(Jewish Group) The stench of anti-Semitism and racism mars Washington

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

The stench of anti-Semitism recently rising at the John A. Wilson Building, the city’s headquarters, has prompted D.C. Council member Brianne K. Nadeau (D-Ward 1) to announce that she and Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) will sponsor activities highlighting the historic relationship between Jews and African Americans in the civil rights struggle. Their program will include a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Undoubtedly, many people, shocked and disgusted by the anti-Semitic slurs of Nation of Islam representative Abdul Khadir Muhammad at the Wilson Building event, will accept the Nadeau-Bowser initiative as a good response. They may be also satisfied that displays of black and Jewish unity are a sufficient antidote to the cringeworthy, loopy conspiracy theory advanced by council member Trayon White Sr. (D-Ward 8) — that a Jewish banking dynasty controls the federal government, the World Bank and the weather. White later apologized.

However, in a city that claims to be, in the words of LaToya Foster, a spokeswoman for Bowser, “an inclusive and progressive place,” a black and Jewish unity proposal is simply not good enough. Its remedies for hate in the District are both limited in scope and exclusionary.


To be sure, the evil of anti-Semitism is real and has a global dimension. I saw it in my visit to the Dachau concentration camp in 1968. It stared me in the face at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, where for hundreds of years coffins were buried stacked one on top of the other because the government wouldn’t allow expansion of the Jewish ghetto. The Holocaust Museum, which I first visited as a member of The Post’s editorial board before its opening 25 years ago, tells the story in gut-wrenching detail.

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