Letter to the editor July 28

Anti-Muslim Gingrich in good company

I was pleased to read the stern rebuke of one of today’s prominent Donald Trump-style blowhards, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (“Gingrich’s irresponsible screed,” July 21).

If there is anything to be said in Gingrich’s defense for his chilling call for the interrogation of Muslims in an effort to determine their ideology, it is that he was playing to the standard-bearer of the party, the vile megalomaniac who seeks to lead the free world. As an esteemed syndicated columnist has said, anyone who would agree to run on a ticket with Donald Trump would immediately be disqualified by reasonable people because that candidate would believe that Trump is qualified to be president.

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Gingrich and others who have capitulated to Trump, including the shameless individuals who spoke on his behalf at the 2016 Republican National Convention, should long be remembered for devoting themselves to a man and a jumbled ideology which plays to the worst in us.

The tortured history of our people includes discrimination that we have suffered throughout history, this nation’s borders having been closed to us at various times in which we sought refuge from persecution, imprisonment and death, and the nearly successful effort to exterminate us through the Holocaust. It is difficult for me to understand how any person of our faith can endorse or have anything to do with Donald Trump when he stands for all that is the antithesis of the Judaism that I know and love, a faith which preaches repairing the world and being kind to our neighbors, especially those who are in need.

Hatred, ignorance, intolerance and scapegoating are not Jewish values.

Oren Spiegler

Upper St. Clair