ON THE evening of Oct. 7, as it was becoming apparent that Hamas had not only carried out the worst massacre of Jews in the history of modern Israel, but had done so in a frenzy of cruelty and bloodlust, the liberal Black activist Amber Sherman took to Facebook.
Writing as the chair of the Black Caucus of the Young Democrats of America, Sherman proclaimed her full support for "the uprising happening in Gaza right now." The corpses of the victims hadn't cooled, but Sherman was eager to display solidarity with their killers. "I encourage folks," she wrote, "to publicly acknowledge the uprising happening in Gaza and stand in support of the Palestinian people."
In a tweet on X (Twitter), Sherman — who calls herself a "Black liberationist" and has worked with Official Black Lives Matter Memphis and BLM Louisville — reveled in the Hamas slaughter. "You love to see it," she exulted. She followed up the next day, tweeting a picture of herself wearing a Palestinian scarf and grinning. She captioned the picture: "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." That slogan is a call for the elimination of Israel and its Jews.
In the world of Black progressive organizers, Sherman was no outlier. The horrific Hamas slaughter, in which Israeli civilians were shot, burned, raped, and tortured to death and more than 200 kidnapped and taken to Gaza, brought forth a gusher of excitement in left-wing Black circles.
BLM Chicago tweeted out an image of a paraglider with a Palestinian flag and the words: "I Stand With Palestine" — a gleeful allusion to the fact that some of the terrorists who carried out the bloodbath had entered the Israeli kibbutzim on gliders. It deleted the tweet a few days later, but doubled down on standing "with Palestine & the people who will do what they must." Another BLM chapter, Black Lives Matter Grassroots, issued a statement declaring its "solidarity with our Palestinian family" who are "resisting 57 years of settler colonialism and apartheid." On Saturday came another message: "Yeah, we said it. Free Palestine!"
Black antisemitism is not a new phenomenon.
Louis Farrakhan, who heads the Nation of Islam, has for decades spewed a potent toxin of African American nationalism and unrelenting Jew-hatred into the Black community. Before Al Sharpton became a host on MSNBC, he was a street agitator who trafficked in vicious antisemitism; on one occasion, he fomented a riot in Crown Heights, N.Y., during which his followers, chanting "Kill the Jew," beat and stabbed an Orthodox yeshiva student to death. When Black Lives Matter issued a formal platform in 2016, it focused entirely on domestic issues — with a single exception: The document condemned Israel, the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, of committing "genocide" against Palestinians. Last year, the rap artist Kanye West, with a social media following of 31 million, unleashed a stream of antisemitic malice, vowing to go "death con 3" against Jews.
 Three days after Hamas's brutal massacre, the BLM Chicago chapter proclaimed its support for the terrorists, some of whom had used paragliders to enter Israel. |
Survey data has long shown that bigotry against Jews is higher among Black Americans than among Americans overall — and higher still among those with a college education, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. lamented as long ago as 1992. Too many people have turned a blind eye to the antisemitic bile in progressive Black circles. But after the events of this month, denial is impossible.
David Christopher Kaufman, a gay Black Jewish writer in New York, expressed the anguish he felt as he saw or heard so many Black activists react to the ghastly attack on Israel by condemning — Israel.
"When you're living at the front lines of intersectionality like I do as a gay Black Jew, you learn early on that no one is coming to your rescue," he wrote in The Forward.
This is how I feel about Israel right now. While the last two horrible weeks have included some commendable allyship, they have also revealed a level of indifference and disbelief to Jewish pain that extends beyond my darkest nightmares.
From mass anti-Zionist protests to relentless antisemitic social media posts, folks that Jews have championed during their gravest hours have turned their backs on us with soul-crushing ease. . . .
There is the grief I feel, as a Black man, watching African American after African American — whether professors or protesters — insist that the Palestinian struggle is their struggle, seeing the 1,400 Israelis that Hamas killed as some sort of trophy.
It is important to make clear that this is not a blanket indictment. Some Black leaders have unwaveringly stood with Israel against the terrorists. US Representative Ritchie Torres, a progressive New York Democrat, has vehemently condemned organizations that engage in "glorifying the terrorism of Hamas, cheering and celebrating the cold-blooded murder of Israeli civilians." Boxing champion Floyd Mayweather posted a strong public statement of support for Israel, then filled a plane full of military equipment he had purchased and flew it to Israel. New York City Mayor Eric Adams attended a pro-Israel rally three days after the massacre and, in a powerful address, said that New York was "not all right" after the heart-crushing atrocities of Oct. 7.
But they have largely been eclipsed by uncompromising left-wing Black activists who want the world to know that as Israel goes to war against the barbaric Jew-haters of Hamas, it cannot count on their sympathy.
It could have counted on Martin Luther King Jr.'s.
The Nobel peace laureate was a leader in the fight against antisemitism, especially among American Blacks. He was at pains to rebut the vile smear that Zionism is racism. King was an admirer and defender of the modern state of Israel, and he declared unequivocally that to hate the world's only Jewish state was to hate Jews.
I have recounted in Arguable before how in 1967 King described Israel as "one of the great outposts of democracy in the world." It was a message he repeated just 10 days before his assassination. On March 26, 1968, King was asked whether Black American intellectuals should support Israel in its conflict with the Arab world. Nine months after the Six-Day War, when some on what was then called the New Left were turning against Israel, King reiterated his ardent support for the embattled Jewish homeland.
"Peace for Israel means security and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity," he said.
King had no tolerance for those who pretended that anti-Zionism was anything but Jew-hatred wearing a mask. He said so bluntly. The prominent political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset recalled a dinner in Cambridge in October 1967, during which a Black college student denounced "the Zionists." King's reaction was swift.
"Don't talk like that!" he snapped. "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking antisemitism!"
America's foremost civil rights leader wasn't just a great exponent of the fundamental principle that all persons are created equal and that racial distinctions have no legitimate place in American life. He was also an ardent believer in America's potential for decency and goodness and a staunch supporter of the beleaguered Jewish state. Were he here to see how eagerly so many progressive Black Americans have lined up against Israel after the worst massacre of Jews in its history, Dr. King would be reduced to tears.
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Suicide is not health care
Proponents of physician-assisted suicide were back on Beacon Hill last week, urging the Legislature to pass a bill that would authorize doctors in Massachusetts to prescribe lethal drugs to willing Massachusetts residents who are terminally ill and expected to die within six months. If it passes, it would make Massachusetts one of only a handful of states to permit physicians to play a role in ending patients' lives. In 40 of the 50 states, the practice is illegal.
Advocates have been trying for years to get the law changed. In 2012, they collected the necessary signatures to put what they called a "death with dignity" initiative on the state ballot. Voters rejected it, but the campaign to legalize assisted suicide never let up. Bills to overturn the voters' decision have been introduced in the Legislature repeatedly. In 2022, the state's Supreme Judicial Court rejected a lawsuit claiming that there is a legal right to have the aid of a doctor in ending one's life.
Now, bolstered by the support of Governor Maura Healey, the advocates are trying again. What they want is inhumane and dangerous and should not become law.
The case for assisted suicide is not hard to understand. Supporters describe the torment of the terminally ill, suffering from conditions that will only grow worse. Not all those torments involve physical pain — indeed, only about a third of patients who seek to end their lives cite pain as their motivation. The data consistently show that the top reasons given for requesting life-ending prescriptions are social and psychological, such as the loss of autonomy, the indignity of physical breakdown or incontinence, the prospect of being a burden on family and caregivers, and the existential despair of waiting helplessly for death.
 The oath of Hippocrates, the ancient Greek healer known as the Father of Medicine, avows: "I will not give a lethal drug to anyone to cause death." |
Like countless others, I have seen the misery of loved ones in their last illness. In the months before they died in 2021, as they were stripped of their mobility, as control over their bodily functions disintegrated, as pain became a constant, both my father and my mother often said: "This is no way to live." But it would never have occurred to them to deliberately end their lives, let alone to seek anyone's help in doing so.
Whether physicians should hasten patients' death is among the oldest controversies in medicine. More than 24 centuries ago, doctors taking the Hippocratic Oath vowed, "I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan." In that era, notes Ezekiel Emanuel, the prominent oncologist and professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, "physicians commonly provided euthanasia and assisted suicide for ailments ranging from foot infections and gallstones to cancer and senility." The arguments for bringing about a sufferer's suicide were perfectly familiar to Hippocrates. He knew how emotionally appealing they could be. That is why he required new doctors to swear to resist them.
At the hearing in Boston, one of the bill's sponsors, state Senator Jo Comerford of Northampton, insisted that the legislation has been drafted with "rigorous safeguards" to ensure that no patients are coerced into ending their lives. She is doubtless sincere. But once suicide drugs can be lawfully prescribed, there will be pressure on patients to avoid the cost of protracted medical treatment by taking the pill that will bring everything to a speedy end.
Consider the experience in Canada, where medical assistance in dying, known as MAID, was legalized in 2016. There too, rigorous safeguards were built into the law. At first, eligibility was limited to adult patients of sound mind with a terminal condition. A waiting period was mandated. Approval had to come from a physician. Information about nonlethal alternatives had to be provided.
But those safeguards have since been dropped. "Assistance in dying" can now be provided to Canadians who are not terminally ill, who have not completed a waiting period, and who have not even consulted a physician (a nurse practitioner suffices). Beginning next March, mental illness alone will qualify as a reason for assisted suicide or euthanasia. And activists are pressing to expand the law even further and allow "mature minors" to be approved for lethal drugs.
More than 10,000 Canadians were "assisted" to their deaths in 2021. That accounted for for 3.3 percent of all deaths in Canada that year. It also represented a one-third increase from the year before.
There have been distressing reports of Canadian patients being pressured or invited to take advantage of the quick death MAID offers them. In one case, a retired Army corporal testified that a government caseworker turned down her request to have a wheelchair lift installed in her home but offered to facilitate assisted suicide as an alternative. In another case, an Ontario man with a degenerative disorder recorded conversations in which hospital staffers asked him if he "had an interest in assisted dying" and pointed out that his hospital stay was costing "north of $1,500 a day." Choosing death has become alarmingly easy in Canada, as the guardrails in the original law turned out to be short-lived.
Enlightened societies do not make it easier for people to kill themselves, let alone encourage them to do so. Individuals may choose, out of pain, heartache, or dread, to end their lives. Many make that choice — suicide in the United States has become a leading cause of death. But that's a tragedy, not a policy ideal. Human beings may have the legal right to dispose of their lives as they see fit, but that doesn't change the basic truth that life is precious and suicide is a dark and awful way to die.
The legislation on Beacon Hill would not simply authorize doctors to prescribe poisonous drugs for patients who want to be dead. It would endorse a view from which good people should recoil: that some lives aren't worth living. There have always been men and women — and children — who felt they would be better off dead, but we should not reinforce that feeling any more than we should yell "Jump!" to someone who, in despair, has climbed out onto the ledge of a high building.
What people who crave suicide need most is relief from their physical or psychological pain, not a prescription for death. Someone determined to end it all can always do so. But involving doctors in the process is a step way, way too far. Assisted suicide isn't health care and it never can be.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "The disastrous Wye accord," Oct. 29, 1998:
The road from Oslo has led to calamity. What Israel offered was land for peace. The exchange it got instead was land for terror: More Israelis have been blown up and gunned down by Palestinian terrorists in the five years of "peace" than in the previous 15 years.
Israel has exchanged land for antisemitism: The largest newspaper in the Palestinian Authority, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, writes that Hitler's persecution "was a malicious fabrication by the Jews." That "Jewish control over the mass media has . . . put a pleasant face on the vile image of Jews." That "Jews spread prostitution as a means of plunging the world into decadence, abomination, and corruption."
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The Last Line
"In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken." ― Ernest Hemingway, "Ten Indians," from Men without Women (1927)
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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