Tobin Overlooked the Real Enemy
The opinion piece by Jonathan Tobin (“Should Everyone Be Afraid of Elon Musk Buying Twitter?”, May 4) is a remarkable piece of sophistry.
He eludes to the notion of online hate speech being of concern, but that’s not what troubles him the most. He describes the censoring of Nazis (which is not the decision to refuse to publish their poison) as a slippery slope to something worse. That is, the censoring of speech of anyone we disagree with. He accuses the Anti-Defamation League and others with threatening democracy.
And yes, for sure, there are real, serious, concerns about “cancel culture” as practiced by the far left. I will acknowledge that antisemitic attacks, particularly it seems in New York City, do not appear to be coming from the right. The liberal left needs to address it.
However, anyone with their eyes open, anyone who is honest, knows that the main political threat to our democracy and peace is emanating from another source.
Online purveyors of racist, antisemitic hate speech consisting of the ideology of “replacement ideology” and other choice philosophies, fellow travelers in the Republican Party, et cetera, are the threat in our faces right now. There have been, in recent years, examples of the violent consequences of this online poison, most recently, the massacre in Buffalo.
Edward Moses, Philadelphia
BDS a Definite Campus Threat
Thank you for publishing Richard L. Cravatts’ opinion piece (“An Open Letter to the Editorial Board of The Harvard Crimson,” May 5). Finally, a journalist willing to confront and combat the lies spread on our college campuses.
I’d love a list of those schools, colleges and corporations that have caved in to supporting BDS. We need to rethink where our financial contributions are going and eliminate our support from those that further these lies. JE
Ronna Newman Rutstein, Delray Beach, Florida
Mr. Moses you’re looking at the threats Jews are facing through a tunnel with only fascists and racists in your view. You mention the racist who killed those innocent blacks and I agree with your disgust of that act. But you leave out the massacre in Wisconsin, and the shooting on a New York City subway, both acts perpetrated by “Black Supremacists”, who are equally repulsive to anyone with a conscience, You also ignore the recent resolution by radical leftists in the Democratic party demanding official American recognition of
the “Nakba”, that’s what anti-Semitic Muslims call their failure to wipe out the Jewish population in pre-Israel Palestine in 1948. That resolution demands the right of Palestinian return to the Jewish state, which would result in nothing less than it’s destruction. Here are the co-sponsors of that resolution: AOC, Ilhan Omar, Betty McCollum, Marie Newman, Jamal Bowman, and Cori Bush, all anti-Semites. My distaste for the far-right rivals yours but they don’t represent a growing and powerful segment of the Republican party as these reps and their allies represent in the Democratic party. That’s why Tobin and I are extremely troubled by this growing influence and the threat to Jews that they represent. Sadly Tobin’s warning hasn’t affected the focus of too many Jews, and they ignore the left as they magnify and concentrate on the threat from the right.