THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S "PROGRESS"
INTO ANTI-SEMITISM
BY ANDREW HARROD
SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2019/03/the-democratic-partys-progress-into-antisemitism-part-three; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
America’s Democrats are a “new Nazi party,” the “party of jihad, Jew-hatred and communism,” Jewish anti-sharia activist Pamela Geller recently declared, in light of the Democrats’ inability to censure Representative Ilhan Omar for antisemitism. As previously noted, rationalizations and Muslim identity politics excuses have enabled Leftist and Islamic supremacists to normalize their anti-Semitic views on Israel, a development that has left American Jews questioning their political future.
A like-minded Jewish analyst, Deborah Weiss, described the Omar affair as a “wake-up call” for Jews, who have historically been loyal Democratic voters. Conservative commentator Eileen Toplansky agreed that Omar and her fellow Muslim Democratic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib“ should awaken even the most somnolent Jew to the Democratic Party’s being overwhelmed by the enemies of America.” The “Democrats into whom they invested everything have turned on them,” said the prominent orthodox rabbi Dov Fischer.
Conservative commentator Daniel Greenfield has analyzed various factors contributing to the rise in America’s leftist antisemitism, including the Democrats’ turn towards socialism. “Jew-hate and socialism have always gone hand in hand,” he has documented, while the virulent antisemitism often present on college campuses is now taking over progressive politics with anti-Jewish victimhood narratives. Conservative commentator Bruce Bawer has noted that progressives’ “current victim-group hierarchy…places Muslims at the very top” and “Jews at or near the bottom, if not eliminating them from the picture entirely.” “Sorry, honey, but Jews are not part of Intersectionality,” Fischer has stated.
Victimhood claims by Muslims such as Omar, observed conservative writer Steve Postal, act as “merely a Trojan horse to inject anti-Semitism into mainstream political discourse.” Thus the conservative activist and rabbi Aryeh Spero identifies a “strategy, as we have seen from Islamists in Europe,” of a “slow but inevitable seepage of anti-Jewish caricatures into the country’s political discourse.” Bawer in Norway confirms that the “Islamization of Western Europe has made everyday life nothing less than perilous for Jews.” Accordingly, Muslim reformer Asra Nomani, a former colleague of journalist Daniel Pearl, whom jihadists beheaded in 2002 in Pakistan, described a phone call in which Pearl’s father revealed that now “Jews in America are afraid.”
These new political realities confound many Jews, as political scientist Abraham Miller has noted that “Jews and Democrats have traditionally been in the vanguard of support for ‘minority’ rights.” This reflects the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) leftist biases that reveal themselves in skewed hate crime statistics. Greenfield particularly noted how President Donald Trump’s election prompted the American Jewish Committee (AJC) to form the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Greenfield scorned this “Wolf-Sheep Advisory Council,” given ISNA’s extensive links to jihadists and sharia supremacists.
As Greenfield explained, AJC had far greater expectations than ISNA for this “sick sad joke in which Jewish lefties ally with Jihadists against a pro-Israel administration.” Yet for Jews today often experience unrequited political love, Miller observed, for “increasingly, ‘minorities’ do not support Jews or Israel’s right to exist.” This includes not just Muslims, but many other minority groups that “mindlessly embrace intersectionality,” such as Berkeley, California’s “Gays for Palestine,” a decidedly LGBT-unfriendly society.
Washington Examiner editor Philip Klein has correspondingly examined why historic Jewish liberal political leanings and trends such as secularization among Jews will at least slow any political shift of Jews to the Republican Party. Miller bemoaned the fact that “Jews, for whom being a Democrat is a commandment from the Almighty, will find a rationale in it for their continued self-exploitation and self-hatred.” Political analyst Steve Feinstein concurred that Democratic Jews have an “almost unfathomably limitless capacity for self-deception.”
A good example of this leftist Jewish self-deception appears at the website of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress (CAP). “The threat to American Jews comes from the growing white nationalist movement,” wrote Max Berger, co-founder of the radical anti-Israel group IfNotNow. Today “global anti-Semitism is on the rise, just as it was in the 1930s, when capitalism produced inequality on a massive scale.”
European Union statistics from 2018 decidedly refute Berger’s Marxist cant, as surveyed Jews reported that a preponderance of the antisemitism they encountered came from Muslims and Leftists. These were respectively the first and second largest reported ideological sources of antisemitism, followed by European rightwingers. Federalist editor David Harsanyi confirms that the “average American Jew is more likely to encounter an aggressively ‘anti-Zionist’ BDS activist on a campus (or a progressive march) than a white supremacist anywhere.”
Such facts explain why polling data in the years leading up to 2014 has suggested declining Jewish support for the Democratic Party. Following orthodox Jewry’s embrace of the Republican Party, Fischer, therefore, foresees a broader “formal political realignment of Jews away from the Democrat Party.” For example, the group Jexodus recently launched at the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and Spero led a protest at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.
Jewish alienation from the Democratic Party would have a significant impact because America’s small but successful Jewish minority possesses an outsized political influence. The Jerusalem Post reported in 2016 that perhaps half of all Democratic, and a quarter of all Republican, political donations, come from Jews. For Democrats such as Omar, that is indeed a lot of “Benjamins” at stake, should Jews like the legal authority Alan Dershowitz not feel welcome in the Democratic Party.
Jews would do themselves and the broader American society a favor by critically reflecting on their political affiliations. If the Democratic Party wants to victimize Jews and others by becoming the home of political Islam and leftist radicalism, then Jews should make the Democrats pay a price. Anti-Semitic and anti-American Democrats such as Omar must receive a clear rebuke by Jews who are not selling their political allegiances cheap on the basis of outdated habits.
