by Andrew Bernard
“These enemies of the Jewish people are not playing games,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said. “They mean to end our existence as a people. We will not allow that.”
A bipartisan group of House lawmakers gathered on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to call for the Senate confirmation of the Trump administration’s nominee to combat antisemitism and to condemn the attack on a Chanukah celebration in Sydney that left 15 innocent people dead.
Jewish and non-Jewish congress members joined leaders of American Jewish groups to call the rise of antisemitism around the world a threat to the religious liberty of all.
“Those of us who are of any faith—Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim—we have to see the attack on the Jewish community as an attack on all of us,” said Rep. George Latimer (D-N.Y.), who is Catholic.
“I’m going to take upon myself when I go back home to my own community, my district, to make sure that my friends who are not Jewish understand exactly why it is important for those of us that are Christian and of other faith traditions to stand by the Jewish community right now,” he said.
Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) organized Tuesday’s press conference, which Reps. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Lois Frankel (D-Fla.) and other members of the House attended.
William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and Ted Deutch, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, each recounted how warnings from Australian Jews had fallen on deaf ears in their government.
“In Western countries, particularly, it’s been an issue since Oct. 7, and having the prime minister and others not talk about antisemitism, not talking about Jew-hatred, not talking about Chanukah, but rather talking about gun control, is a diversion,” Daroff told JNS.
“It’s a diversion around the substance of this, which is that Jews are literally being hunted around the world, and our governments are not doing enough,” he said.
Sunday’s attack on Sydney has highlighted the lack of security in that city for a prominent and public Jewish event, with the leader of New South Wales revealing that only three police officers were patrolling the park where more than 1,000 Jews gathered for the first night of Chanukah.
Deutch told JNS that concerns about a lack of security for Jews in Australia extend beyond Sydney.
“In Melbourne, the failure to act to protect the Jewish community has meant that on every Sunday, when there is an anti-Israel protest, and which when we were there was joined by the antisemites on the far right as well—it was a real witch’s brew—that every Sunday the Jewish community felt so unsafe that they would not go into the downtown of their own city,” Deutch said.
“It was a no-go zone,” he said. “I don’t want to ever get to the point where any city in America feels like it’s a no-go zone for Jews.”
In his remarks to the press, Deutch listed some of the measures that the bipartisan group of lawmakers agrees are necessary to combat Jew-hatred.
Those include asking the Senate to confirm Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun as the Trump administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, the attendance of lawmakers at Jewish events and an investigation into the foreign sources of antisemitism.
“We know that previous antisemitic attacks in Australia were supported and coordinated by the Iranian regime,” Deutch said. “This attack perpetrated by homegrown, violent extremists was reportedly inspired by ISIS.”
“In the United States and with our allies, we’ve got to take concrete steps to strengthen our intelligence and counterterrorism cooperation, to protect our communities, to preserve democratic stability and to prevent massacres like the one that happened in Bondi Beach,” he said.
Wasserman Schultz said she hoped the tragedy in Australia could be a “wake-up call.”
“This is not pretend. These enemies of the Jewish people are not playing games,” she said. “They mean to end our existence as a people. We will not allow that.”
Andrew Bernard
Source: https://www.jns.org/bipartisan-reps-call-for-confirmation-of-jew-hatred-envoy-after-bondi-attack/
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