Event
helps crash wave of hate
By Jill Thomsen
On-line Forty-Niner
Four
days after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New
Year, citizens, lawmakers, rabbis and scholars
filled the Alpert Jewish Community Center
on Sept. 11. The goal was to examine the
effects of global terrorism and the phenomena
of rising global anti-semitism and local
hate crimes.
“Breaking
the Wave of Hate,” sponsored by the Anti-Defamation
League as well as the Long Beach and Orange
County Jewish Federations, attracted a roomful
of standing people who were subject to tight
security measures that included baggage
searches and security clearance tags. Long
Beach resident Joe Shapiro decided to attend
because he said he feels “it’s important,
especially after Sept. 11, to join together
as a community. Not just as Americans or
as Jews, but as people.”
Rather
than focusing on Sept. 11 specifically,
the organizers, participants, and audience
members viewed the anniversary of the attacks
as an opportunity for “beginning to look,
again, at the ramifications of hate and
what it can do” said Joyce Greenspan, regional
director of the ADL.
Gregory
Games of Norwalk said “Sept. 11 was a wake
up call to Americans, but this is the same
thing that has been going on in Israel on
a weekly and daily basis for years and Americans
are completely unaware of it.”
While
remembering the heroes of Sept. 11 and honoring
local Long Beach Police Chief Jerome Lance
and Costa Mesa Chief David Snowden, the
event carried an underlying message of tikum
olam, the Hebrew term for “repairing the
world.”
In
a powerful panel discussion, moderated by
Assemblymember Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach,
three experts offered statements on the
ramifications of Sept. 11.
Sabi
Shabtai, a terrorism expert who has worked
with the FBI and CIA, noted that after the
1993 World Trade Center attacks, “we went
back to sleep.” Despite the various embassy
bombings, Americans felt “that was all ‘over
there.’ We did not want to see.” With
regards to Sept. 11 Shabtai posed the question:
“Did we learn the lesson? Or are we
going back to sleep?”
Judge
Bruce Einhorn argued “that the criminal
outrages which occurred on Sept. 11 have
in fact emboldened anti-semitic bigotry.”
He observed that “terrorist forces do not
seek to compromise or weaken us, but to
destroy us.”
Sept.
11 is “the worst hate crime that I can imagine,”
said Orange County Deputy District Attorney
Michael Fell, who was in charge of handling
all hate crime cases within the county.
“Because that is what that was.”
The
uniformed security presence at the center
also brought the issue of hate crimes to
the forefront of people’s minds, including
Todd Spitzer, Orange County supervisor.
“We’re
all wearing yellow tags. I’m really uncomfortable,”
he said. “We can’t live like this. We can’t
live where we go into a building and we
have to show our ID, and we’re subject to
search and seizure and we have concrete
barriers and where the police are present
in the parking lot. … It’s always in some
other part of city, in some other nation.
It is here.”
Audience
member Deborah Pyetzki felt the event was
“fantastic” and said Shabtai’s discussion
regarding global terrorism was especially
effective as “a lot of times we focus on
what’s going on at home. We don’t
really pay attention to what’s going on
in the rest of the world.”
Shabtai
left the gathering with these thoughts:
“Israel is the bellwether. If Israel
goes, then everything else will go as well.”
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