Governor Needs to Step Up

Governor Blagojevich continues to evade responsibility for the anti-Semitic epithets hanging in the air around him. He has yet to ask for the resignation of one of his Hate Crime commissioners, Claudette Marie Muhammad, who as one of Nation of Islam's top officials has refused to disavow the hate-filled remarks of her boss Louis Farrakhan.

In the Sun Times today, Michael Kotzin of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago has this to say:

What is at stake is far more than a loosely uttered phrase or two. In his rhetoric, Farrakhan has given new life to traditional anti-Semitic themes of Jewish conspiracy, Jewish control and Jewish villainy. He has used age-old images that demonize the Jewish people.

And in this world, we as a society can not let this be explained away by politicians:

There are contemporary echoes of this kind of language that help explain why members of the Jewish community are taking all of this so seriously. For example, a leader of Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian terrorist organization dedicated to eliminating Israel that has patented the use of suicide bombing, was quoted in the Feb. 27 issue of the New Yorker saying: "Now the fashion world, the media -- it's controlled by Jews.... Freud, a Jew, was the one who destroyed morals, and Marx destroyed divine ideologies. ... And now it is the Jewish lobby in the United States that is setting policy in the world and causing the United States to wage war all over the world." You might almost think that he and Farrakhan have the same speechwriter.

As the local crisis has evolved, the Governor's Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes has ironically become a platform for circulating the kind of hate speech that it was created to combat. Anti-Semitism has been turned loose.