Thread by @MarkLeuchter

On the death of #SheldonAdelson - a brief thread.

Sheldon Adelson - the megadonor to the GOP who received the genuflection of virtually all hopefuls on the Republican national stage - is dead. 1/

Adelson pumped money into the very GOP machinery that has enabled Trumpism, facilitated policies that have torn children from their parents, cultivated racism, antisemitism, and white supremacy, and that has now led to the deaths of 350,000+ Americans from COVID. 2/

Some people who appreciated the money he threw at Israeli groups and initiatives are going to be angry if I celebrate the demise of this merchant of corruption and death. "Jews don't celebrate death", right? Wrong. 3/

The "Song of the Sea" (Exodus 15:1-18) is the oldest text in the Hebrew Bible, the foundation of Israelite religious belief, and it is nothing but a celebration of a mass death of Egyptians at the Red Sea during the Exodus. 4/

1 Samuel 18 preserves an old song that tells us that both David and Saul were celebrated for slaughtering "thousands" and "myriads". 5/

The Passover Seder ritual has a song that literally contains a line saying that Jews would have been satisfied if God only killed Egypt's firstborn. 6/

And every (non-Pandemic) year, Jewish parents take their kids to synagogue to hear the Scroll of Esther read on the holiday of Purim, and celebrate as the passages describing the slaughter of Haman, his sons, and other adversaries are read aloud. 7/

"But these were enemies!" the argument will go. Sure. And so was Adelson. An enemy to this country, an enemy to democracy, an enemy to intellectual honesty and facts, and ultimately, an enemy to his fellow American Jews who did not share GOP values. 8/

I'm a Jew, living through an antisemitic, white supremacist, Trumpist insurrection that is the closest thing to the Nazi threat in early 1930s Germany that we've seen SINCE that threat. And Adelson helped empower these people 9/:

Adelson was a fiend, a source of danger, a traitor to this country's principles and an enabler of violent destruction. Now he's dead. His memory will not be a blessing. 10/10