I have seen the clip now. I have seen her face. And I will not pretend I looked at it with cool eyes. Because I did not.
Two women wanted a bath.
That was all.
A married couple, a quite ordinary evening, a bit of warm water and a few hours together, the smallest and most human thing one can wish for. They were not carrying a flag. They were not shouting a slogan. But one of them wore a small gold Star of David around her neck, a faith worn close to the skin - as I myself do, only with a cross - and that was enough.
Enough for the question to fall at the door -
- are you Zionists?
Enough for a piece of jewellery to make two people into suspects, and for the verdict passed over them on the spot to read complicity in genocide...!??
Just think about that for a moment. How COMPLETELY INSANE this is. A piece of gold around a neck, and two women suddenly stand accused of one of the heaviest words the language contains at all.
And what hit me hardest was not the anger in the one who turned them away, because there was no real anger. There was a false smile. Not peace, but self-satisfaction, a calm and comfortable certainty of standing on "the right side", and from there the right to look down on two women and judge them out.
Hear what I say to you now, you who smiled - you think you are good. You are not. You did the oldest and ugliest thing there is, and you did it with a smile on your face, because the Lie has taught you that Cruelty feels like Goodness, when it just points at the right ones.
And it becomes even more incomprehensible. Because the space we find ourselves in is a gay sauna, a place whose only reason for existing is that no one should be turned away for who they are. A space born precisely of that wound, which it is to be stopped in a doorway and found wrong.
That space put a guard at the door, weighed a person's loyalty and threw a married couple out because of a Star of David. The most vulnerable of yesterday guard the door today. Welcome to all, and get out of here, in the same breath.
What kind of plague in the brain have these people reached for?
The worst is not even that it happened. The worst is that it happened in Barcelona, in the middle of a city that wears its liberalism like a medal on its chest, recorded on video, laid open to the whole world.
And see the bystanders who see it happen and say nothing. That is how it always spreads. Not through those who shout, but through those who become silent and tell themselves it is not their table. The way we receive it says more about us than we want to know.
One can no longer hang a sign saying Jews are not welcome. But one can ask a question, take one word, fill it with hatred and repeat it, until the Word alone can close that door, which no sign may any longer.
This is not the evil of the past with boots and shouts.
This is what it looks like now.
It smiles. And it thinks it is good.
Clips like this circulate every day.
The same is also carried forward here in this country.
Just say no.
Put your foot down.
Hard. Down.
If necessary.
❤️🔥🪽
