Anti-Israel sentiment in the U.S. "is a demon that must be exorcised from our body politic," Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., wrote Sunday.
Torres, in a New York Post Sunday opinion column eight days after terrorists first attacked and massacred civilians in southern Israel, addressed pro-Hamas comments and demonstrations seen in the U.S. during the past week.
"Something is rotten in the state of America," Torres wrote. "When the institutional leaders in our country cannot condemn the cold-blooded murder of Israeli children and civilians with moral clarity, one must ask, What kind of society are we becoming?
"What does the silence and indifference and cowardice — from these so-called leaders — tell us about the depth of anti-Semitism in America and the reckoning required?"
Pro-Hamas demonstrations have been seen in cities and on college campuses across America. One such rally was organized by the New York City-Democratic Socialists of America, which romanticized the terrorism of Hamas as "resistance."
"Imagine, for a moment, the inconsolable grief of a Jewish mother whose baby has been butchered to death. Could you imagine anything more callous and cruel than telling that grieving mother: You had it coming. You and your people brought the terror upon yourselves," Torres wrote in Sunday’s column.
Socialist policies seen at colleges and in politics have contributed to the anti-Israel "hate and hysteria."
"[They] have been allowed to fester freely in academia, social media, the political arena, and elsewhere," Torres wrote. "It has been propagated by Astroturf activists and academics, amplified by their enablers in elected office, and subsidized by government and civil society."
The congressman, an openly LGBTQ person from the Bronx, said the "time has come to confront not only the symptoms but the disease: a Democratic Socialist industrial complex that indoctrinates young Americans with an anti-Israel hatred so virulent that it renders them indifferent to the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust."
"Anti-Israel extremism, which has been given a veneer of mainstream respectability in law schools and legislatures, is aided and abetted by the sheer spinelessness of so-called 'leaders'— from public officials to the presidents of colleges and universities," he wrote in the Post.
"Days of silence were often followed by words of cowardice, if there were any words at all."
Torres added that "America cannot long remain a decent society if the next generation of Americans are made to be indifferent to the barbaric butchering of Israeli civilians and children."
"I, for one, stand with Israel as it seeks to defend itself," he wrote. "Despite the profound pain of the present, Israel will emerge from it all better and stronger than ever before."
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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