— Feature, Musings —11.30.2023 12:31 PM
My latest: first they come for the Jews
A Christmas tree.
A Christmas tree lighting get-together, to be precise.
They’ve been doing the Christmas tree celebration in Rockefeller Center, in Midtown Manhattan, for a long time. The first time they did it was in 1931, during the Great Depression. A Norway Spruce, often from upstate New York. They truck it in.
Some Italian-American workers did it first. They put up the first tree, a smaller one, and then they decorated it with “strings of cranberries, garlands of paper, and even a few tin cans.” A couple years later, they brought in an even bigger tree – 50 feet high – and set up a skating rink at its base, and it became a yearly thing.
Regular people, workers and union folks, would pull their money together to get the tree. Then they would decorate it together.
Why light the Christmas tree? Goes back Centuries, really, to when they used candles, and not electrical lights. It means Christ is a light to the world, basically. That’s it.
Since the Fifties, the lighting of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center has been broadcast live on TV. As many as 150 million people watch it happen.
They bring in big stars to perform for the tree lighting. Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, Dolly Parton, and (of course) Mariah Carey. It’s not political. No one gives jingoistic speeches. It’s just a nice little party, one that makes people happy. In a world of unrelenting pain and misery and horror, it’s a nice thing.
It shouldn’t be necessary, here, to point out that the lighting of a Christmas tree isn’t an occasion to provoke a riot. Or that the rest of us don’t regard it as an opportunity to start street fights and scream obscenities while little kids look on. In particular, we wouldn’t treat it like a night to promote hate.
But you and me, we aren’t part of Team Hamas. We don’t shoot up schools, or firebomb synagogues, or block highways, or put up hate graffiti, or target businesses simply because they’re owned by Jews. We don’t do that. Normal people don’t do that.
The Team Hamas does, and did. And, on Wednesday night, they were at it again.
A mob descended on the Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Rockefeller Center. They claimed to be “pro-Palestine,” but all of us know, by now, that they are really anti-Jewish-State. Anti-Jew, to be precise.
Hundreds of them descended on Rockefeller Square on Wednesday night. They fought with police, they screamed genocidal slogans. Some of them even held up signs with big swastikas on them. They called the police “f**king Nazis.” They tried to break down barricades separating them from families who had come to see the tree lighting.
One cop said it was “total chaos.” And it was.
But it was also revealing. It told us something we should think about.
Since October 7, when Palestinian Hamas terrorists killed hundreds of Israelis, and kidnapped dozens more, it’s been obvious that the “pro-Palestine” protesters really, really hate Jews and the Jewish state. It’s been obvious that many, if not most, of them are wildly anti-Semitic.
But here’s the thing: a Christmas tree lighting ceremony isn’t for Jews, is it? It isn’t about the Jewish faith. It’s for, and about, Christianity.
You know that old saying, the one that suggests how progroms start with the Jews, but never end with the Jews? It’s true.
And we’re now seeing it happen, in real time.
Warren,
If this wasn’t so serious, I would resort to calling it a joke. Crown Prosecutors here and District Attorneys there, need to crack down but hard. Charge those violent fuckers with the maximum and make it the hell stick just like glue! Enough is God-damned enough.
Strangely enough, the CBC didn’t mention this on the news this morning. Only talked about Cher.
If it wasn’t for double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.
This just moves fence sitters to supporting Israel. If they want the West to permanently give up on Palestine, they should keep it up with this bullshit.
Warren,
From Michael Geist:
Pablo Rodriguez Failed For Weeks to Say Anything About Funding for an Anti-Semite and Then Lied About What He Knew. He Should Resign.
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/11/resign/
Good God, this ain’t good. Rodriguez is in serious trouble now.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m slightly acquainted with the Minister.
A Trudeau Liberal resign because they lied?
What an extraordinary concept.
I suspect Hamas has a death wish. Mr. Netanyahu and co. will make it so.
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/hamas-claims-responsibility-for-deadly-jerusalem-bus-stop-shooting/ar-AA1kM14I?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=SCOOBE&cvid=d23f5f6a95f64606aee59c7c5e4e4af0&ei=37
This is getting out of hand. IMHO there needs to be a firm response. If these assholes want a fight, give it to them. And make sure they lose.
Articles demanding absolutist views, such as this one, are key to providing precisely the “win” Hamas is looking for – and that’s what truly terrifies me. Because if we adopt the mentality that the British Home Secretary has espoused – that any pro-Palestine display be treated in of itself as a hate crime- the splitting and radicalism is going to get so much worse.
Hamas know damned well that tens of thousands of their own are going to be massacred in military operations. They don’t care about that. What they DO care about, is seeing more and more people picking a side and enforcing it. The pro-Palestinian side, for obvious reasons. The pro-Netanyahu side (I’m not going to dignify his rule by pretending the people of Israel are thrilled by carpet-bombing), because the carnage being wrought in Gaza is heart wrenching and generating Palestinian sympathy by the day – allowing the true anti-semites to further blend in under cover of humanitarian sympathizers, and causing exponentially more radicalism among people who started as simple humanitarians.
The war of eradication against Hamas is going to work every bit as well as any other war against a fanatical movement. A lot of death, some lulls in violence, followed by mass recruitment and redux of terror.
Again – I don’t have the answers. But prove me wrong.
This doesn’t end well for anyone.
Who started it?
EHWAL,
CORRECTION: Who enthusiastically went out of their way to start it and go on a civilian killing spree? Definitely not the IDF.
Who decided that one good massacre begets another, much more extensive massacre? Definitely not the Gazans.
Jason,
The Gazans are pawns in this. They could not prevent the Hamas takeover in 2007 and are now and have always been powerless to remove Hamas.
And the other point is, when Hamas was voted in, Gazans knew who they were and what they represented. If Hamas changed between then and now, it certainly wasn’t for the better from a co-existence and peace perspective.
Not relevant anymore, I’m afraid. The October 7 massacre was appalling, to say the least. Yet here we are, approaching 20x that number of civilian fatalities caused by the campaign of retribution, with the IDF and Israeli government showing a complete lack of regard for civilian life in Gaza.
“Blame Hamas,” they like to say. And I do. I’d like to see them wiped out. But if that act comes at the cost of millions of innocent lives – which, it appears it will, once all the wartime displacement and starvation is accounted for – it is not worth it, and to pretend it is makes us no better than al-Qaeda.
Jason,
The Americans are doing what they can to hopefully mitigate civilian casualties but Israel is running the show militarily. Your points are both relevant and accurate but this is a literal war for survival. Whether one completely agrees or not with IDF strategy on the ground, the world is powerless to change it. Even the United States can’t and won’t dictate militarily to the Israelis. The IDF won’t stop or rest until Hamas is at least decimated, if not destroyed.
Warren,
It galls me in the extreme that Hamas is masterfully playing their four HostageAces. The humanitarian pause is now a defacto retaliatory weapon, given that IDF operations are once again underway. What will the terrorists do to the hostages if a new humanitarian pause does not come into effect over the medium term? I shudder to think.