Is nothing sacred?
Well, yes — even in these often irreligious days, places of worship are sacred. You don’t have to be an adherent of a particular faith to be quiet and respectful when visiting a church, to follow the protocol when entering a mosque, to go by the rules inside — or outside — of a temple. It doesn’t take much effort. It’s the least that you can do. If you can’t do it, then please stay home.
And yet, some young protesters in the current and seemingly endless fray over the war in Gaza conflate the current Israeli government with the ancient faith of Judaism, and in so doing take their politics very much into the realm of sheer, shameful antisemitism.
That’s what happened Sunday at the Adas Torah synagogue in Los Angeles’s very Jewish Pico-Robertson neighborhood when pro-Palestinian demonstrators who said they were protesting an event there that they believed promoted the sale of stolen Palestinian land provoked fights with synagogue members and supporters of Israel.
Americans have the right to protest — protest whatever they like. They do not have anything like the moral or ethical high ground when they, as Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in the aftermath, to “cast a shadow of fear” in “the heart of one of our Jewish communities” as well as “regionally and nationally.”
“Yesterday was abhorrent, and blocking access to a place of worship is absolutely unacceptable,” Bass said at a news conference after the horrific event. “This violence was designed to stoke fear. It was designed to divide. But hear me loud and clear: It will fail.”
Such an obnoxious occurrence at a place of worship is bound to create an over-the-top reaction, and one of those reactionary responses is the call by many to ban the covering of faces — many of the pro-Palestinian protesters wore masks — at public demonstrations.
The idea of such a ban is pure hokum, civil-liberties wise, and probably unenforceable. At the same time, the call for it is sadly understandable. The very idea that the mask-wearers are doing so, whether with a keffiyeh or an N95, out of fear of COVID infection is absurd. They’re hiding their faces for other reasons.
The synagogue-attackers should be masking up out of shame.