PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — In defense of Colin Kaepernick, I made the supreme sacrifice four years ago: A one-time high school chum de-friended me on Facebook. He could not believe how liberal I had become – all because I insisted that football players like Kaepernick had a constitutional right to kneel during a pre-game playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Now Kaepernick – and by extension myself – has been vindicated. Taking a knee is such a fad that even police chiefs are doing it.
In northeastern Iowa, voters sent Republican Rep. Steve King a seven-month pink slip, limiting his time to voice his bigoted attitudes from his office on Capitol Hill; the Supreme Court on Monday outlawed job discrimination against gays; and white America has been shocked – SHOCKED!!!! – to discover that racism pervades society.
“What it tells us is there is hope,” said Gerald Bostock during an MSNBC interview, referring to his lawsuit stemming from his offense of being a homosexual.
Bostock could well have been addressing all these developments. It took long enough – nearly 401 years in the case of racism – for these events to come about. They can make us believe again that more positive steps to reduce bigotry are possible, in this case anti-Semitism. Which brings us to Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. For 1 1/2 years, some American Jews felt betrayed by Democrats for allowing them to take advantage of their positions to bash Israel.
They are right. The Democratic leadership should have led the way in censuring them and sending them into a corner to minimize the harm they can cause.
It is easy to guess what Democrats are up to. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must despise this pair. She has been enamored of Israel since she was a child by virtue of her father’s friendship with a Jewish judge and his wife; both her father and brother served as mayors of Baltimore. From what I have read, Pelosi might have set a record as a frequent bar and bat mitzvah guest.
Why would Pelosi want to help Omar and Tlaib? Doubtful that she wanted to, but she needed to for political reasons. She needed their votes in Congress and sought to hold onto Democratic voters who lean more toward Omar/Tlaib ideologies than that of Pelosi
Her reasons would certainly be poor ones, but they are understandable. I wonder if she and other Democrats went so far as to recruit a candidate to challenge either Omar or Tlaib in their respective primaries, the most practical opportunity to oust them.
Omar’s primary in Minneapolis will be the most optimistic occasion. A very strong rival is attorney Antone Melton-Meaux whose background suggests he is an intelligent and inclusive person, not to mention sane. He advocates an evenhanded approach toward the Middle East to help both Israel and the Palestinians, as opposed to Omar’s one-sided attitude.
Like Omar, he is black. It suggests that the Democratic establishment could have sought him out partly because his race would attract votes that might otherwise go to Omar. However, that is in addition to Melton-Meaux being a highly qualified candidate.
The dynamics of Tlaib’s primary was more pre-ordained. Her main rival in the primary is Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones, who narrowly lost to Tlaib in the 2018 primary. Trouble is, Jones is a follower of the anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan.
The other recent events offered me hope for Melton-Meaux’s chances in August. After all, Kaepernick became a pariah in 2016 when he kneeled as the National Anthem was played. No major league team would allow him to touch a football. They feared that fans would boycott games if Kaepernick took the field.
Now that White people have discovered that police brutality is real, National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell jumped on the bandwagon, saying that the kneeling protests created a “false perception among many that thousands of NFL players were unpatriotic,” according to The Washington Post.
Just what constitutes patriotism?
While Kaepernick’s star is rising, Steve King’s days as a congressman are numbered. He lost the June 2 Republican primary to be renominated after nearly 18 years in office.
He once said that illegal immigrants have “calves the size of cantaloupes” from hauling drugs, he associated with far-right political figures with historical Nazi ties and he defended White supremacy, the Post reported.
On Monday, the Gay community won perhaps its most valuable victory when the Supreme Court ruled that homosexuals cannot be fired for their sexual orientation. The jurists determined that terminating one’s employment because of sexual orientation violates the sex discrimination clause of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In a nation where Jews, Blacks, women and so forth are safe from dismissal for who they are, Gays have always been vulnerable to losing their jobs for being gay. No longer after Monday’s decision.
In the last three weeks, the vast majority of White Americans have come to recognize how widely the Black community has endured racism for the last 401 years. It took the video of George Floyd’s death in a police officer’s custody to wake up America.
It makes me wonder if my former Facebook friend will take me back. Maybe I should not care if he does. Then again, why do I need him?
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Bruce S. Ticker is a freelance political commentator based in Philadelphia. He may be contacted via bruce.ticker@sdjewishworld.com
White America fought Hitler who saw blacks as an inferior race. Without White America Barack Obama would not be elected. Bruce Ticker does not speak for me.
Omar is a valuable Dem candidate, anti-Israel and one-sided. Tlaib is the same, but she might be replaced by an even more radical Farrakhan follower, who is an anti-semite. Pelosi’s choices are understandable – she likes attending Jewish events, but, you know, party interests do prevail. It is all good to know but I have questions:
How does this article help to protect synagogues and Jewish schools vandalised during recent riots in California and elsewhere? How does it help afro-american, hispanic, asian, muslim, armenian and other people who lost their businesses to the mob? How does it help hundreds of decent and hardworking police officers who had lost their jobs due to police defunding? I challenge Mr. Ticker to name a single Dem leader who rejected wide spread destruction and loss of lives. Party affiliation dictates silence. Keep voting for anti-semites.