CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 5, 2023, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“ANTI-HATE
TALK IS FINE; TIME FOR ACTIONS”
Starting next winter, California will have
two days every January to think about ways to end hate crimes.
That’s because the state Legislature in March added a “Stand
Against Hate Action Day” to the January calendar, just two weeks after the Martin
Luther King holiday, honoring the pastor and orator who always worked to lessen
hate. The new commemoration was adopted unanimously, on bipartisan votes of
77-0 in the Assembly and 38-0 in the state Senate.
But there’s no sign just talking about ending hate and hate
crimes will do much about the problem. That will take action, not mere talk.
For a new FBI report recorded nearly 10,500 hate crimes nationally
in 2021, the latest year for which full statistics are available, with 1,767 in
California.
That jibes with figures from
the Anti-Defamation League showing hate crimes of all kinds were up about 30
percent in California in 2022, compared with 2021.
These crimes don’t even include this year’s shootings of
Orthodox Jewish men outside synagogues in Los Angeles and frequent attacks on
both Blacks (victimized in about 30 percent of hate crimes) and
Asian-Americans, who often feel threatened when out in public.
One reason for this is the sad fact that bigotry and racism
and anti-Semitism over the last seven years became “cool” topics on the Internet,
with message boards and YouTube videos and dark web entries urging white male violence
against minorities now commonplace.
It can be argued that a lot of this stems from de facto
legitimization of prejudice on college and university campuses nationwide. This
is perhaps best documented by the thorough studies of the AMCHA Initiative,
which documents hatred toward Jews on campuses. Jews make up just two percent
of the populace, but have been targeted lately in more than half of all
religious hate crimes, more than the total against Sikhs, Roman Catholics,
Buddhists and others who are also sometimes targeted.
Jewish students have been singled out on California campuses
and nationwide, pressured by threats of violence to leave student body offices
to which they were elected and intimidated from wearing Star of David necklaces
they once sported proudly. They are not obvious from their skin color, but are targeted
for having “Jewish” names, or because they defend Israel’s right to exist, even
as many of them object to major policies of today’s Israeli government.
If California is serious about fighting hate, and not just
making symbolic gestures like the new Stand Against Hate day, its government
might take a few actions that have long been authorized.
For example, almost 10 years ago, University of California
regents voted to ban anti-Semitism from their campuses. But when many Berkeley
Law School student groups voted to exclude speakers from their group events if
they did not oppose the existence of Israel as the world’s only Jewish homeland,
the school’s actively Jewish dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, stood by despite conceding
those bans would cover him, too.
The students who carry out and respect this plainly anti-Semitic
rule will soon be practicing law. Will they and their immediate predecessors
and other fellow students, essentially taught anti-Semitism while in school, continue
anti-Semitic practices after graduation?
In February, UCLA hosted students from 200 college chapters
of the national Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that promotes the
slogan “From the River to the Sea” originated with help from Middle East terror
groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, both financed by Iran’s extreme Islamist government.
The slogan essentially calls for removal
or massacre of all Israelis, the vast majority of them Jews.
Why is such a group allowed to stage its
national meeting on the UCLA campus, in publicly-funded facilities where
regents officially banned anti-Semitism almost a decade ago?
Why are UC and California State University
faculty allowed to use state-owned facilities and email accounts to promote the
boycott, divest and sanction movement against Israel that was originated by Hamas?
The answer so far is that few dare confront
them, in the mistaken belief this would somehow violate academic freedom. But bigotry has never been part of legitimate
academics.
The bottom line: As long as California allows promotion of
prejudice on its campuses and elsewhere, days of “action” against hate will be
empty gestures.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
No comments:
Post a Comment