolerance for hate. We can’t let that happen. If there was ever an issue worth overreacting to, this is it.
Attempts to dial down our understanding of past acts of hate will damage our future. And present-day acts of hate — be it the thinly veiled words of a TV opportunist, vandalism at Chicago synagogues, racially motivated bomb threats at universities or Nazis in Florida — need to be swiftly called out, squashed and deemed wholly unacceptable.
Anything less lets the darkness in.
Rex Huppke is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
