Hanukkah: symbolic lights burn against anti-Semitism

Echo opinion by Sue Winthrop published in the Daily Camera newspaper, in Colorado: Hanukkah: A gift of light to the world today.

Hanukkah 2021

Every year at about this time I think about the story of Hanukkah. Though considered a minor Jewish holiday, this year the story of Hanukkah seems to have greater significance. 

This historical event took place in the 2nd century BCE (Before Christian Era). At the time King Antiochus IV outlawed any Jewish practice and defiled the Jewish Temple. A small army of men that were Jewish, the Maccabees, rebelled against this religious persecution and regained control over the temple. The eternal flame in the temple seemed to only have enough oil to last for one day. Instead the eternal flame lasted for eight days, until more oil could be found. Therefore, the eight days of Hanukkah.

It seems to me, this year the story of Hanukkah signifies the survival of the Jewish People. As anti-Semitism and hate crimes are on the rise I think about what we can do as a nation. While our days are shorter and this is the darkest point of the winter, people all over the world are lighting the menorah. Bringing the gift of light into their homes. The lighting of the menorah seems to stand for hope, peace and change.

I hope that this year can be different. That our country will start to heal its wounds and come together. To quit the fighting amongst us over differences in our beliefs and the way we look. 

That leaders in Washington will start setting a better example.

That people in our nation will start thinking about others and put their selfish behavior behind. From Sue Winthrop in Longmont, Colorado 

Dangerous Former Guy cult

Trump cult is Nazi Germany redux.....

Think about it! Echo opinion letter published in the Daily Camera, a Boulder County, Colorado newspaper:

Donald Trump is obviously fixated on a return to Naziism

Not far from the tree

This is Nazi Germany of the 1930s/40s. #TFG'- Trump’s father, Fred Sr., was a seemingly vicious racist, anti-Semite, slum lord and a possible member of the Ku Klux Klan, as he was arrested at a KKK brawl in 1927 (“In 1927, Donald Trump’s father was arrested after a Klan riot in Queens,” Feb. 29, 2016, Washington Post) and possibly involved in the New York-New Jersey region of the German American Bund, or “Amerikadeutscher Bund,” an organization that supported the goals of Hitler’s Nazi Party, and it’s reasonable to assume he personally idealized Adolph Hitler.

The “Bund” was the overseas extension of the German Nazi Party, and it took its orders directly from Berlin. There is some evidence that Fred Trump was, in fact, a spy for the Nazi Party. Curiously, his FBI file from 1927 to 1960 has “disappeared.” In the 1930s, Fred Trump reportedly donated millions to the German Nazi Party.

It seems Donald Trump grew up embracing the Nazi Party and Hitler’s beliefs and methodologies; they form the basis upon which he has conducted his entire life and business. 

These horrible beliefs are laid out clearly in Hitler’s 1927 book, “Mein Kampf,” and later in a compilation of Hitler’s speeches published as “My New Order.” According to a 1990 Vanity Fair interview, Ivana Trump told her lawyer, Michael Kennedy, that (Trump) “constantly reads a book of Hitler’s speeches ­and keeps a copy of ‘Mein Kampf’ at his bedside for reference. (“7 Takeaways From Vanity Fair’s 1990 Profile of Donald Trump, Aug. 5, 2015)

Today’s senior Republican leadership has clearly embraced these same beliefs in order to advance the party’s goals of seizing and maintaining control of the federal government permanently, using disenfranchisement of non-Republican voters and gerrymandering to seize and keep control through the Electoral College. Trump’s actions while president continue to indicate that he had and has no respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, or most of all the truth. Lying is integral to the Republican party’s current strategy.

Causing death through murder of more than 6 million Jews, and more than 75 million more dead because of the Nazis, today the Republican party has embraced their early beliefs, and is using their processes, policies, politics and procedures to seemingly replicate what Adolph Hitler created in Germany, promoting this evil right here in the United States.

Welcome to the new, better, more modern American Republican Nazi Party. Trump himself is an emotional, intellectual, ethical, moral and religious eunuch, and a pathological liar, but his influence and that of his cult of followers is an existential threat to the future of the United States.

Kenneth A. Marcoux in Boulder, Colorado