Silence and denial enable deadly outcomes, captured by the slogan Silence=Death applied to both war in Gaza and AIDS deaths in Africa. Multiple violent attacks against Jews and Palestinians have been committed by perpetrators who are not members of those targeted communities. The Pittsburgh assassin was influenced by the racist Great Replacement Theory alleging Jewish conspiracy to contaminate white America with asylum seekers. In the 1980s, thousands died from AIDS before government acknowledgment, and public figures promoted punitive measures against gay men. Recent policies and rhetoric have dehumanized refugees, false claims by officials about HIV and Covid-19 persist, and termination of HIV programs has contributed to tens of thousands of deaths.
The landlord who attacked and killed a member of a Palestinian family in Illinois, the man who committed the "Tree of Life" massacre in Pittsburgh, the man who killed the Jews at the D.C. Jewish Museum, and those charged with attacking the Jewish woman and her friend in the Marina have something in common: As far as I know, none of them are Jewish, Palestinian or LGBTQI.
When AIDS emerged in the 1980s, thousands of people died before President Ronald Reagan even mentioned it. His press secretary joked about it, and political pundit William F. Buckley advocated for gay men to be tattooed on their buttocks and put into concentration camps. During Trump's first term, a queer asylum seeker from Central America died in ICE detention despite pleading for treatment. More recently, Trump's administration is targeting Haitian refugees for deportation as pet-eating vectors of AIDS.
Now that highly effective treatment and prevention is available, there is no reason to "blame the victim." Nonetheless, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy falsely suggests that HIV does not cause AIDS and has claimed without evidence that the SARS Covid-19 was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Most destructive of all is the sudden termination of highly effective HIV prevention and treatment programs. Researchers estimate that tens of thousands of people have already died in just a few months this year.
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