Rioters target some Jewish neighborhoods

The riots here bore the essence of organized incitement soon after vandals began ravaging Minneapolis during the middle of last week. By Sunday, the looting reached the Roosevelt Mall, slightly more than 10 miles north of center city Philadelphia – and less than two miles south of my apartment building.

The Roosevelt Mall, which I often patronized when I lived nearby, is part of a once-heavily Jewish neighborhood; the looting at that site was reported by a local television station. A childhood friend told me that her son-in-law, a police officer, was slightly hurt during widespread rioting on Monday.

Several synagogues in Los Angeles were vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti on Saturday, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Notably, graffiti reading “F**k Israel” and “Free Palestine” was spray-painted on the walls of Congregation Beth Israel in the Fairfax section, a largely Jewish neighborhood, in the wake of a protest march along Fairfax Avenue. Rioters and looters also damaged Jewish businesses along Melrose, Fairfax and LaBrea avenues, JTA reported.

Back in Philly, I often shopped at a WaWa store where a fire was set at 12 ^th and Market streets, and I was a frequent diner at the Marathon Grill on 16 ^th Street, which was gutted by vandals and looters Sunday.

From 1,100 miles away, it is difficult to assess Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s performance in quelling the chaos in his adopted hometown sparked by the death of George Floyd while in the custody of a Minneapolis police officer. Frey, who is Jewish, was literally and figuratively attempting to extinguish an inferno. He was struggling against an invisible foe that seemed to be everywhere at once.

This was guerrilla warfare and Frey needs all the help he could get. It is painfully obvious that Frey, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and other leaders struggled to avoid a greater conflagration. A poorly coordinated confrontation between police and protesters carries the potential for an even more devastating incident. Such as Monday’s tear-gassing of peaceful protesters – led by our president – in Washington’s Lafayette Square.

“We have to bring down tensions in America,” Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker told a TV interviewer the same day.

Of course, our president sided with the enemy, so to speak. For the past week, he poured as much gasoline as he could find onto the ongoing bonfire.

“You have to dominate,” said Donald Trump, sounding like a karate instructor. “You have to do retribution.” These comments come on top of his other outrageous remarks.

No, says Pritzker, who is also Jewish. “We have to call for calm. The rhetoric that’s coming out of the White House is making it worse.”

Surprising that Trump did not proclaim, John Wayne-like: “A president’s got to do what a president’s got to do.” The closest I could find to that line is from the western Hondo, when he says, “A man ought to do what he thinks is best.”

It occurred to me that George Floyd was not even born when The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 52 years ago. When Dr. King died, the civil rights movement collapsed, yet racial tensions remain. The Black community is among the hardest hit by poverty, and African-Americans have protested police brutality long before police officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, fatally pressed his knee against Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.

Certainly, the riots that accompanied peaceful demonstrations were disgraceful. I also have concerns about the timing of the general protest movement. Will it surprise anyone if coronavirus cases spiral out of control again, endangering not only demonstrators but also police officers and health-care employees?

It is still not clear if the troublemakers are from the right, the left or even both. Attorney General William Barr charged that they are leftists. Others speculate that white supremacists are inciting the trouble to reflect on liberals and Democrats.

Trump clearly recognizes that he can benefit politically. By Tuesday, he brought the military to Washington, parted the sea of protest crowds with tear gas and dubbed himself “your president of law and order.” Maybe the current atmosphere will scare suburban Whites back into the Republican fold on Nov. 3.

Yet it is most likely that Black voters who need no convincing that Trump is a racist will be compelled to turn out in massive numbers and vote against “your president of law and order.”

Trump took Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin with the help of three kinds of voters – opponents of Hillary Clinton; citizens who gave Trump the benefit of the doubt; and African-Americans who stayed home in Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. Those three states, as many readers will recall, provided Trump with enough electoral votes – by narrow margins – to win the electoral college.

Maybe some suburbanites will reverse their plans and vote for “your president of law and order,” and they might constitute a minimal amount of voters. The ballots of minority voters in Philly neighborhoods like Cobbs Creek and Strawberry Mansion could outmatch the ballots of those cast by Whites in suburbs like Radnor and Willow Grove.

One of Trump’s key weaknesses is that he underestimates the intelligence of Americans. Apparently, he never heard John Wayne’s advice to real-life son Patrick playing his movie son in Big Jake: “You’re short on ears and long on mouth.”