Feb 3, 2019 4 min read

National Public Radio aired an excellent program last November which examined the innovation in our workforce. Various experts explained how the loss of jobs in the United States was directly tied to automation, at a time of massive productivity in our national economy, rather than the offshoring of jobs overseas as claimed by misinformed Trump supporters. One month later, NPR interviewed a Lyft driver in Detroit who still had hope, even though NPR said 50 percent of the city lived below the poverty line. The Lyft driver claimed there were no jobs and no money.

Two days later, NPR turned away from the poverty and drugs in Detroit to address other woes – those of undocumented immigrants marching to our border begging for work. The government of Mexico, in a humanitarian effort to help, offered the immigrants immediate jobs in U.S.-owned garment factories. According to the Mexican administrator interviewed by NPR, there were between 10,000 to 12,000 immediate job openings, but factories were having a hard time finding employees because even Mexicans considered the jobs to be too slavish, and too low paying!

These jobs, of course, are no longer in the United States because of our excellence in automating low-level manual labor jobs out of existence. Too bad folks in Detroit are moonlighting as Lyft drivers, or dealing drugs in the ghetto, to grift by in our high-tech economy. NPR seems to think the sweat-shop factories Wall Street elites are funding over the border have not a thing to do with our unemployment, the stagnation of our wages, or Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump. Does anyone at NPR think all those poverty-line people in Detroit might have voted for Trump?

What’s more, NPR insists the xenophobia that Trump supporters have promoted, and the animus aimed at poor Mexicans and Arab Muslims fleeing poverty and violence, is dangerous. Nowhere was this more evident than in the recent shooting spree at a Pittsburgh synagogue. A rabid racist, claiming the synagogue was bringing Muslim refugees into the United States to “slaughter my people,” opened fire in a house of prayer. NPR made it clear that the president, and his supporters, were in part to blame for politically promulgating this type of racist rhetoric.

What NPR’s reporters did not make clear was why a Jewish refugee center was bringing Muslim refugees into the United States. As we all know, Jews and Muslims have an unhappy history. Jewish Israelis often bulldoze Arab Muslim homes, and shoot armed Arabs who resist such land seizure for settlements, as Americans once did to Indians. Today, more and more of Israel was once some poor Palestinian Muslim’s home. So why was a Jewish temple in Pittsburgh bringing Muslims here, while Israeli Jews expel Muslims and built a militarized wall to keep them out?

In fact, Israel has such angst about attacks by understandably outraged Muslims that it authorized educators to carry weapons to protect their classes. A Jewish student showed me a picture of his professor carrying an AR-15 rifle while leading class outdoors. Although Trump advocates emulating this example after a series of school shootings, leading Democrats totally disagree. Diane Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, Richard Blumenthal and Michael Bloomberg think we should ban guns here in the United States. Our Pittsburgh Democrats are now preparing to do just that.

This leads me to an observation, and a question, for the reporters at NPR and leading Democrats. If Trump wants to keep jobs in, and build a wall to keep certain people out, and if Trump wants teachers to pack heat for protection, and America to maintain its ethnic majority – following Israel’s example – why is it that bigoted and bad? What does that make Jewish supporters of the State of Israel? The way many leading Democrats support the State of Israel, one might imagine they would all be on board with the Trump agenda! Jarod Kushner can assure you that it works.

I think America needs leading Democrats to go on NPR and explain their political philosophy, and why they oppose funding a wall here, but voted for aid to help fund one in Israel, or why they want to ban guns here while voting for gun sales to Israel. Americans have a right to know why Dems believe what works so well for Israel is somehow so wrong for America. I wonder if any of them will remember Baruch Goldstein, who shot 29 Muslims dead at prayer inside a mosque because he believed that Arab Muslims were only interested in slaughtering his people.

Joseph M. Mazgaj is a substitute teacher in the Peters Township School District.