I’ll back Israel forever, says politician who gave viral speech in synagogue
► TO GO from being admitted to hospital with suicidal thoughts related to his sexuality and dropping out of college to being elected a US congressman at the age of 31 shows the inner steel of Ritchie Torres.
So when he tells me he fears he might be assassinated over his vocal support for Israel, it’s a surprise. The question of a sitting member of Congress being murdered, he says, is a matter of “when” not “if”.
The front line in the fight for Western values and free speech now runs straight through cities like New York. It’s no longer soldiers fighting in dusty, foreign fields who risk their lives to protect our way of life and beliefs.
His transgression? To point out that Israel is a liberal, Western-style democracy that should be defended from terrorists. For which he has been labelled a “genocide enabler” in rhetoric that he believes is “almost bound to escalate to the level of violence”.
“I do fear for my personal safety, and I have long felt that the assassination of a member of Congress is not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” he says flatly. “But I grew up in public housing in the Bronx and I do not scare easily.”
We speak just days after MP Mike Freer announced he was standing down due to death threats related to his support of Israel. Violent extremism, Torres warns, is on the rise in democracies across the world. He notes that on his third day on the job as Congressman he witnessed the 6 January assault on the Capitol.
Despite the febrile and dangerous atmosphere, Torres doesn’t have a security detail. It’s not his own safety he is concerned about, anyhow. He fears for his mother, who raised him; his twin brother; and sister, living on her own in what he has labelled “slum conditions”.
“There were anti-Israel activists who said to my mother, ‘You’re a genocide mother and you should have aborted your child.’ The level of venom and vitriol that has been directed towards me and my family is hard to overstate.”
He pinpoints the source of much of the hate he receives: TikTok. It’s here the poison of antisemitism is introduced to a new generation and reflected in the genocidal slogans and watermelon signs they carry on Western streets. More than that, he says, TikTok is a “national security risk”. It is an “act of national self-sabotage”, he says, and “a profound miscalculation” to put the “leading news source or the next generation” in the “hands of our leading foreign adversary, the Chinese Communist Party”.
Now is the time to enact bipartisan legislation, currently making its way slowly through the Senate, to force TikTok to be sold to an American company, he believes.
“There’s nothing new about antisemitism, which is the most ancient form of hatred. What is new is the algorithmic amplification of antisemitism.
“As a New Yorker I lived through 9/11, I never thought in my wildest nightmares that I would see Osama bin Laden’s letter to America trending on TikTok. If that is not enough of a provocation to effectuate action against TikTok, then nothing is.”
Torres draws strong parallels between the racist opposition to the civil rights movement and the hatred that the Jewish community now faces. In an electrifying speech at Central Synagogue in Manhattan on Martin Luther King Day, he likened those who celebrated Hamas’ October 7 massacre to white people in the
Jim Crow era celebrating the lynching of black people.
He tells me that Dr King would have himself been horrified by the Hamas terrorist attack and also by the response, or rather lack of response, from many quarters.
“Dr King would’ve been appalled by the barbaric violence that we saw on October 7, but almost as appalling is the widespread indifference and silence.”
Like Dr King, Torres refuses to be cowed by the violent mob. He quotes Franklin Roosevelt when he says “the greatest thing we have to fear is fear itself”.
“For me, the greatest threat to liberal democracy does not come from the far right or from the far left, it comes from the complacency and cowardice of a centre that lives in fear of the extremes.”
One issue he refuses to be silent about is that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Here he is taking on many in his own party who see Israel and Palestine through the prism of identity politics and anti-colonialism. Such simplism allows them to easily identify, without having to engage their critical faculties, the good guys and the bad guys: it’s white Jews oppressing indigenous people of colour. That Torres is black adds power to his argument. That he is not college educated, where such views are imbibed, may make him more clear-sighted.
Few organisations do more to promote anti-Zionism in public life than the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Torres cites a pledge it asked its members to sign to never travel to Israel and to support BDS.
“In the DSA worldview, it is permissible to travel to China, which is committing genocide against Uyghurs Muslims, to travel to Russia, to Iran, to North Korea.
“But travel to the world’s only Jewish state is strictly forbidden. If that is not evidence of anti-Zionism as antisemitism, then I’m not sure what would be.” TikTok has denied failing to protect Jewish users and pushing pro-Palestinian content, saying: “Hateful ideologies, like antisemitism, are not and have never been allowed on our platform.”
The level of venom and vitriol is hard to overstate