Feel the burn

As rioters in USA cities burn, torch and loot in demonstrations against police brutality (“Louisville demanded justice after police killed Breonna Taylor” (June 14) there seems to be a common thread in the unwarranted deaths of several blacks.

Make no mistake, they did not deserve to die and the policemen involved should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But George Floyd was a former nightclub bouncer. In his early 20s, he did time for theft with a firearm, then had various arrests for possession of cocaine. In 2007, he and five other men forced their way into a woman’s house, held a gun to her stomach, ransacked the house, looking for money and drugs. He served five years for aggravated robbery. Then, before his murder, police attempted to arrest him for passing what looked like a counterfeit $20 bill. Floyd was a big powerful man, two meters tall and over 100 kilograms. He fought the arrest and the handcuffs, refused to get into the squad car.

A few days later, Breonna Taylor was shot to death in Louisiana. Three policemen men (in street clothes) burst into her home in a perhaps mistaken drug bust. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, reached for his licensed handgun and started shooting, hitting one officer in the thigh. The policemen responded with fire.

In another incident, a black restaurant owner (with a violent lifestyle as a youth) exchanged shots with the police and was killed. The common thread is that these incidents did not involve racist police officers driving around, looking for blacks to kill. They involved violent people, resisting arrest or trigger-happy.

As in all matters, we should know the whole story before making judgments. Who would want to be a police officer in the USA these days? Public safety may soon be long gone.

YIGAL HOROWITZ

Beersheba

The worldwide protests following the tragic death of George Floyd are rapidly devolving into nihilism and anarchy. This is manifested by revisionist history (“US protests refighting the Civil War narrative,” June 12) as well as the removal of statues that have been repainted with the brush of racism (”Statue of scout founder Baden-Powell to be taken down in Britain,” June 12).

What they are promulgating is the concept that a just future can be achieved only if you first totally deny and destroy the corrupt past. This is antithetical to traditional Jewish thinking, which holds that our vibrant living past serves as a guide for our future survival.

DR. SAMUEL DERSHOWITZ

Jerusalem

An open letter organized by three Jewish activists and signed by 52 people affiliated with Jewish organizations is calling on the Jewish community to take a number of actions, including endorsing Black Lives Matter (“Open letter calls on Jewish organizations to endorse Black Lives Matter,” Jpost.com, June 13).

Yet a Black Lives Matter protester vandalized the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square. He explained his motives: “I tagged up the statue of Churchill because he’s a confirmed racist. He fought the Nazis to protect the Commonwealth from invasion – he didn’t do it for black people or for people of color or for people of anything. He did it sheerly for colonialism. People will be angry – but I’m angry that for many years we have been oppressed”

In 1999, Charles Krauthammer wrote: “Person of the Century? Time Magazine offered Albert Einstein, an interesting and solid choice. Unfortunately, it is wrong. The only possible answer is Winston Churchill. Why? Because only Churchill carries that absolutely required criterion: indispensability. Without Churchill, the world today would be unrecognizable – dark, impoverished, tortured. Take away Churchill in 1940, on the other hand, and Britain would have settled with Hitler – or worse. Nazism would have prevailed. Hitler would have achieved what no other tyrant, not even Napoleon, had ever achieved: mastery of Europe. Civilization would have descended into a darkness the likes of which it had never known.”

Jewish organizations are willing to endorse Black Lives Matter, whose members desecrate the statue of the man who saved civilization from the “darkness the likes of which it had never known.” This is shameful! They have forgotten our collective history.

MLADEN ANDRIJASEVIC

Beersheba

In “Difficult times for Jews in America” (June 10) Micah Halpern writes of the external threats that beset the American Jewish community during these turbulent times. Overlooked is the refusal of some in leadership positions in the Jewish community to acknowledge the blatant Jew-hatred and demonization of Israel emanating from the Black Lives Matter movement.

ZOA president Morton Klein, who has been unabashedly outspoken about the inherent antisemitism of BLM, is under attack by none other than Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Reform movement, who is seeking his and the ZOA’s ouster from the Conference of Presidents for refusing to bow before the idol of political correctness.

Has Jacobs appointed himself chief of Thought Police for America’s Jews?

JOEL KUTNER

Jerusalem