Caught in the middle

An attempt by the Left to remove Confederate flags and statues in Charlottesville, Virginia, resulted in a free-for all. President Donald Trump was excoriated for placing equal blame on both of the violent, radical sides.

This incident has implications for Israel, which often finds itself between the rock of Scylla and the whirlpool of Charybdis.

True to form, columnist Susan Hattis Rolef denounces the white supremacists while minimizing the violent role of the leftist counter-demonstrators (“Of white supremacists and statues of Confederate leaders,” Think About It, August 21). The latter include adherents of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, both antisemitic, pro-Palestinian movements. She even resorts to irrelevance, stating she was “nauseated” by the remarks of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair, who said the radical Left was more dangerous than the neo-Nazis. What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?

On August 19, Caroline B. Glick, in “Trump and the Jews” (Column One), pointed out that for the Jewish community, “there ought to be no distinction between abhorrence and concern” over white supremacists and the radical Left. In fact, the community should be more concerned about the latter “because its assaults are more direct and more frequent.”

When it comes to confronting our adversaries, politics should be placed aside. The commonality of the radical Left and radical Right is the hatred of Jews. A plague on both of them! ROBERT DUBLIN

Jerusalem

Susan Hattis Rolef’s words are golden: “In dictatorships and former dictatorships, it is common practice to pull down the statues and remove the pictures of ousted dictators. But what about democracies that have experienced political upheavals? ... I believe that for the sake of unity and healing old wounds, a way should be found to avoid the destruction of the old artifacts and to integrate them into the current reality, even at the cost of changing the context within which they are displayed.”

It is becoming apparent that the statues will come down, even, I have heard, on Monument Avenue in Richmond, the “holy city” of the South, the focus of all its reverence. So allow me to modify her suggestion a little: Let the statues come down. Carefully put them in storage, but let their plinths remain. On them, replace the plaques bearing the descriptions of these heroes of the South with new plaques engraved with something like the following: “Here stood the statue of [blank], removed on [date] on account of [blank]. It has been carefully stored in the basement of [blank] against the time when, as God wills, tempers have cooled and it can be restored – forever, if that is His will.”

Yet with all due respect, those of you who are wasting your energy on that splinter of a fragment of the Right, which is no real threat to the US, are dupes of the radical Left. That is the real threat to the United States and its Jews, and to Israel. MIKE GOLD Modi’in