Why Does Rep. Anna Eskamani Want "Peace" With Nazis?
The answer lies in her earlier posts and voting record.
In January of 2022, Rep. Anna Eskamani - who represents a large part of Orlando in the Florida Legislature - rightfully denounced Nazis who protested near UCF. Her comments called those individuals “racists,” “anti-Semitic,” “absolutely disgusting,” and “empowered by conservative politicians.”
Yet just two years later, when faced with a much more distressing situation - not merely a protestor, but a hate criminal who vowed to slaughter a group of Jewish students - her response was markedly different.
Rather than denounce Seif Asi, the antisemite who perpetuated this blatant hate crime, Eskamani chose the path of peace.
Eskamani wants people to “use peace as a tool for advocacy” in response to a neo-Nazi aligned student threatening a group of Jews. Eskamani would rather Seif Asi “lead with love” as opposed to shooting up a bunch of Jews. Eskamani thinks Seif’s “emotions are high,” apparently explaining his behavior. Eskamani certainly doesn’t think of Seif as an “absolutely disgusting” person.
Discerning readers may notice that Eskamani did not ask the Nazis two years ago to “use peace as a tool for advocacy” or to “lead with love.” She rightly denounced them for their murderous antisemitism. Now that another Nazi-adjacent student has done the same? He gets love and peace.
Distressed readers may ask what could have changed in the past 2 years to allow Rep. Eskamani to extend kindness to Jew killers. They may ask who gave her the right to take a conciliatory tone with our murderers.
The answer can be found in a single “Yes” vote which Eskamani lodged in favor of a ceasefire with Hamas, the genocidal terrorist organization.
“My values compel me to be on the side of peace,” she wrote at the time.
The word peace in that statement is a gross distortion of reality. As Eskamani should know, there is no such thing as “peace” with an organization institutionally dedicated to your erasure from the Earth. The “peace” that Eskamani agitates for is the same “peace” which existed on October 6th. It is an illusion - an illusion which Seif Asi’s arrest threatens to shatter for “peace”-supporting individuals.
Why does Eskamani ask us to accept today’s antisemitism and not yesterday’s antisemitism? As the acclaimed Jewish scholar Dara Horn wrote in her book, People Love Dead Jews, “readers… were essentially insisting that Jewish suffering was only worth examining if it provided… ‘a service to mankind.’” The Holocaust in particular is used to “[drive] home the importance of love,” or to teach people “a fancy metaphor for the limits of Western civilization.” The Holocaust (and its metaphorical representation in the traditional neo-Nazis who protested in 2022) can only serve this role because the Jews did not - could not - fight back.
That is the reason why Eskamani condemns some Nazis and not others. The 2022 Nazis hearken back to the Holocaust and defenseless Jews, meaning that Eskamani can condemn them with ease. The 2024 Nazis, however, represent a scenario where the Jews have and are fighting back. Defending today’s Jews does not reward anyone with “a fancy metaphor for the limits of Western civilization;” nor does it provide a lesson about humankind. Instead, the lesson that today’s Jews offer Eskamani - and the people who think like her - is that the Jews are their own people with their own lives. When Jews fight back, they lose the metaphorical qualities that modern discourse has attributed to them. For Eskamani and others, then, Jews who refuse to accept martyrdom are worthless.
UCF Jewish Monitor has a message for people who think like Eskamani: we’re not leaving. Not from the diaspora. Not from our homeland. We have the right to live as human beings, not abstract victims of humanity’s evildoers. And we have the right to not accept “peace” with an organization which will use it to kill us.