Riverdale’s Progressive Rep. Torres stands firmly with Israel

“Imagine, for a moment, the inconsolable grief of a Jewish mother whose baby has been butchered to death,” wrote Rep. Ritchie Torres. “Could you imagine anything more callous and cruel than telling that grieving mother: You had it coming.”

That’s just what the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America did, Torres wrote in the New York Post on Sunday, in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel that have left 1,400 dead, thousands wounded and an estimated 199 taken hostage in the Gaza Strip.

The DSA “wasted no time in holding a hate rally romanticizing the terrorism of Hamas as ‘resistance’,” he wrote.

Torres, the first gay Afro Latino person elected to Congress, is both a Progressive Democrat and a major congressional voice in support of the Jewish state. A portion of his district (NY’s 17th CD) includes heavily Jewish Riverdale as well as predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods in the Bronx, including Morrisania, Mott Haven and Tremont.

Before lines changed in 2022 to include Riverdale, the South Bronx was a major part of the district — and even then Torres was firm in his support for the Jewish state.

“Something is rotten in the state of America,” Torres wrote in Sunday’s Post. “The anti-Israel hate increasingly possessing the American mind is a demon that must be exorcized from our body politic. For America cannot long remain a decent society if the next generation of Americans are made to be indifferent to the barbaric butchering of Israeli civilians and children.”

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Here is the text of Rep. Ritchie Torres’ article as published by the New York Post:

Oct. 7 is a day that will live in infamy as the most gruesome terrorist attack in the history of the Jewish State.

Thousands of Israelis were murdered, raped, tortured, and abducted as hostages. Ten percent of the members of an Israeli kibbutz, Kfar Asar, were massacred. 

About 260 young Israelis partying at a music festival were gunned down. Babies were butchered, burned and beheaded.

The ONLY morally acceptable response to such incomprehensible terror is overwhelming outrage at the boundless barbarism of Hamas.

While most of the civilized world, led by President Biden, rightly recoiled in horror at Hamas and condemned its terrorism immediately and unequivocally, Israel’s ideological enemies here in the US found cause for celebration at the sight of dead Jews.

Imagine, for a moment, the inconsolable grief of a Jewish mother whose baby has been butchered to death. Could you imagine anything more callous and cruel than telling that grieving mother: You had it coming. You and your people brought the terror upon yourselves.

Those were the shocking sentiments of the New York City-Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA), which wasted no time in holding a hate rally romanticizing the terrorism of Hamas as “resistance.”

The DSA was hardly alone in blaming the victims of terrorism rather than the terrorists themselves.

Something is rotten in the state of America. When the institutional leaders in our country cannot condemn the cold-blooded murder of Israeli children and civilians with moral clarity, one must ask: what kind of society are we becoming?

What does the silence and indifference and cowardice — from these so-called leaders — tell us about the depth of anti-Semitism in America and the reckoning required?

The time has come to confront not only the symptoms but the disease: a Democratic Socialist industrial complex that indoctrinates young Americans with an anti-Israel hatred so virulent that it renders them indifferent to the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Anti-Israel extremism, which has been given a veneer of mainstream respectability in law schools and legislatures, is aided and abetted by the sheer spinelessness of so-called “leaders” — from public officials to the presidents of colleges and universities. 

Days of silence were often followed by words of cowardice, if there were any words at all. 

Northwestern University, for example, said it had no plans to “put out a statement officially stating a University position.” Imagine that: a university that cannot be bothered to take a position on a pogrom against Jews. Have we learned nothing from the long and ugly history of Anti-Semitism? 

There is nothing accidental about the disregard for Israeli life that revealed itself in the wake of Oct. 7. The dehumanization of Israeli victims follows inevitably from the hyperbolic and systematic demonization of Israel itself.

Anti-Israel hate and hysteria have been allowed to fester freely in academia, social media, the political arena, and elsewhere. It has been propagated by Astroturf activists and academics, amplified by their enablers in elected office, and subsidized by government and civil society.

When people are made to believe the most dangerous lies about Israel — that Israel is the root of all evil on earth; that it is a “75-year occupation” that must be wiped off the map from the “river to the sea”; that Israelis are not civilians but settlers who can be fairly targeted for “resistance”; that Israelis are committing genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians and harvesting their organs and using the blood of their children; that Israel is always the aggressor and Hamas always the resister: when you tell so many lies and incite so much hate, what do you think will happen?

How do you think the believers internalizing these lies will respond to the savage slaughter of Israelis? This is a moral monstrosity made in America, and one that America must unmake.

The anti-Israel hate increasingly possessing the American mind is a demon that must be exorcised from our body politic. For America cannot long remain a decent society if the next generation of Americans are made to be indifferent to the barbaric butchering of Israeli civilians and children.

I, for one, stand with Israel as it seeks to defend itself. Despite the profound pain of the present, Israel will emerge from it all better and stronger than ever before.

It will outlive the pernicious lies and the dangerous demagogues who tell them. It will outlive the extremism of the DSA and BDS. It will outlive the terrorism of Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah.

Israel will live on — for the next 75 years and beyond. Resilience is the DNA and destiny of the Jewish people and the Jewish State. It always has been and always will be. I am as certain of that as I am of anything. Am Yisrael Chai.