Sometimes a small part of a larger op-ed can spark such passionate reactions that it merits further exploration.
A few weeks ago, I wrote an Washington Examiner opinion piece explaining why I believed a Washington Post column that many smart folks had written off as immature and vaguely anti-Semitic contained enough grains of truth that it could not be so easily dismissed.
I spent two paragraphs pontificating about why I believed Carey Purcell’s misguided attempts to rationalize why two Jewish men broke up with her wasn’t anti-Semitic because it seemed to be coming from a place of ignorance as opposed to malice.
I received pushback on that concept from friends who rightly pointed out that the spread of subtle anti-Semitism, whether intentional or not, could still be problematic. Point taken.
Even more interestingly, I got in an argument with a Twitter user who essentially accused me of being racist for excusing Purcell, a white woman, while claiming that D.C. Councilman Trayon White, a black man who recently invoked a conspiracy that Jews control the weather and government, was the perfect example of “blatant anti-Semitism in Washington.”
Conveniently for my argument, White has spent the last week proving just how ingrained his anti-Semitism truly is.
Last Wednesday, White visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as part of his repentance to the Jewish community. While there, he continued to walk a tightrope between ignorance and malice.
The Washington Post’s coverage of the tour leads with an anecdote about White studying a photo of a woman surrounded by Nazi soldiers with a sign around her neck reading, “I am a German girl and allowed myself to be defiled by a Jew.”
White, with complete sincerity, asked his tour guide, “Are they protecting her?”
“No,” the tour guide responded. “They’re marching her through.”
“Marching her through is protecting,” White retorted.
Later in the tour, one of White’s aides asked if the Warsaw Ghetto — used to isolate and imprison Polish Jews — was like a “gated community.”
Questions like these provide important clues about the depth of White’s disinformation regarding the historical treatment of Jews and that of his inner circle.
White reportedly ditched his tour before finishing it, which suggests that he was not taking the experience, nor his atonement process, seriously.
White and his aide are not alone in being unaware of the Holocaust’s toll on the European Jewish community. According to a recent study commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, 41 percent of millennials believe 2 million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust (it was actually about 6 million) and 52 percent of Americans could not identity what Auschwitz, an infamous concentration camp, was.
If that was the extent of White’s transgressions, one could reasonably pity his unfamiliarity with Jewish history and begin working to educate him. Unfortunately, there is further evidence that indicates his anti-Semitism is too deeply embedded to be reversed.
The day after White’s visit to the Holocaust Museum, the Post reported that White in January donated $500 to a Chicago event hosted by the Nation of Islam, whose leader Louis Farrakhan used the occasion to proclaim that “powerful Jews are the enemy.”
There could also be a reasonable explanation for this; as the Post’s Fenit Nirappil put it, the Nation of Islam routinely performs community service in the District’s poorest areas, including White’s Ward 8. He could have just been returning the favor to Farrakhan, never even thinking about how the donation would be perceived.
A day after his Farrakhan connection became public knowledge, White went on Facebook Live to provide a 35-minute rant doubling down on defending his donation, claiming that he was “under attack” by the media and comparing himself to Marion Barry, a former Ward 8 councilman whose political career survived scandal after scandal.
“They spent $40 million trying to take down Marion Barry,” White said. “This is nothing. I am built for this.”
White, to his credit, said he doesn’t “agree with everything” Farrakhan preaches, and reiterated that he was never taught about the Holocaust in school. Unfortunately, none of that helps alleviate White’s increasingly disturbing history of malicious behavior toward the Jewish community.
In my op-ed about Purcell’s column, I made the point, “There’s real anti-Semitism out there, and labeling everything as such only serves to devalue the word.”
The totality of White’s comments and actions have led me to conclude that this is what true ingrained anti-Semitism looks like. A person cannot push a conspiracy that specific, donate to a noted anti-Semite, and show such little remorse for his indiscretions without some real hate in his heart.
That malice may stem from ignorance, but I feel comfortable calling White irredeemably anti-Semitic. In any debate about what genuine anti-Semitism is, he should be the beginning and end of the discussion.
Joshua Axelrod (@jaxel222) is politics editor at MediaFile and a graduate student in Media and Strategic Communications at George Washington University. Previously he was a web producer and pop politics writer for the Washington Examiner.
