Racism and National Security – a Volatile Combination

The new cool in Europe is to be anti-Semitic especially new in Germany, according to Steve Emerson’s web site in an article written by Abigail R. Esman. And those throwing the bombs and horrific language are the old and new line Nazis but the new refugees fleeing from their own countries of oppression and violence.

When I was a child during the early years of WWII and in grammar school, it was at a time when my family didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Notwithstanding our own lack of funds, my grandmother would round up the kids of refugee families who were living on the wrong side of poverty and feed them lunch at the same time I came home for lunch. There was one boy I remembered well. My grandmother and mother would be trying to feed this gang and get us out in time to get back to school for the afternoon session, and he would stand up, pound on the table, and say: “I am rrrready, I am vating!” I wanted to respond, as young as I was—if you don’t like the service leave, but I dared not on more than one ground. Eighty years later I have never forgotten his arrogance and his sense of entitlement. Many years later, my father had a wonderful woman who cleaned his office. One day when she was complaining about having a bad cold and how expensive doctors were, he suggested she go to the emergency room of a local hospital a few blocks away. She looked in horror at my father and said: I ain’t gonna sit on bench with any of them spicks! This woman was black.

And now not only do we have vitriolic language pouring out of the White House, as I commented in my last blog, we have been introduced this week to a racist leader of the free world. The President of the United States.

The mandate of these Commentaries is the examination of national security. And we hold strongly to that directive. If we were to review the impact of racism or anti-any minority, we inevitably learn that we have simultaneously injured the very fabric that supports our national security. Pragmatically, we become less apt at fighting those who would attack or endanger our democracy in the form of traditional terrorism.

This reasoning is clearly supported by reality: once you have an attack by one segment of the population against another segment of that same community then vital security components must be diverted from one area of concern to another in order to maintain the safety of all. It does not take rocket science aptitude to understand the causal connection and the dilution of resources. Those who fail to do so, do at the risk of greater national violence that becomes endemic.

You may say if I and my neighbors call someone a “nigger”, a “spick rapist”, how have I diminished any portion of the security arrangements in my community? I haven’t physically attacked that “nigger or spick”, and thus trigger a response from law enforcement. The answer is so obvious:–words have consequence, and words inflame actions, and words incite people to act. There are people in this country who take at face value the truth of statements made by our elected officials. One of them being the President of the United States.

As reported in the New York Times, in 1923, the president of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn, told an immigration conference that an unnamed European country was “making the United States a dumping ground for its undesirables.” His comments gained traction among a segment of the American population but fell on deaf years on the vast number of Americans who knew different and were proved correct by history. Forty-two years later in 1945, we were the strongest and most powerful nation in the world. The difference between 1923 and 2018 is the world has shrunk, arms of violence are larger and more powerful, bombs are smaller and more lethal and we have reinvented terrorism on a grander and deadlier scale. The spoken and written word travels further and faster and to more people instantly. When you call a nation a “shithole” that message is transmitted to the entire world within seconds. There are and will be consequences.

We need only look at “Germany, anti-Semitism is not just widespread: it is growing, particularly among the country’s hip youth” Abigail R. Esman. And she writes –“anti-Semitic attacks and regular calls for “death to Jews” have plagued Europe in recent months”. In the “Austrian capital, officials fined three pro-Israel activists last month for waving an Israeli flag near a pro-Palestinian demonstration”…” a man wielding a Palestinian flag smashed the windows of a kosher restaurant in Amsterdam.” And on New Year’s Eve, a man threw a rock at the window of the Amsterdam Chabad center. ” In an in-depth report for the Daily Beast, Josephine Huetlin describes the vast reach of German Jew-hate – from Muslim enclaves to far-right groups that support the up-and-coming political party, Alternatives fur Deutschland (AfD, Alternatives for Germany). “Indeed, AfD may signal the biggest threat going forward. According to Huetlin, AfD politicians believe that “the Central Council of Jews in Germany secretly controls the entire country.”

By surfing the net, you can read the comments of those that support the Trump rhetoric, and they do so without question. If you want to support those thoughts and comments that is fine, but to do so without question and without any objective analysis is dangerous. Not merely to oneself but to others. Democracy is dependent upon independent thinking not mass adherence or abidance by a master’s call. To do so is frightening, dangerous and un-American.

It is not politically correct to say: We do live in dangerous times. And we do, and to make these times less uncertain and more secure it is imperative that we have leaders that think before they speak and leave knee-jerk analysis in the waste-bin. But equally important, it is imperative that we, as individuals, “think” before we follow.

Richard Allan,
The Editor

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