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FOP letter fraught with inaccuracies

November 6, 2020

There is too much in Robert J. Schappert’s paranoid, conspiracy-laced screed, “Enemies of democracy are upon us,” to fully address in this space, so I’m going to comment only on the words that offend me most.

I’ll begin with Schappert’s assertion that philanthropist “George Soros reportedly funds” Antifa and Black Lives Matter. He continues, “Where do you think the funds come from to supply rioters with pallets of bricks and water bottles to throw at law enforcement? 

Let’s call this charge what it is: an anti-semitic trope. 

It gives me no pleasure to call out bigotry, especially when it’s spouted by the president of the Sussex County Fraternal Order of Police.

Schappert knows what he’s doing when he invokes the name of George Soros this way, and if he doesn’t, he’s naïve or not the researcher he pretends to be. 

Soros is a 90-year-old Hungarian Jew who survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary and moved to the United Kingdom after the war.

Through his Open Society Foundation, Soros has spent $32 billion to assist democracy-building efforts in the United States and around the world. He initially focused his philanthropy on nurturing budding democracies in Eastern Europe that emerged after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

That, however, has been lost on people like Schappert who suggest Soros is a supporter of anarchists and Marxists. The charge is as absurd as a tweet once sent by Roseanne Barr claiming that Soros is a former Nazi. None other than Donald Trump gave this hateful nonsense currency when he retweeted it. 

The president’s lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, also retweeted a Soros slur, this one calling him the Antichrist. And the National Republican Congressional Committee ran an ad in Minnesota last month that portrayed Soros in front of a pile of money, charging him with bankrolling left-wing mobs. 

It’s no coincidence that Soros, who is Jewish and a liberal Democrat, has become a favorite target of right-wing bigots, Trump and many of his supporters. In the final days of his 2016 campaign, Trump ran an ad that portrayed Soros and two other prominent Jews - Federal Reserve Board Chairwoman Janet Yellen and Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs —as “globalists” who made money off the backs of hard-working Americans. Globalist, by the way, is another dog whistle that’s been used through the ages to tar Jews as disloyal citizens. It was favored by Hitler, who said Jews were “internationalists” who used their nefarious business skills in ways that harmed the fatherland.

This kind of language has consequences. Two years ago, an angry Trump loyalist delivered a pipe bomb to Soros’s home. Such ugly assertions have been part of the Trump playbook since the moment he came down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy, calling Mexicans rapists and criminals.  

This is language we should not condone, especially from somebody who represents the Fraternal Order of Police. 

It is also curious that Schappert never mentions the police killings of blacks when criticizing the demonstrations that have occurred in cities throughout the nation.

It’s as if these Marxist, anarchist left-wing mobs as he describes them came out of nowhere to inflict injury and cause mayhem just for sport. Black Lives Matter was founded in 2015 to end police brutality. Since then, the organization has called out dozens of police killings. Nobody condones looting and violence, but surely no one can credibly claim that these police-inflicted deaths, now captured on mobile phones and body cams, are all justified. 

Finally, Schappert attempts to tie Antifa to Joe Biden by noting that going to antifa.com takes you directly to Biden’s site. He’s right. But as someone who claims to be privy to police intelligence, does he really think the redirect isn’t a hack?

This would be tantamount to signing on to donaldjtrump.com and being redirected to Stormy Daniels’ site. As Joe would say, “Come on!” 

Gerald S. Cohen
Lewes
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