I was born and raised a Jew, though I have left the active practice of the faith, I embrace my background and do not deny it. I did not raise my children as Jews, Christians, or Muslims, but as people who would respect other human beings for who they are; not as who they might be pictured by bigots. I was raised in the 50′s and 60′s in Minneapolis where we Jews lived in several neighborhoods in high concentrations. We had “our own” country and social clubs since we were denied admittance and participation in the “christian” clubs of the city. I was call kike, Jew-boy and whatever denigrating names my neighbors deemed to bestow on me and to this day do not understand what it is/was that I did to deserve to be treated in that way. Wasn’t my skin white,  just like theirs? Wasn’t I a citizen born in Minneapolis and raised there by parents also born in the USA and Caucasian just like them? No, we don’t bury our dead standing up. No, we don’t drink the blood of christian children. No we don’t own all the banks and the media. To this day I have a hard time with self righteous people calling out others such as me as unworthy of being Americans.

And now we can add the Muslims to the equation as well. Lowe’s Stores and the travel sight Kayak, both of whom I shop, have decided that they cannot sponsor a very plain, straight forward show about American Muslims because they are not uniformly depicted as radicals somehow different from the rest of us. As a child I learned of the atrocities of Germany durning World War II which tried to exterminate peoples they considered inferiors: Jews, “Gypsies”, gays, communists and anyone who did not toe the party line. Millions were killed to prove some twisted ideology about a “pure” race. And now right here in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” Muslims are being singled out in just the same way. And even worse, it seems that so called “pure Christians” are once again at the heart of the problem.

I tend to vote with my pocketbook when I get this mad over business decisions involving the defamation and segregation of people. That is why I immediately unsubscribed from Kayak and sent an email to Lowe’s stating my opposition to their anti-Muslim behavior. I will not shop at either place, period. I will pay more, search more and do whatever it takes to avoid those who display such bigoted behavior.

The narrative is that the Pilgrims came to this continent to escape religious persecution. Now that their descendants are in the majority here, they seem to have lost total track of their own history. That’s sick, and I will not assist them in what I perceive as the same evil that befell my tribe in Europe just before my birth.