Public Comment

Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia have once again reared their ugly heads. Eleven Jewish community centers across the country received bomb threats. At a cemetery in University City, Missouri, more than a 100 Jewish gravesites were desecrated. Facing intense criticism President Trump finally broke his long silence and denounced anti-Semitic threats. But this came a week after he chastised a Jewish reporter, Jake Turx, for asking about the recent bomb threats at his news conference. In his usual nasty bullying style he heaped scorn on the reporter and the “dishonest media” and demanded the reporter sit down. 

During the press conference with Prime Minister, Netanyahu, Trump side-stepped a similar question posed by an Israeli reporter by heaping self-congratulatory praise on his “amazing election victory” raising increasing concerns about his rapidly declining mental faculty. 

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center the number of anti-Muslim groups in the US has tripled last year, from 34 in 2015 to 101 last year. Hate groups have received a huge boost by the candidacy and then election of Donald Trump who has been very adept at fanning the flames of racial disharmony and has now become “divider-in-chief”. 

Sadly, Trump has unleashed a kind of Pandora’s Box of hatred in our country. And those are not easy things to get back in the box. 

But in rare gesture of racial harmony a Muslim group went online to raise money to help the Jewish community restore the damaged tombstones.