This ad has been around for a while and running frequently on Fox News. I never paid attention to it until this morning, because I was watching a debate among some legitimate legal experts about the birth-right citizenship issue.

KABOOM! Basically the ad directs donors who identify with the ethnic group behind the plea to be concerned about the victims of the Ukraine war with Russia who belong to one specific group (tribe, race, religion, whatever—pick your word) as if nobody else’s lives count. I know there are many, far too many, Americans who think like this, and the more Americans who do think like this, the weaker, more divided and more imperiled our nation, society, culture and democracy is.

The message is literally “Jews are suffering in the Ukraine, so please send money to help them. Let other groups take care of their own. They aren’t our problem.”

I am not picking on Jewish groups here, for a TV commercial calling for donations to poor black people or poor whites to the exclusion of everyone else equally in distress would be similarly unethical…and disgusting. So far, I’ve never seen such an ad. This thing compounds the offense by making the invalid appeal to emotion represented by playing the Holocaust card. The suffering of elderly Ukrainian Jews at the hands of Russia is particularly cruel today because of what Germany did 80 years ago?

Don’t insult my intelligence. I was a fundraiser for many years: I know the drill. This ad, however, is indefensible. Shame on The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews for creating it. Shame on Fox News for running it. Shame on anyone who gives the group a dime in response to it.

Yecchh.