Brickbat: Intemperate Talk

Linden, New Jersey, Mayor Derek Armstead has apologized for making disparaging remarks about Hasidic Jews. In a secretly recorded conversation between Armstead and local Board of Education President Marlene Berghammer, Berghammer said, "If it's in a neighborhood school district, it should be, we don't mind if it is a black person or a Haitian-speaking person." Armstead replies, "That is what has to happen in order to keep our community from being taken over by guys with big hats and curls," an apparent reference to the city's growing Hasidic Jewish population. Armstead apologized for the remarks but said it is part of an extortion scheme: The comments were first revealed in a $950,000 lawsuit brought by former assistant superintendent Paul Oliveira, who claims he was forced to leave his job for opposing a scheme to keep Jews from being hired.

Comments

[Fire up the Woodchippers! (5-30 Banana Republic Day)]

Wow! Another Jew hating democrat. What a surprise.

[Vernon Depner]

Maybe he was talking about drag queens.

[Dan S.]

Concern about Hasidic Jews trying to take over local governments is actually legitimate, as there is a history of Hasidic groups trying to do exactly that. Whether there were any plans to attempt such a takeover in Linden, I don't know. Is there even a significant Hasidic community in Linden? But where it has happened, opposition to such takeovers notably includes liberal and secular Jews. And the conflicts within Israel between the Haredim and secular Israeli Jews should demonstrate that such concern need not be rooted in anti-Semitism.

[Medulla Oblongata]

Yeah, they're not the only ones.

The Guardian:

In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council.

They viewed the power shift and diversity as a symbolic but meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric that was a central theme of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.

Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: “Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.

In a tense monologue before the vote, Councilmember Mohammed Hassan shouted his justification at LGBTQ+ supporters: “I’m working for the people, what the majority of the people like.”

While Hamtramck is still viewed as a bastion of multiculturalism, the difficulties of local governance and living among neighbors with different cultural values quickly set in following the 2015 election. Some leaders and residents are now bitter political enemies engaged in a series of often vicious battles over the city’s direction, and the Pride flag controversy represents a crescendo in tension.

“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”

For about a century, Polish and Ukrainian Catholics dominated politics in Hamtramck, a city of 28,000 surrounded by Detroit. By 2013, largely Muslim Bangladeshi and Yemeni immigrants supplanted the white eastern Europeans, though the city remains home to significant populations of those groups, as well as African Americans, whites and Bosnian and Albanian Americans. According to the 2020 census some 30% to 38% of Hamtramck’s residents are of Yemeni descent, and 24% are of Asian descent, largely Bangladeshi.

After several years of diversity on the council, some see irony in an all-male, Muslim elected government that does not reflect the city’s makeup.

The resolution, which also prohibits the display of flags with ethnic, racist and political views, comes at a time when LGBTQ+ rights are under assault worldwide, and other US cities have passed similar bans, with the vast majority driven by often white politically conservative Americans.

[R Mac (5-30-24, sarc’s too drunk to remember what he thinks about it)]

A local government banning the flag of a subversive cult being flown on public property shouldn’t be controversial.

[Chumby]

A subversive pedo cult.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Did the city council invite the LGBTQXYZ leaders to a rooftop meeting?

[Rossami]

Campaigning to get elected (or even just represented) is hardly a "take over [of] local government". That's in fact what local government is supposed to be about.

[Fist of Etiquette]

So now simply being a decolonizer is illegal???

[Chumby]

I didn’t even know that Misek was in New Jersey much less a mayor there.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

End public schools.