Adas Israel LA

 I am more than discomfited by people blocking access to a synagogue. I hate the menacing, macing, cursing, and physically attacking the people entering, or anybody around wearing a kippah. I am sickened by self-styled allies of Palestine who enter a subway car - masked! -  and demand that any Zionists present raise their hands. All that shit is simply indefensible. 

But I am also deeply shamed by friends who are quick to denounce these things and imply that their adversaries who do not also denounce them are hypocritical when they themselves are silent about the demolition of the Great Omari Mosque, the Khalid bin al Waleed Mosque, the Church of St. Porphyria’s, etc. by the IDF. They are all quick to say that Hamas combatants use the churches and mosques of Gaza without knowing anything whatever in particular about the individual case.

Welcoming real estate pimps who are selling condos on land that has yet to even be transferred by colonial courts may not be as bad as hiding the perpetrators of the atrocities of October 7. But then again, the antisemitic hoods in LA didn’t raze Adas Israel to the ground.

Last month we learned of a committee of billionaires who offered to purchase Mayor Adams’s police action to break up student protest camps at Columbia and NYU. Today Reuters reports on largely-secret influence operations by the government of Israel inside the US Congress and elsewhere. But when people call attention to these things they are accused of employing old antisemitic tropes. This reminds me of the definition of chutzpah: murdering your parents and asking for the mercy of the court as an orphan. We live in a bizarro universe in which Marjorie Taylor Greene(!), who traffics regularly in antisemitic conspiracy theories (Jewish space lasers?)  feels free to denounce the “disgusting antisemitism” of the Democratic Party. I am at a loss.