WEST VIRGINIA DEMOCRATS are asking West Virginia Republicans to censure a GOP candidate for anti-Semitic remarks.
The request should be honored, but the Republicans also could ask the Democrats to censure the anti-Semitic Democrats who sit in the U.S. House.
GRANTED, WEST VIRGINIA is not Washington and it didn’t elect the likes of The Squad.
As a matter of fact, most West Virginians who even know what a Jew is, bear us no ill will.
According to the Jewish News Syndicate, June 17, 2020 / JNS - The West Virginia State Democratic Party is calling for the state’s GOP to condemn “anti-Semitic hate speech spread by Robert Karnes,” a Republican state senate candidate.
Karnes, a former West Virginia state senator, won the June 9 primary against incumbent Sen. John Pitsenbarger.
According to the Democratic Party in a Facebook post, Karnes, in a conversation with Mike Pushkin, a Democratic Jewish member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, “pushed a false conspiracy theory that George Soros made his fortune by ‘selling Jews to the Nazis.’ ”
Karnes said that since Pushkin is a Jew, like billionaire liberal activist Soros, Pushkin could “be like George.”
“This kind of hateful, anti-Semitic language has no place in West Virginia, and it certainly has no place in our state’s Capitol,” said West Virginia State Democratic Party chairwoman Belinda Biafore. “I hope chairwoman Melody Potter and the entire WV GOP will do the right thing, and denounce this awful rhetoric.”
Jews in Charleston
Charleston WV has two synagogues. A beautiful Reform synagogue looks over the Kanawah (ka-naw) River. The Conservadox congregation’s building lacks the beauty and view of the Reform building, but it never lacks for a minyan, daily and Shabat.
I lived there for the better part of a year and walked past the State House every Shabat to make minyan. No one looked twice at my red and blue Shabat kippa. In Charleston, Jews are “just people.”
I’m glad to read that some Democrats are speaking out against anti-Semitism. It would be good if they would purge their own houses first; maybe in West Virginia they have.
I hope the Republicans will act on the Democrats’ suggestion.
It’s a pity the anti-racist Democrats can’t get their Members of Congress to behave decently.
On the State House lawn
As I would walk to minyan on Shabat, I passed the State House.
There were, hopefully still are, three monuments.
From right-to-left as you face the front of the Capitol, with your back to the river, the rightmost monument is to a Union soldier. In the center is a statue of Lincoln. On Lincoln’s right is a monument to a Confederate soldier. (Farther down the street, tucked away and almost unnoticed, is a monument to Confederate soldiers who fought in the war; among the names belongs to a black man.)
Charleston is an interesting city, and West Virginia is an interesting state.
It seceded from Virginia to stay in the Union, yet young men and boys from what became West Virginia served in both the Union and Confederate armies. The war is long over, and for the most part, West Virginians honor the past by no longer fighting the war. It’s part of their history; they know it, but it IS history.
Charleston, of course, if not all of West Virginia as the GOP candidate’s anti-Semitic remark proves.
The West Virginia GOP would do well to distance itself from the anti-Semite.
PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.
Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. Defamation is a false statement of fact. If the statement was accurate, then by definition it wasn’t defamatory.
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