Statement on the Million Youth March

Statement on the Million Youth March
Joseph Kaye
Press Conference at State Office Building
September 9, 1998
My name is Joseph Kaye. I am a member of an organization called People Power, as well as the Network Against the "Counter-Terrorism" Act. I have engaged for more than forty years in the struggle for social justice. As a Jewish American I am proud of following that strand of Jewish tradition which has placed Jews disproportionately in the forefront of progressive thought and action. I am here today to raise an alarm concerning a growing threat to the Jewish people in the United States, highlighted by the most recent events around the Million Youth March. That threat does not come from the intemperate remarks of Kalid Muhammad in which he misguidedly singled out Jews in his justified denunciation of genocidal conditions faced by the African-American people.
The fact is that African-Americans in their great masses have never been a threat to the Jewish people, have never acted to prevent Jewish people from getting a good education, have never tried to bar Jews from employment, have never tried to block their political advancement. Never raised social bars to them. It was not people with black skins who slaughtered six million Jews. And the neo-Nazi groups, the militias which are proliferating throughout the country with impunity, spewing hate, backed up by automatic weapons, engaging in military maneuvers under the complacent eyes of the authorities -- contain no African-Americans.
But there is more for Jews to worry about. We are witnessing the ever more rapid march of the country toward a police state, toward the gutting of our Bill of Rights. We see the growing official trampling of human rights, particularly the rights of the so-called minorities. As Holocaust survivors and their descendants, Jews should be particularly sensitive to the smell of Fascism.
Nowhere is this official repression more evident than in New York City today under the Giuliani administration. Giuliani does not even try to hide his contempt for the law, for the Constitution. I will not go through a litany of his repressive acts but mention here only his handling of the Million Youth March. Giuliani tried to justify his Gestapo tactics by calling the march a hate march, fraught with the likelihood of violence.
Well, I was at the march -- no mean feat, by the way, for the police did everything possible to keep people from getting to it, not only closing the subways, but barricading block after block leading to the rally site, then slicing up the crowd and keeping the participants in pen-like conditions -- a truly chilling experience, a police state experience.
The hate march turned out to be peaceful and filled with love. Yes, I, a European-American, a white man, did feel menaced. But the menace didn't come from the friendly crowd. It came from the thousands of cops with light complexions. Pastor Niemuller's words are famous. "First they came for the Jews...." And the other communities shrugged it off. After all, they were not Jews. Today, they are coming for Black people and people of color generally. If Jewish people allow themselves to become complicit in this -- complicit in their encouragement or complicit in their silence, it is only a matter of time before it will be our turn.
Joseph Kaye's commentary was run on the WBAI Evening News
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