RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #185 (5/4/2024): Three Cheers for the NYPD
airs May 4, 2024 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube video:
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for early May 2024.
Credit where credit is due. And I don’t mean the credit cards where I owe 30 percent interest on a sofa I bought in 2014. No, I’m talking about: let’s applaud a job well done in a tremendously difficult situation.
Ever since George Floyd — you know, the drug addict, thief, armed robber, and counterfeiter who was horribly murdered by overzealous law enforcement — ever since that subject for statues became a symbol for systemic racism, cops have been betwixt and between. On the one hand, they face loathing from communities where, admittedly, they behaved badly for decades. On the other, they’re expected to be models of self-control while putting their lives on the line. Picture trying to do your job when the very people you are tasked to protect are shouting to defund you. Imagine that you take pride in serving the Big Apple, yet you’re automatically lumped in with the bad apples.
And now imagine that you’ve been called to a college campus where hundreds of deluded 20-somethings — whose age alone would mark them as enemies of authority — imagine that these liberal loonies and BIPOC buttheads have overtaken a major American university. As part of their tantrum, they’ve camped out on the lawn, blocked access to thoroughfares, and even vandalized a building. The school President has hithered and dithered, not wanting to spark violence or squelch free speech, but terrified to lose benefactors who might balk at endowing a university whose main export has become anti-Semitism.
By the time Columbia’s leader, Minouche Shafik, realized things had gotten out of control, things had gotten out of control. What to do? What to do? Let the monkeys run amok? Surrender Hamilton Hall, Lewisohn Hall, Kravis Hall, the ironically named “Harmony Hall” — all to a bunch of tent-pitching yahoos who couldn’t find Gaza on a map, a map in a bookstore, a bookstore in a city, and a city on their non-stop TikTok feeds?
At a certain point, order must be restored. It doesn’t matter that the disrupters were non-violent, and it wouldn’t matter if they were there supportingIsrael against the demons of Hamas. They were asked to leave and refused. They were commanded to leave, and instead, smashed windows and home-invaded the administration building.
That’s when you send in the cops. With riot gear.
And that, finally, is what President Shafik did. After a week of letting the hyenas run the zoo, she called in the NYPD who, with exceptional restraint and by-the-book behavior, broke up Hamas on the Hudson. Crying sophomores, shrieking professors, double-talking outside agitators — rounded up, plunked on paddy wagons, and slapped on the wrists, alas, but at least temporarily out of commission.
This, my friends, is how it’s done. Because, God knows, the cops showed more self-control than I would have to these Morningside morons. The first one to shout “Free Gaza” would have to do it through a mouth full of broken teeth. The first holding a “Divest” sign would have to hoist it with cracked knuckles. And the first Jew tweeting “Cease Fire Now!” would have so much mace sprayed in her face, her eyes would turn all four colors of the Palestinian flag.
This is why I am not a cop. This is also why the New York Police Department — and every Blue brigade that’s been summoned to these conflagrations — deserves oodles of kudos for the job they did and the way they did it. I’m sure many of these officers agreed with the protesters — we’re not talking Einsteins here, on either side of the grass — but they followed reasonable directions in a professional manner, and they deserve our gratitude and admiration.
And when the green-tent vermin swarm back onto the lawns of Columbia, NYU, Yale, UCLA, or any other ivy-choked nest of minacious radicalism, let the liars on the left be met head on by what’s right.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
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Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with theatrical director Ethan McSweeny
