Inside Charlottesville rally and the focus on Jews

[Melech 9,900]

"The city of Charlottesville, thanks to pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union, had allowed them — 500 or so — their rally in Emancipation Park, or as they prefer to call it, Lee Park, to protest the city’s plans to remove from the park a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

That worked for an hour or so on Saturday, and then the protesters and the counterprotesters started to pelt one another with plastic bottles — it was unclear who started it. There were gas bombs — mildly irritating — that seemed to come more from the white supremacists. And then the sides rushed each other headlong and there were scuffles.

So Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency and, heeding the police, the white supremacists filed out of the park and started walking, north, but to where no one seemed sure. There was talk of meeting at a parking lot, but which parking lot, no one was sure. As they approached the Dogwood Vietnam Memorial, a bucolic hill overlooking an overpass, they sputtered to a stop for consultations and did what marchers on a seasonably warm day do: They sat on the grass, sought shade and chatted.

I had been following at a distance with a handful of journalists and folks who were there not so much to counterprotest but to deliver an alternative message. Zelic Jones from Richmond bore a poster with a saying by Martin Luther King Jr., “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

I climbed the hillock to see if anyone would be willing to talk; on the way, the marchers had studiously ignored reporters, but I thought, at rest, they might be more amenable. It was not to be. One man, wearing black slacks, a white shirt, sunglasses and black baseball cap, shadowed me. He moved to stand between me and anyone I had hoped to interview.

I looked him directly in the eye.

“How’s it going, Shlomo?” he said.

“My name is Ron,” I said. I hadn’t identified myself as Jewish.

“You look like a Shlomo.”

“You want to talk?” I offered.

“I don’t talk to the press,” he said. “They just lie.” He scampered away.

The exchange was jarring in how personal it was. I’ve been hated, directly, for many things (try being a journalist, anywhere), but it had been a while — I’d have to cast back to early childhood — since I’d faced visceral hatred just for, well, looking Jewish.

 

Among the 500 white supremacists were men and women bearing signs like “Goyim know!” (Know what?) and “Jews are satans children.” There were Nazi flags. There were men all in black, t-shirts and slacks and army boots and helmets, jogging along with plastic shields. There were the men who sang of “blood and soil” as they marched to the Emancipation Park event. And when the white supremacists got their act together and gathered in McIntire Park, they shouted “Jew” every time the name of Charlotteville’s Jewish mayor, Michael Signer, was mentioned.

And of course, the hostility was not confined to Jews: As targets, Jews were not even preeminent; blacks were. There were the “White lives matter” t-shirts. Marching along McIntire Road, the white supremacists shouted out the N-word at drivers passing by. More prominent than the Nazi flags were the Confederate flags and their variants.

The focus on Jews was anomalous: This was supposed to be about the Confederacy and southern heritage, and defenders of the Southern Cause are not always identified with hostility toward Jews. An hour’s drive away, in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery, a Confederate monument, there’s a carefully tended Jewish section.

And yet here it was, the chants of “Jews will not replace us” (as?). I had two more personal encounters. At Dogwood Vietnam Memorial, a man in a floppy beige sunhat started following me and explaining to me the lie of the Holocaust, the evil of the Jews, the value of DNA in determining purity. I retreated as he ran after me, screaming, “My mother says I’m a Jew! My MOTHER! Does that mean I’m entitled to something?” (I resisted replying, “Your mother’s love.”)

And earlier, filing out of Emancipation Park, a group of youths surrounded and shouted at me, “Take that wall in Israel down! An open border for everyone!” — a reference to a popular theory on the far right that Jews are engineering open borders to bring the United States to ruination while keeping Israel pure. They moved on.

Anomalies like these tend to bemuse, at least me. What the racists believe to be hurtful jibes come across more as non sequiturs, as mouthings of the deluded or the possessed. Why “Shlomo” of all names? What was that about DNA? A wall in Israel?

Read more: http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/379786/inside-the-charlottesville-rally-jews-targeted-for-special-abuse/

 

Seems like that America being a "safe place" for Jews is certainly over. 

[Fatigay 21,211]

17 minutes ago, Melech said:

Seems like that America being a "safe place" is certainly over.

fixed

[Whispering 18,865]

Not surprised. Well, I am...but, I'm not. 

[Morphine Prince 109,696]

They can never leave Jews alone smh. 

[The Child 18,997]

They must have such a sad life, constantly blaming your failure on others, that's so pathetic.