RUTHFULLY YOURS

If President Trump called out each right-wing bigot that invaded Charlottesville, it would not be enough. Some obsessive Trump antagonist standing behind the arc of Klieg lights while holding a microphone would find that somehow, somewhere, he had left out something.

If there is anything we can agree on, say liberal pundits, it is that fascism is evil, and Trump should have rushed to condemn them after the vehicular assault on demonstrators.

James Fields, the alleged perpetrator of the vehicular assault in Charleston, is identified as a white nationalist but belonged to no group. Moreover, he seems to be mentally ill.

The Army discharged Fields after a few months in a manner that bespeaks mental problems — but let’s not raise that issue. It will prevent us from feeling sanctimonious about condemning the right.

We most certainly would not want to put Fields in the same category as Major Nidal Hassan, He committed that act of workplace violence at Fort Hood, slaughtering fellow soldiers while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

When former attorney general Eric Holder jumped into the discussion of the Charlottesville vehicular killing, calling it terrorism, he was summarily mocked for his contrasting depiction of Hassan as merely a perpetrator of workplace violence. The hypocrisy was palpable.

Of course, nearly everyone wants Trump to condemn only the right. Far be it for us to examine the politics of the left.

If we think of fascism as a system of authoritarian rule, the suppression of basic liberties, a belief system organized around hatred for the “other” and the inevitability and glory of war (or violence) as a solution to political problems, there were a lot of candidates for the label in the streets of Charlottesville. Some of them were most definitely from the left.

If we can all agree that fascists should be condemned, let’s not stop with the neo-Nazis and white nationalists, let’s demand that the President condemn all the fascists.

The American Jewish Committee has called on President Trump to condemn the far-right groups in Charlottesville. Let us disabuse them of the idea that only the far right is anti-Semitic. One thing nearly every one of the major groups in the street shared is their antipathy toward Jews.

Yet the AJC depicted the events in Charleston as a conflict between the voices of hate and those who chose to stop hate in its tracks. We wonder if the AJC bothers to read the news or just dreams up this material. Since when are Black Lives Matter and Antifa concerned about stopping hate, especially hatred against Jews?

While progressive Jews were being warriors for social justice and the causes of others, the far left and their Muslim allies were building intersectionality, whose very foundation is anti-Semitism. Intersectionality singles out the world’s only Jewish state as a source of oppression and the denial of human rights. Not only is the characterization mindless, but every Muslim state busy stoning gays and female rape victims is given a pass.

That’s why Jews and Jewish symbols were bluewashed from Chicago’s Dyke March and Jews were found to be of insufficient virtue to participate in the city’s Slut Walk.

Jews should have seen the signs. They were much earlier ostracized from Occupy Wall Street.

Black Lives Matter has embraced every anti-Semitic trope found in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. BLM’s anti-Semitic founding document could have been penned by Hamas.

BLM’s offshoot the Dreamer Defenders received the Potemkin Village tour of Jerusalem and came back spewing every asinine accusation about Israeli apartheid and oppression. It’s a wonder their tour guide provided by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (the people who created airline hijacking) did not show them pictures of Israelis drawing blood from Palestinian children to make matzos.

The Antifa thrives on violence and wreaks havoc wherever it gathers. Violence is its calling card, raising the question of whether the high on violence is as much a motivation for protesting as are the political issues. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who covered Charlottesville for the New York Times, spontaneously tweeted about Antifa’s violence and hate. Subsequently, she corrected her tweet. It obviously departed from the acceptable leftist narrative.

The chaos in Charlottesville is about two groups of fascists taunting each other in the public square and fighting it out.

Whether one is a greater threat to civilization than the other is a question for debate, but let us not indulge the silly fantasy of Charlottesville being a conflict between the forces of good and the forces of evil.

President Trump was correct in condemning all the violence in Charlottesville, and no matter what he did, there are those who would ineluctably find fault with his words.