When Good People Do Nothing

To the Editor,

I write this letter as a concerned member of the Chatham Borough community and not to promote any particular candidate or party for Chatham Borough Council. I did not discuss this letter with any campaign.

Edmund Burke (1730–1797) wrote, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” President John F. Kennedy echoed the sentiment and I believe it still applies today. This is why I believe we should all stand up and emphatically declare that we will not tolerate bigoted public statements by any candidate for public office and that such statements outweigh any record of service when it comes to an individual’s candidacy for Chatham Borough Council.

I was troubled after attending the Chatham Borough Council Candidate Forum this past Thursday. Not by what was asked or said during the forum, but by what was not asked. No question even remotely broached the topic of the hateful comments by candidate Peter Hoffman which have recently come to light—comments that he initially defended before the resulting public outcry made it clear that defending these comments was the wrong response.

I believe that deeply held, personal views critically influence a public official’s policy decisions. Additionally, the personal character of our elected officials directly reflects who we are as a community and sends a message to others, including our children—the most impressionable of us all. This is why I feel a closer examination of publicly voiced beliefs by our candidates for public office is required.

In the interests of accuracy and contextual relevance, whole quotes and citations are given. In a public comment in 2008, the candidate wrote on the website Bare Naked Islam:

“So these are the practitioners of the ‘religion of peace’? Islam is a sick, backwards faith practiced by low life scum. This girl was innocent and did not deserve this brutal punishment. Clearly there’s no room for love or forgiveness in Islam. Until the ‘moderate’ muslims [sic] reign in their sick brethren and stop this type of behavior, Islam will always be the religion of beasts in my view.”

After these views became public, the candidate defended his comments by saying they were in response to watching a video of the stoning of a young girl. However, the video directly preceding the above comments was not an attack by Muslims. The following description appeared with that video under the title “Previous stoning of another young girl in Iraq”:

“Up to 1000 men from the Yezidi Kurdish community of Mosul killed a teenager who’s [sic] only crime was running away to marry a man whom she loved. In a short mobile video clip which appears to have been taken by locals at seen [sic] of the murder, the girl is seen being ambushed on her way home by a group of up to 1000 men who were waiting for her to return; the men killed her in the most brutal way possible, by throwing large stones on her head. The following clips show that while she is alive and crying for help she is taunted and kicked in her stomach until someone finishes her off by throwing a large stone on her face.”

As another commenter explained, the Yezidi Kurdish community is a non-Muslim community—a community that has actually been targeted by ISIS. Yazidis, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind... (last visited Oct. 29, 2018).

Even if the attackers had been Muslim, of the many ways to express the utter dismay at watching something so atrocious, disparaging an entire religion does not come to mind.

And the candidate’s bigoted views do not stop there. He also seems to harbor prejudice regarding hyphenated Americans in his Letter to the Editor entitled Diversity is Our Strength, Including Diversity of Opinions.

The term hyphenated American was an epithet used from 1890 to 1920 to disparage Americans. Hyphenated American, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind... (last visited Oct. 29, 2018).

This prejudice stems from the idea that “…a hyphenated American is not an American at all…”—a quote from Theodore Roosevelt. President Woodrow Wilson similarly regarded “hyphenated Americans” with suspicion, saying, “[a]ny man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.” Woodrow Wilson also held a White House screening of the movie The Birth of a Nation—a movie credited as being one of the events that inspired the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. A Presidential stamp on bigoted remarks and ideas does not make them OK.

America has never been a country that authoritatively requires or expects people to give up their culture or individual identity in order to assimilate into some fictional ideal of what a “true” or “real” American looks like. The “scholarly” article that the candidate references to support his views is entitled The End of Identity Politics—an anti-affirmative-action and anti-immigration article that is no more scholarly than I believe it is correct. The End of Identity Politics, https://www.hoover.org/researc... (last visited Oct. 29, 2018). Scholarly articles cite sources. The Hoover article cites no sources and is clearly an opinion piece. As the candidate said regarding the Hoover Article, we can chose to “agree with it or not.” I emphatically do not.

We who identify as Italian-American, Irish-American, or otherwise, do not do so in exclusion of our American identity, but in addition thereto—the epitome of our American melting pot. Being an Italian-Spanish-German-English-Irish-American myself has not made me less of an American, but more. And I have a big problem voting for anyone to represent me who believes that I am not a real American, that my Korean-American wife is not a real American, that our children are not real Americans.

Some may say—as the candidate did—that we should be able to “express personal opinions without being attacked for them”. But this is the exact opposite of why our Constitution guarantees us the freedom of speech. We have this freedom so that we can openly question authority. I cherish and will always defend our freedom of speech. But with this freedom comes responsibility. When someone exercises his freedom to voice bigoted beliefs in public, he must accept the responsibility of being judged publicly for them.

If the candidate wants to continue to serve Chatham Borough, I urge him to do so on one of the many Commissions or sub-groups in the Borough. I believe that everyone deserves a second chance. The best way to get people to see a different point of view is to engage, not exclude. But I do not think that we as a community should tell our neighbors—let alone our children—that such rhetoric is excusable in the people we elevate to represent us as a town.

In first grade, fellow classmates told my daughter that girls cannot be President. Such beliefs do not appear from thin air, but are fostered in our children by what they see and hear. We cannot afford to foster hateful and bigoted ideas in our community. We are seeing some real-world effects of tolerating hateful speech by our elected officials right now. We cannot sit by idly and excuse hateful, bigoted rhetoric in our elected officials simply because an apology was given or because of a record of community service.

For all these reasons, I urge you to reject hatred, reject bigotry, and reject this candidate serving on our Chatham Borough Council.

Sincerely,

Joseph Treloar

Chatham Borough