Holy War Against Sophomoric Graffiti Is Fake Outrage

Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2018/05/01/holy-war-against-sophomoric-graffiti-is-fake-outrage/

 

On Monday, hundreds of Hopkinton High School parents were alerted via email of an “extremely troubling act” that stripped this suburban school of its “sense of safety” and provoked police involvement.

Was it a bomb? A knife? A gun?

No. A graffito. A single “small swastika, the size of a fingernail,” scrawled on a school bulletin board.

I know what you’re thinking:  “Holy cow, why didn’t they go into full lockdown?!”

Relax, Helicopter moms. Hopkinton Principal Evan Bishop is pleased to announce that the perp has been busted (“As a result of a thorough investigation, we were able to identify the student responsible”) and will soon suffer a horrifying fate:  Expulsion, or even worse:  Weeks of sensitivity training at the hands of government-school social workers.

If they had any mercy in their hearts, they’d hang him now.

Am I making light of a Nazi symbol being etched on the wall of a public school in 2018? Why, yes. Yes, I am.  On the question of how to handle Nazis in the modern era, I am an unapologetic member of the Mel Brooks school:  Unbridled mockery. 

A few choruses of “Springtime for Hitler” are far more powerful than months of P.C. hectoring.

I’m not saying Hopkinton officials should completely ignore it (though that’s not a bad idea). I’m just pointing out the price of their overreaction:  What could have been solved with an eye roll and an eraser is now a community-wide incident. If you’re some punk teen who wants to cause trouble — and yes, those exist even in sanitized suburbs like Hopkinton — you just found out how to make everyone jump to your tune for the price of a No. 2 pencil.

There was a similar reaction in Melrose last year, when “police were called in to investigate” after some knucklehead scratched a swastika and SS symbol on some plastic playground equipment. A detective was assigned. The mayor spoke out. The community mourned.

And some dopey kid got a good laugh over all the pretend angst he inspired.  And yes — it is pretend.

Real anguish is what I feel on behalf of my lovely (Jewish) bride, Buttercup, when I see grown-up adults in Georgia setting swastikas ablaze at a Neo-Nazi rally last month.

Anguish is watching college-age young men in Charlottesville, Virginia last year chanting “Jews will not replace us!”

A thumb-size pencil scratching is clueless kiddery. Rallies on liberal campuses to “Boycott, Divest and Sanction” the state of Israel from students waving the flag of Yasser Arafat and Hamas is something worth getting upset about.

When my wife and her family talk about the concerns they have over rising anti-Semitism, schoolyard stupidity doesn’t make the conversational cut. They’re talking about the attacks on Israel by Hamas. About the willingness of members of the American Left to defend this terror organization and its attacks on the Jewish state.

They talk about U.S. Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota, a former follower of that loathsome anti-Semite, the Reverend Louis Farrakhan, meeting with him as recently as 2016.  Ellison is the second-highest-ranking member of the Democratic National Committee.

My Jewish family and friends do worry about anti-Semitism, but it’s not the schoolyard kind. It’s from socialists in Britain’s Labor Party, which has been scandalized by repeated incidents of anti-Semitism for months.

It’s because Germany’s top Jewish leader warned Jews not to “show themselves openly with a kippa [yarmulke] in a big-city setting in Germany” due to the real danger they will be attacked.

If suburban progressives in Massachusetts want to do something to fight the “intersectionality” of anti-Jewish bigotry and hate, they might want to stop looking for thumb-size graffiti and start looking around for a mirror.

 

Michael Graham hosts Behind The Blue Wall, a podcast about being a conservative in deep-blue New England, for Ricochet.com.