Silverstein said this:
People like Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, live for tragedies like this. You wait. Tomorrow or the next day he'll be holding a press conference with the security guard's wife telling the world that African-Americans and Jews must make common cause against the vast antisemitic conspiracy. If he’s really feeling his oats that day he might even work in a reference to an evil Iranian president who denies the Holocaust as well. Mark my words, it’s coming.”
As Petra points out, Foxman did not act that way. He acted like any decent human being would, saying this:
“The shooting at the United States Holocaust Museum, in which a security guard was critically wounded, is a very sad and tragic event which reminds us, as the Museum itself does every day, in the starkest way, where the spread of hatred can lead. […]Brunn’s evil attack, at the very place that was created to remember and teach about evil in the world, is an immediate reminder that words of hate matter, that we can never afford to ignore hate because words of hate can easily become acts of hate, no matter the place, no matter the age of the hatemonger. […]”I would expect this from Silverstein, but where is Cif's journalistic standards.
Richard Silverstein, it is you who live for these moments making snide remarks against people and institutions you don't like.
One of Harry's Place' readers pointed one more thing - Brunn and Silverstein share at least one false and hate-filled idea - that African Americans are the tools of the Jews. That's right, go scroll back up and look at the excerpt. Notice in Silverstein's description of the theoratical press confrence by Abe Foxman and the presense of Officer John's widow and the rallying of African Americans? I wonder what his response will be to this? Perhaps he ment Zionists?
2 comments:
From Richard Silverstein's piece in the Guardian:
Instead of describing this incident as the lone act of a desperate, mentally unstable creature who sought, like the Slim Pickens character at the end of Dr Strangelove, to go out in a blaze of racist glory – they will seek to parlay this incident into a much wider antisemitic conspiracy.
Unfortunately, for anyone who actually saw the Stanley Kubrick film and remembers it, the Slim Pickens figure was anything but a lone, disturbed creature. He was created by Terry Southern intentionally as the product of mass, anti-Communist and anti-Soviet hysteria. That's why it's so dangerous when the lines become unclear between legitimate and balanced criticism of Israel and overt anti-Semitism.
Jes, excellent, essential point.
Michael, when it comes to Israel and Jews, the Guardian has no journalistic standards. It's worth being clear about the fact, too, that it was Silverstein, not Foxman, who actually used the shooting and a man's death for the purpose of scoring a political point.
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