Guns, Japs and Jews

A few things that are unpopular, unsettling ... but true.

Unless you have spent the last week at the bottom of a mine shaft (possibly not a bad idea, depending) you know that a guy drove from Las Vegas to Park Avenue in Manhattan, apparently to attack the offices of the National Foorball League.

He managed to murder four innocent people Monday, none of whom had anything to do with the NFL, before being considerate enough to kill himself, thereby saving the taxpayers millions. I know his name, but won’t use it, because becoming a household word is what creatures like this want. Since then, people have been trying to figure out why he did it. He claimed in a suicide note that his brain had been damaged by playing football (not in the NFL) but I’ve heard stories as outlandish as that he was really there to rub out one of the victims because she was a prominent and successful Jewish woman. However, I do know why he did it, and have decided to tell you.

He killed those people because in this country, pretty much any mentally ill psycho can buy all the guns he or she wants. That’s all you need to know. We value guns more than human life, and the U.S. Supreme Court has sanctioned this.

Japan, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite. They don’t think everyone should have the right to have a murder weapon. That’s why in 2023, guns killed 43,163 Americans. They killed people in Japan, too. Ten. That’s right, 10, and most of those were suicides. I was in Japan for a few weeks earlier this year, not for the first time, and I have never met a Japanese who wanted to get even with the United States for World War II. But they are in a sense getting even anyway.

Every three years, more Americans die in gun violence here than were killed fighting Japan in World War II. Every politician who votes against gun control is sort of a murderer by proxy. Think of that: It takes only three years for our firearms body count to match the number of men we lost fighting in the Pacific Theater from 1941-45.

And finally — it would be nice if we’d be honest about the blatant antisemitism now rampant in this country, thinly disguised as “anti-Zionism,” whatever that means. Yes, you can loathe Netanyahu and not be antisemitic, just as you can (and should) loathe Donald Trump because you love America. But it is pretty obvious most of the time when that’s just a thin cover for Jew-bashing.

Last Saturday, I saw protestors at Eastern Market in Detroit with signs that said “Free Palestine,” It would be nice if the media asked them what that meant. Free to do what, exactly? Free with every purchase, as the old saying goes? And what about the slogan “from the river to the sea?” It would be nice if someone asked them, “what river? What sea,” and then pointed out to those who could correctly answer that this is a faintly veiled call for genocide, presumably against the Jews.

As George Orwell argued nearly a century ago, we ought to use language honestly to express what we really mean, not to try to hide what we are really saying.

Personally, I think whatever you think about the Middle East, we need to focus on what to the world is the far more important five-alarm fire; the overwhelming need to save democracy in America,