Ritchie Torres

We need a Ritchie Torres in Canada. He is a Democratic congressman who is decidedly not silly and is a shining star on the issue of Israel and antisemitism. Part of his recent op-ed (yesterday):

Something is rotten in the state of America. When the institutional leaders in our country cannot condemn the cold-blooded murder of Israeli children and civilians with moral clarity, one must ask: what kind of society are we becoming?  

What does the silence and indifference and cowardice — from these so-called leaders — tell us about the depth of anti-Semitism in America and the reckoning required? 

The time has come to confront not only the symptoms but the disease: a Democratic Socialist industrial complex that indoctrinates young Americans with an anti-Israel hatred so virulent that it renders them indifferent to the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.  

Anti-Israel extremism, which has been given a veneer of mainstream respectability in law schools and legislatures, is aided and abetted by the sheer spinelessness of so-called “leaders”— from public officials to the presidents of colleges and universities.

Days of silence were often followed by words of cowardice, if there were any words at all. 

Northwestern University, for example, said it had no plans to “put out a statement officially stating a University position.” Imagine that: a university that cannot be bothered to take a position on a pogrom against Jews.  Have we learned nothing from the long and ugly history of Anti-Semitism? 

There is nothing accidental about the disregard for Israeli life that revealed itself in the wake of Oct. 7.  The dehumanization of Israeli victims follows inevitably from the hyperbolic and systematic demonization of Israel itself. 

And the same rot exists in Canada. Read the whole column.