Biden’s address left antisemitism unaddressed - opinion
Last weekend, in fact, provided Biden with an additional reason to discuss hate in America.
By YAAKOV MENKENUpdated: MAY 8, 2021 17:11US PRESIDENT Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris speak after meeting with Asian-American leaders at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in March.(photo credit: CARLOS BARRIA / REUTERS)
President Joe Biden seems to care deeply about combating “hate” – unless it’s directed at the targets of the world’s oldest hatred.We all expected the president to speak about hate in America during his first address to a joint session of Congress. He did not disappoint. He talked about the murder of George Floyd, systemic racism and white supremacy.He mentioned attacks upon blacks, Native Americans and women. He celebrated a hate-crimes act to protect Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.Last weekend, in fact, provided Biden with an additional reason to discuss hate in America. Beginning Thursday night and proceeding through the weekend, four different synagogues and three vehicles were vandalized in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx. All were damaged in precisely the same way: smashed windows.Every student of the Holocaust knows that the Nazis’ first wholesale violent attack on Jewish property was Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass. Seeing it replicated in microcosm on the streets of New York traumatized the Jewish community, and gave Biden the opportunity to assuage its concerns with words of healing.There’s one problem: He passed.President Biden spoke about “the viciousness of the hate crimes over the past year,” but never mentioned the community that is, according to the FBI, overwhelmingly the most frequent victim. Given the small Jewish population of the United States, merely 2% of Americans, a Jew is several times more likely to be the target of a hate crime than all of those who earned Biden’s mention.Could we imagine that President Biden would have said nothing if it had instead been four black churches, or four mosques, vandalized last weekend? Of course not. It would have been a leading element of his address, the centerpiece of his section on fighting bigotry. For Biden to spend so much time talking about racism and hate in America, and to rattle off a long list of targeted groups yet omit entirely the targets of multiple hate crimes carried out within the previous week, sends its own message: Jews don’t qualify as a targeted group.INSTEAD, BIDEN called for passage of a bill, the “Equality Act,” that would give state sanction to antisemitism. It provides a potent weapon to be used against anyone who dares hold a Jewish wedding with a mehitzah, a divider between men and women, in accordance with thousands of years of Jewish observance.For Asians, Biden called for passage of a new hate crimes act. For the more frequent Jewish victims of precisely the same random, violent assaults, he called to make their religious practices a violation of American statute, and to declare their Bible a bigoted document.
This is not entirely new. We did not have to wait for a joint session of Congress to wonder whether Jewish concerns were being ignored. One Biden appointee after the next has a track record of hostility toward the Jewish state and the Jewish people.Biden placed Maher Bitar, whose animosity against the world’s only Jewish state is longer than his career, in charge of intelligence on the National Security Council.As USAID administrator, he selected Samantha Power, the former UN ambassador who in 2016 helped draft the ridiculously anti-historical and obviously hateful UNSC Resolution 2334, which declared the site of the Jews’ Holy Temple, David’s city, the Mount of Olives, Judea and Samaria to all be “occupied Arab land.”And as deputy assistant secretary for Israel and Palestinian Affairs at the State Department, he picked Hady Amr, who responded to the neutralization of a notorious Hamas terrorist by decrying Israel’s “brutal murders of innocents” and implying that both Israelis and Americans deserved to be targeted in return. And this is by no means an exhaustive list of Biden appointees with similar records and attitudes.Also, within the past week, dozens of rockets from Hamas terrorists have targeted Israeli towns, attempting to murder men, women and children indiscriminately for the “crime” of being a Jew trying to live on the Jews’ holy land. Yet last night, Biden claimed that “our intelligence agencies” not only regard white supremacy, biased thoughts, as terrorism, but “the most lethal terrorist threat today.”The most frequent targets of terrorist threats would, of course, beg to disagree. But according to the Oval Office’s newest occupant, Jews aren’t a targeted group after all.Rabbi Yaakov Menken is managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, the largest rabbinic public-policy organization in America.
