{"id":59624,"date":"2018-05-08T08:02:49","date_gmt":"2018-05-08T13:02:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/?p=59624"},"modified":"2018-05-22T03:27:19","modified_gmt":"2018-05-22T08:27:19","slug":"leave-the-kids-out-of-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/inspiration\/leave-the-kids-out-of-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Leave the Kids Out of It"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was only up on Twitter for a day or two, so maybe you missed it. I hope you missed it because it was terrible. It was there on Sunday when I decided to write about this and gone on Monday when I sat down to actually write it.<\/p>\n

It was a video that went viral on multiple social media platforms showing a grown man verbally abusing a small child (maybe four years old). The nature of the abuse was the child\u2019s Hasidic-style haircut \u2013 a mostly-shaved head with long payes<\/em> (sidelocks). It\u2019s certainly not a style common outside of Hasidic communities. The man was laughing at the child, saying that he felt bad that they (presumably the child\u2019s parents) cut his hair like that. \u201cI\u2019d be crying if I looked like that, too, bro,\u201d the man says at one point. Perhaps the child was crying because, you know, a strange adult man was mocking him for no apparent reason?<\/p>\n

The video was widely shared because people found it funny, which is in and of itself disheartening. What\u2019s more disheartening is that when people pointed out how inappropriate the video was, some viewers doubled down on it, urging critics to \u201claugh it off\u201d and move along. Some people tried to provide a positive spin, that the original poster was sincerely commiserating with the child over what he considered to be tonsorial faux pas<\/em>, but an honest reading of the video does not support such an interpretation. A number of commenters tagged Twitter itself, asking them to remove the video as a violation of standards \u2013 a request that appears to have eventually been met. As of today, the New York Post<\/em> reports<\/strong><\/a> that the video can still be found on Facebook.<\/p>\n

The general consensus is that this video wouldn’t have gotten as far as it did had the abused child not been Jewish.\u00a0We have previously discussed<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0why, in this enlightened era, people still consider the Jews to be fair game.\u00a0(In short, they see attacking Jews as \u201cpunching up,\u201d which is okay.) This may be wrong but, even if one does feel this way, leave the kids out of it.<\/em><\/p>\n

There are rules about involving children in our conflicts. These basically boil down to: don\u2019t do it. That\u2019s a pretty universal standard:<\/p>\n