On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Laura Coates Live,” Senior Rabbi of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles Steve Leder stated that “most people are better at virtue signaling than they are at behaving virtuously. And that’s what we’re experiencing and that our brothers and sisters with whom we marched after George Floyd, with whom we marched for women’s rights, for LGBTQ+ rights, we were marching on a one-way street for the most part.”
Leder stated, “The Palestinian people have been the doormat of the Middle East for a century, and they deserve better. They deserve better from their own leaders, they deserve better from their Arab brethren and other Arab nations, they deserve better from Israel, and they deserve better from us.”
He continued, “However, that admittedly complex, nuanced, difficult dynamic that needs to be addressed, has nothing, I repeat, nothing to do with what happened on October 7, 2023, that Hamas made the decision to murder…we have to bifurcate…because conflation is the enemy. When you start to conflate a clear act of murderous terrorism, with an admittedly complex and difficult issue, you begin to obscure the truth of the matter. So, the only way forward, I think, is the following: Can we all agree that what Hamas did was morally repugnant and wrong, and can we all see how they are trying to flip the script? And by that I mean, attack Israel and murder, force Israel to defend itself and respond, hide behind innocent Gazans — behind them and underneath them in tunnels, 300 miles of tunnels below the ground — and then use the death of those civilians to claim that you, the perpetrator, are the victim, and the real victim is now the victimizer. If we can at least agree that what Hamas did was wrong, morally repugnant, then we have a conversation that we can actually have. But if we conflate what happened on October 7 with the other complicated issues in the Middle East, we will make no progress, and it will be a race to the bottom, my tragedy is worse than your tragedy. We have got to stop conflating these two issues, that’s the only way I think we can address them, one at a time.”
Host Laura Coates then asked, “I just have to ask you this question, because I am a scholar of the Civil Rights movement. It was a calling of mine to be in the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice, and one of the things that was always so ingrained in my household growing up…is about [the fact] that, sometimes, the people who don’t look like you or believe what you do or have had your personal life or journey, can be and ought to be your staunchest defenders and champions, and you should be one for them as well. I wonder, what has been the experience of support you have gotten from communities where we are accustomed to having coalitions? Do you feel that there is support from other groups?”
Leder answered, “Some, but not anywhere near what I had hoped for. I’ll tell you what I said — I spoke to a bunch of Millennials and Gen Zers a couple of weeks ago, Laura, about this issue — and I said, the harsh reality that you are bumping up against is that most people are better at virtue signaling than they are at behaving virtuously. And that’s what we’re experiencing and that our brothers and sisters with whom we marched after George Floyd, with whom we marched for women’s rights, for LGBTQ+ rights, we were marching on a one-way street for the most part. Because they are not marching with us now. In fact, any feminist marching for Hamas is a feminist marching for rape, it’s inexplicable to me. And I don’t have a good answer for you, other than to say, sadly, that Jew-hatred is trumping, is subverting and subordinating the values they claim to stand for and live by. There’s a blindness that comes with groupthink, there’s a blindness that comes with Jew-hatred, and you end up subordinating all the values you say you stand for. And when your professed values and lived values are not the same, that makes you a hypocrite, full stop.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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