Potok: “What leaders say
really matters …”
NEWBURGH – The recent term “alternate right” is just
another way of saying “white supremacy.” That was the message
of Mark Potok, an expert on the American radical right, who spoke to some
200 people at a Jewish Federation of Greater Orange County forum in Newburgh
on Sunday. (Click
here to listen to the presentation.)
Potok, formerly of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said historically black people were the targets of hate-mongers, but now they have turned their sights on Jews. He pointed to the recent demonstrations in Charlottesville in which white supremacists carried torches and chanted anti-Jewish slogans.
FBI statistics now reveal that Jews in America are 1.5 times more likely
to be the target of hate crimes than Muslims.
Those crimes began to increase early this year with the new administration in Washington, Potok said. He told the audience to learn the facts because if a lie is repeated often enough, people start to believe it.
“What leaders say really matters and directly translates, for instance, into criminal hate violence or the lack of it,” he said. “I need only point out that after Trump was elected, in the next two months we saw an incredible spurt of hate crimes directed, not only against Jews, but against Jews, black people, brown people, Muslims, women.”
Potok traced anti-Semitism all the way back to the Middle Ages where Jews were accused of creating the Bubonic Plague.
