Maybe this New York rally I mentioned below wasn’t the only one.
A short time after I wrote my post I received an email from TPM Reader T who pointed me to this press release about the protest which notes that the protests were planned for “New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Hartford and Philadelphia and, in solidarity, in several places around the world.”
It’s important to note that when I call the New York City event an anti-Semitic rally I don’t say that simply because it opposed this one law. Obviously, any piece of legislation can be subjected to criticism. What I am referring to are numerous examples of attacks on Jews and Holocaust denial at the event itself. But as you can see from the press release, the arguments in the organizing press releases weren’t that far from what ended up happening at the rally.
The national organizers condemn the proposed law arguing that it vilifies Poland and makes Congress into the “debt collector” of “Jewish American restitution organizations.”
They vilify Poland in the international arena and shift the blame for the Holocaust from Germany to Poland and apply various types of political and economic threats, pressure and blackmail while positioning the State Department, and ultimately the US Congress, in the role of both “arbitrator” and “debt collector” on behalf of Jewish American restitution organizations. All of the above amounts to a monumental extortion attempt, an act of the economic and political war waged against Poland.
There’s this passage from the organizers of the New York even specifically …
Creating laws that put a selected group of citizens (Jews) above all others is a great, unprecedented evil. In addition, observing what happened in the Congress when the House Joint Resolution #37 was voted in mid-February, I perceive it as nothing short of an unprecedented assault at freedom of speech, and therefore, a birth of totalitarianism in this country (https://youtu.be/qmqe3UD-F3o). 424 members of Congress voted to “condemn anti-Semitism”, which I expect to be followed shortly by binding acts of law criminalizing that vaguely defined “anti-Semitism”. They want to have it interpreted as “any criticism of Jews or of the State of Israel”, as you can see in the clip. I think that we should protest that. Once “ice is broken”, further limitations of freedom of speech will come so much easier. They aim at taking away the 1st Amendment, just as they did with the 2nd Amendment. What is next?
But what about the other events.
A short time ago I heard separately from TPM Reader MC who appears to have seen the Los Angeles rally …
I just wanted to add that there was a similar-looking rally (with lots of Polish flags) at the West LA Federal Building on 11000 Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles on Sunday also. I didn’t get a good look at it but just drove by. Their signage was not very good, but there was a sign mentioning S.-something, which I figured was a Senate bill. There were roughly 50 people. They were standing on the southwest corner of Wilshire Blvd and Veteran Avenue, which is a very common place for protests in the west Los Angeles area.
Curious to hear what others may have seen in other cities or in the local press.
