The New Swastika

Many moons ago, in my restaurant days, some jackass spray-painted two swastikas on the sidewalk near our entrance. Our restaurant's neighborhood was heavily Jewish, and at one point boasted the highest concentration of Jewish seniors in the US and perhaps the world. Many were long-standing and loyal patrons. Obviously, we were annoyed. Naturally, many of our patrons were upset, and I quickly ran out and bought a sandblasting setup so I could remove what an idiot scrawled.

Random vandalism is part of restaurant life, especially when that restaurant is open 24/7. That particular bit of hate-mongering didn't happen again, so I just parked it as a one-off, and likely the product of youthful stupidity.

That incident came to mind the other day, when I passed the mailbox depicted above. I was in Tarrytown, NY, a village on the Hudson River sandwiched between the foot of the Tappan Zee (never Gov. Mario M. Cuomo) bridge and the Sleepy Hollow of Headless Horseman fame. A Pink Floyd tribute band was playing, and having visited the eponymous Music Hall before, I knew that a couple turns would bring me to a sure-thing parking spot close by.

I spotted the mailbox on my way to the venue. After shaking my head in disgust, I snapped a pic and shared it with my "home base" Facebook group.

The results were as expected.

On my way back, I opted to be a good citizen and undid the defacing of Post Office property.

I'm sure the hate-spewing vandal thought him or herself clever with the use of the ‘From’ and ‘To’ fields. I'm also inclined to believe that it's more likely the work of some idiot who has let woke and left-tribalism cordon off the brain's frontal lobe than of someone who has carried a lifelong hatred of Jews in his or her soul and finally found a mantra by which to unleash it.

That's an observation, but it's not an excuse.

It's a condemnation.

"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" is the mantra of a genocidal culture. One that's quite ironically represented by the first letter in those COEXIST bumper stickers that have lost their luster and prevalence in recent years.

The first symbol refuses to coexist with either the fourth or the second.

The radical Left that has browbeaten the good-meaning, left-leaning folks who plastered those stickers on their Priuses is at its core viciously intolerant, and Hamas's 10/7 barbarity was the trigger that revealed it to the world. No matter that the Islamist culture the Woke have chosen to side with would throw many of them off rooftops, of course. The screams about Israel committing genocide is quite possibly the biggest case of deflection I’ve ever seen. It’s in Israel that coexistence is actually happening, with 21% of the populace being Palestinian. Guess how many Jews there were in Gaza before 10/7? None - they all left or were removed by Israel in 2005.

At this point, anyone with two brain cells to rub together should have thought through the meaning of "From the river..." There are no Jews in Gaza, and if the people who call themselves Palestinians have their way, there will be no Jews between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Seven-plus million Jews would have to be "displaced," to euphemize it.

The Third Reich had similar ideas.

Equivocation, denial, deflection, and tendentious explanations notwithstanding. You don't chant a mantra that means "no more Jews" and get to claim it doesn't mean "no more Jews." Would anyone believe you if you were raising your arm in a Nazi salute but explained that you only wanted the trains to run on time?

"From the river..." is the equivalent of a swastika. We should show the same revulsion for those who chant it as we do to those who draw them.