Very fine people
by digby
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| Charlottesville, 2017 |
I’m sure this is nothing to worry about …
Antisemitic incidents in the US surged 57% in 2017, the Anti-Defamation League said on Tuesday, the largest year-on-year increase since the Jewish civil rights group began collecting data in 1979.
Close to 2,000 cases of harassment, vandalism and physical assault were recorded, the highest number of antisemitic incidents since 1994, it said.
The rise comes amid a climate of rising incivility, the emboldening of hate groups and widening divisions in American society, according to ADL’s national director, Jonathan Greenblatt.
“A confluence of events in 2017 led to a surge in attacks on our community – from bomb threats, cemetery desecrations, white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, and children harassing children at school,” he said.
Rising numbers were in part attributed to the fact that more people were reporting incidents than ever before, the ADL said, adding that its staff independently verify the credibility of each claim.
Incidents were reported in all 50 US states for the first time since 2010, with higher numbers reported in areas with large Jewish populations.
Donald Trump’s administration has been accused of failing to condemn religious bigotry. Jewish groups scolded the president last year for not mentioning Jews or antisemitism in a statement about the Holocaust.
Following August violence at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists waved insignia from Nazi Germany and yelled “Jews will not replace us”, Trump was slammed for suggesting a moral equivalency between members of the far right and counterdemonstrators. “You had people that were very fine people on both sides,” he said.
Some of Trump’s best family members are Jewish so he can’t possibly be an anti-Semite, amirite?
Maybe he’s just a standard issue dumb bigot who is so clueless that he thinks he can make distinctions between the “good ones” and the “bad ones” but there are not good Nazis.
This is of a piece with the ethnic nationalism that’s growing all over the world and the fact that it’s happening in the US is truly disturbing since this country has always taken pride in the fact that it is an immigrant nation. Now we have this:
The U.S. is no longer devoted to securing “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants.”
That’s according to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) anyway, which changed its official mission statement late Thursday and dropped the language to describe the country.
The federal agency that grants visas and U.S. citizenship now refers to itself as an organization that “administers the nation’s lawful immigration system.” The new mission statement also eliminates the word “customers” to refer to visa applicants.
In a letter to employees, L. Francis Cissna, USCIS’s director, said the changes were a “straightforward statement (that) clearly defines the agency’s role in our country’s lawful immigration system and the commitment we have to the American people.”
It’s clear all right. Is it Nazi? No. But it’s definitely a reflection of this new right wing ethnic nationalism. And that leads nowhere decent people want to go.