Drip by drip by drip is how anti-Jewish sentiment can drown out acceptance and tolerance of the people who, by faith or birth, are Jews. The New Hampshire House needs a plumber as soon as possible to set an example for how we handle bigotry and antisemitic hurtful words because eventually they lead to action against Jews.
Last month, State Rep. Travis Corcoran of Weare went after a fellow representative from Manchester who is Jewish. Rep. Jessica Gill posted about an upcoming Karaoke Caucus Meeting and Corcoran responded on X that “we need a final solution for theater kids in politics.”
The words were meant to hurt because the reason the Nazis built Auschwitz, Dachau and the other death camps was to create a “final solution” by killing every Jew in Europe.
Today, the world’s 16 million Jews are vastly outnumbered by 2.5 billion Christians, 2 billion Muslims and billions of Hindus, Buddhists and nonbelievers. The animus toward those who are Jewish has been reflected in the recent massacre of 15 Jews at Bondi Beach in Australia, the truck attack on a Michigan synagogue on March 13 and the list goes on and on around the world. Just last month:
- British police said they were investigating a possible hate crime after spectators at a school football match in the U.K. shouted “Go Back to the Gas Chambers” at students from the visiting London Jewish Free School.
- Four Jewish charity ambulances were firebombed in north London.
- Three synagogues in Toronto were hit by gunfire within days of each other.
- Four people were arrested after an arson attack damaged a synagogue in Rotterdam.
- A Jewish school was attacked in Amsterdam.
- Two Jewish men overheard speaking Hebrew were beaten outside a restaurant in San Jose, Calif., by men shouting “Don’t mess with Iran.”
For many Jews, especially in Europe, it feels like the 1930s all over again.
Radical Islamic beliefs and anti-Jewish sentiment on the far left and far right in the U.S. have majorly contributed to the hostility Jewish people face today, according to Deborah Lipstadt, professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta.
“I have never seen in my lifetime a period when antisemitism has been expressed so overtly by both the right and the left,” Lipstadt told The Wall Street Journal. “They agree on nothing else. Only on Jew-hatred.”
In light of this 1930s atmosphere, those of us who are Christians need to renew our tradition and religious commitment to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. The good people of Weare need to do a deep dive on Rep. Corcoran who is not new to racist and hateful comments. In 2023, he urged people to renew use of the “n-word” as a form of protest and in 2011 he defended the attempted assassination of congresswoman Gabby Gifford in Arizona.
Deputy Speaker of the New Hampshire House Steve Smith showed his Profile in Cowardice when he said of the final solution posting “we can condemn it, but there is nothing we can do about it.“ Really? How about a vote of expulsion or, at the very least, censure that would reflect our values of tolerance for other believers as called for in our State Constitution in Part I, Article 5.
Silence and inaction is to condone. Another drip gets added to the cesspool of antisemitism.
Chuck Douglas is a former State Supreme Court judge who lives in Hopkinton.