Mr. Vice President @JDVance,
I am an American whose parents came here after the Holocaust. They wanted their children to grow up free from the ethnic and religious hatreds that plagued our people in Europe. I am beyond grateful to them and to this country.
Yet today, I see disturbing levels of extremism and hate rising across the political spectrum in America. I’ve dedicated much of my life to fighting back through @standwithus, because I know all too well where this hate can lead. The murders in Pittsburgh, Washington DC, and Boulder did not happen in a vacuum. Antisemitic ideas are spreading faster than they have in many decades, fueling deadly violence on our streets. These ideas are poison for our society as a whole.
So I appreciate you stating clearly in a recent interview that antisemitism has no place in your political movement. However, the notion that our concerns about this bigotry on the right are “overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign policy conversation about Israel” does not align with facts.
It is a fact that influential figures are spreading antisemitic ideas to millions of Americans. Then, when they are criticized for doing so, they play victim and claim their critics are just trying to “shut down” a debate about Israel. They use Israel to avoid having a conversation about the toxic hatred they promote.
Countless Jewish and non-Jewish Americans who support the U.S.-Israel alliance would love nothing more than to have a sane and rational conversation about foreign policy. We believe that this alliance is a massive win for the American people, and have evidence to back that up. We’re more than happy to have substantive debates with those who disagree.
What we strongly object to is how “criticism of Israel” and a “backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy” are being used to launder lies and hate.
For example, Tucker Carlson had a guest tell his millions of followers that the Nazis murdered Jews because of logistical challenges, not genocidal intent. He called the man who peddles this garbage the “best” and “most honest” historian in America. Criticizing that has nothing to do with Israel.
False narratives about Israel or “the Jews” controlling the American government echo the dangerous conspiracy theories that helped the Nazis rise to power and murder my family.
Framing U.S. citizens who care about Israel as disloyal to America is a smear designed to turn patriotic Americans against each other. Regardless of their intent or status as your friends, Carlson and others with large platforms are poisoning American minds with bad ideas.
Mr. Vice President, I am asking you to put the interests of our country first, and start pushing back far more substantively and forcefully against those bad ideas.
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Roz Rothstein is a cofounder and CEO of StandWithUs, a pro-Israel activist organization, especially in public schools and universities across North America.