A public servant publicly reveals her ignorance
It was well-timed and probably planned, but it was shockingly ill-conceived, and that’s an understatement.
“It” was a speech by Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, at the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus’s annual “Summer Simcha” gathering, which took place in Birmingham and at which she was being honored.
A day earlier, the party’s candidate for the Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, offered an apology (of sorts) for his obnoxious comment in March after a Lebanese man rammed his pickup truck through the front doors of a suburban Detroit synagogue—into an early childhood education part of the edifice.
At the time, Mr. El-Sayed took note of and bemoaned the attack, but he added that, considering that four family members of the attacker, including a known terrorist whom the IDF was targeting, were killed in an Israeli action in Lebanon, “hurt people hurt people”—meaning that people who are hurt can only be expected to hurt others in return.
“I made a mistake,” candidate El-Sayed confessed about that addendum. “We condemned that terrorist attack,” he said (employing, it would seem, the royal “we”), but “what I was trying to do is offer context for why it happened.” But, he added: “it wasn’t the time for context.”
There is, however, no time for context here, of course, because there is no context. There is nothing that justifies, or in any rational way explains, why it makes any sort of sense for someone to seek to attack children who are in a house of worship.
Many media reported El-Sayed’s “apology” and, ignoring his reserving a future right to add “context” to the terrorist attack, speculated about whether the candidate’s words might have persuaded some Jewish Democrats in Michigan to give the guy a pass and let bygones, no matter how base, be bygones.
Then, the next day, things went from disturbing to outrageous when Ms. Nessel, in her Birmingham speech, invoked Esther Hamalkah in what was in effect a reason why Jews should vote for El-Sayed.
The one-two punch of El-Sayed’s mea culpa and Ms. Nessel’s speech was likely intended to counter the efforts of a group of Michigan Jewish Democratic activists who, abhorring El-Sayid’s hostile attitude toward Israel, held a fundraiser in support of the Republican senate nominee, Representative Mike Rogers.
What Ms. Nessel told the Democratic Jewish Caucus gathering was that Jewish voters need to put aside concerns about the candidate’s hostility toward Israel “in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity.”
You read that right. And then she went on to say, “We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest, and, yes, even our own survival.”
You read that right too.
And as to the heroine of the Megillah? Well, Ms. Nessel advised her listeners that “it is perhaps up to us now to follow in her path.”
That path, according to Ms. Nessel, is to “sacrifice the comfort, safety and security, and even the very future of our own people, in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity.”Yes, yes, you read that right too.
“What good,” she asked the audience, “is defending the historic homeland of our ancestors and demanding that candidates acknowledge its right to exist if the planet upon which it rests is no longer inhabitable?”
Why Mr. Rogers’ victory would endanger the planet isn’t entirely clear. But what is clear—or should be—is that Esther Hamalkah’s self-sacrifice had nothing to do with saving humanity and everything to do with protecting her people.
And her people today will be less protected should Mr. El-Sayed be victorious in November.
Someone should inform the oblivious Ms. Nessel of the true lesson of Megillas Esther. And perhaps also inform her that, in stark contrast to Mr. El-Sayed’s opposition to Jews resettling their land, Esther’s son Daryavesh set into motion the return of klal Yisrael to Eretz Yisrael. ●
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