RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bigotry has no bounds. We hear that rioters in Ferguson, USA have found the enemy and it is…the Jews!

Yes the Jews.

Name your “Palestinians” who risked their lives for Civil Rights.
Protesters have been marching with signs equating the “suffering” of blacks with the “suffering” of “Palestinians.”

How Israel got into the picture, six thousand miles away, nobody knows. Reggie Bush ought to know. The football star was up there with the rest of them denouncing the police and while he was at it, denouncing Israel. Maybe someone ought to inform this millionaire athlete that, going back to the 1960s, Jews were front and center for the Civil Rights movement.

They marched with Martin Luther King Jr. The first name (among many) that comes to mind is Rabbi Abraham Heschel.

Many risked their lives and some even lost their lives for the sake of equality. Two (among many) come to mind. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

These Jewish Civil Rights activists were murdered by the KKK near Philadelphia, Mississippi for their participation in the Freedom Summer of 1964.

This is the thanks for all that sacrifice– and please, Reggie, name your “Palestinians” who risked their lives for Civil Rights.

Likewise, I also marched so that Blacks can share with Whites equality and harmony. I expected no gratitude. I did it in the name of justice. I would do it again.

But right now I feel like a sucker.

I continue to believe (with Micah the prophet) that each person ought to have the right to sit under his vine and fig tree – and none shall make us afraid.

But still I feel hoodwinked, sucker-punched and duped.

I just said, no gratitude expected — but scorn, contempt, derision and backstabbing, this I did not expect.

Fortunately we can count on the silent majority of African Americans who know that we are brothers. They have no time for prejudice.

So I know that, and being a Child of the 1960s I was part of an idealistic generation that believed “we shall overcome” – and we did. To a large extent we did overcome. We succeeded. But only to find one set of prejudices shifted and parlayed onto another set of prejudices, the onus placed squarely and with a vengeance upon the usual suspects. (The 1960s recaptured here.)

I cannot help but find myself depressed and disillusioned. Apparently people will always need someone else to accuse, however false or baseless the accusation.

Attacks against Israel on charges of racism, from the likes of Reggie Bush, Alice Walker et al, are particularly obnoxious considering the risky airlift named Operation Moses, which rescued some 8,000 Ethiopian Jews from Sudan. They were brought to Israel in 1984 to join a small Family that is big enough for everybody.

Israel is by far the most inclusive society in the entire region.

But the facts, the truth will never stop the hucksters and the multitudes that heed them. False prophets are playing with our world.

Into the teeth of all that promise of the 1960s, in some ways we are worse off than ever before. My generation’s Martin Luther King is this generation’s Al Sharpton. The world’s biggest liar, a punk named Mahmoud Abbas, is greeted around the world as if he were Winston Churchill. Shakedown artists seem to have the final word.

Banners demanding Boycott have replaced yesteryear’s banners entreating Love.

The music never died, but so many high hopes have been dashed and somewhere Martin Luther King’s Dream remains a pipe dream.

Sorry. I started writing about Bill Cosby and his troubles with women. Maybe later about Cosby as a symbol of the 1960s come undone.

Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. New from the novelist, the acclaimed anti-BDS thriller Compulsive. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller Indecent Proposal that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. Website: www.jackengelhard.com