US' claim to represent pluralist values hollow!

As per a New York Police Dept report, 60% of hate crimes that occurred in November 2022 were against Jewish New Yorkers.

According to a report of the New York Police Department itself, it recorded 45 anti-Semitic hate crimes in November 2022 alone. Jewish New Yorkers were the most targeted group in the region, accounting for 60 per cent of all hate crimes that occurred in the month.

Observers say the incidents of anti-Semitism show how hollow the United States government's claim to represent the finest pluralist values in the contemporary world is. The prevalence of anti-Semitism in the United States blasts an age-old propaganda that Jews command a great influence in the United States. The fact is they have continued to suffer on account of anti-Semitism in the country.

In April this year, there were more anti-Semitic incidents in New York than in any other state in the country. On October 24, three yeshiva students were walking home in the Midwood section of Brooklyn when a gang of eleven students approached them, punched one of the three and hurled eggs at the others. The gang ordered them to say "Free Palestine" during the attack.

The successive governments in the United States have seldom cared for Jews or the causes dear to them. Way back in 1924, Congress passed a system of immigration restriction that reduced Jewish immigration to the US by about 90 per cent. President Franklin D Roosevelt's administration did not take strong action to protect Jews in Adolf Hitler's Germany. In 1944, Jewish leaders begged the American government to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz. The administration rejected the prayer.

US Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F Kennedy preferred a strong relationship with Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser to close relations with the Jewish state of Israel. Under Eisenhower, the US sided with Egypt against Israel during the 1956 Suez crisis. Kennedy focused his diplomatic efforts in an attempt to derail Israel's drive for nuclear weapons.

A close US-Israel alignment began only after the legendary Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made peace with the Jewish state of Israel. The US-Israel relationship deepened after the fall of the Shah in Iran in 1979. It deepened further after the 9/11 attacks when Israeli intelligence significantly assisted American counter-terror efforts around the world.

Ironically, many influential American Jews have not been sympathetic to the Jewish cause. The New York Times, one of the most famous newspapers of the United States, had been a pro-Zionist newspaper under non-Jewish ownership. It became anti-Zionist after it was bought by a Jewish publisher in 1896.

Henry Morgenthau, President Woodrow Wilson's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, happened to be one of the most influential Jewish political leaders of the era. He opposed the British government's Balfour Declaration and the Lodge-Fish Resolution that endorsed it.

(Jagdish N. Singh is a senior journalist based in New Delhi. He is also Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, New York)

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