After much foot-dragging, Democrats finally denounced anti-Jewish bigotry in the last couple days, but not without blatant equivocating. A memo clearly went out to team members, especially the party’s hard-left wing, to disingenuously link “Islamophobia” with the recent flurry of violence against Jews in our large cities.
While President Joe Biden and Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips did not play the inane “both sides” game, radicals like Reps. Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, and of course the execrable Sen. Bernie Sanders, predictably did.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, for decades Israel’s foremost defender among Democrats, released a tepid statement after nearly two weeks of inexcusable absence.
Rep. Jamal Bowman, a first-term radical who defeated a pro-Israel Democrat in New York last year, is more concerned with bashing pro-Israel groups and praising anti-Semites than synagogues being defaced in his district.
“This is deliberate, reprehensible, and an effort not to call out what’s right before Americans’ eyes right now in social media, and how it’s leading to actual violence against Jews,” Christine Rosen said on Monday’s Commentary Magazine podcast.
“It also builds a narrative that support for Israel is itself Islamophobic. This is a crafted messaging effort by the left to water down denunciations by making it an All Lives Matter moment. It’s not acceptable, and is an effort to downplay the fact that people committing many of these acts are on the intersectional grievance hierarchy and thus considered victims,” she added.
It’s true. American progressives are allied with Hamas — odd, since few groups on earth are less “progressive” than Hamas and radical Islamists — so denouncing anti-Semitic attacks would antagonize their egregious base by seeming to place them on “the Jewish side” of the current conflict.
It’s all about intersectionality, a fundamentally regressive concept to unite various sects of Democrats into one angry tent. This means suddenly support for (tolerant, diverse, liberal) Israel is apparently now akin to “anti-black bigotry” — because pro-Hamas Black Lives Matter says so?
After spewing anti-Semitic invective to start their congressional tenures, Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar said they’ll do better; they have not, and yet neither has been held accountable with consequences from party leadership.
While media obsesses about the zany Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Democrats promote and enable “The Squad” because these extremists are popular social-media influencers. Apologizing for terrorism while bashing America and Israel remains fashionable on the left.
Former New York City politician Dov Hikind exposed the hypocrisy and tendentiousness of today’s Democrats Sunday night, with perhaps the most eye-opening Twitter thread of 2021.
Let’s close by considering Viktor Orban. The Hungarian prime minister infuriated the European Union a few years back by refusing to take Muslim refugees during mass migration after the Syrian civil war. Yet most Jews in his country remain unafraid of anti-Semitic violence, while Jews in Berlin, Brussels, London, Paris, and yes, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C., have reason to be on high alert.
In France, for example, nearly half of all religious and racially-motivated violent acts are committed against Jews, despite Jews making up less than one percent of the country’s population.
“Anti-Semitism is unique because it reflects the history of the world’s crimes against this minuscule minority, whereas so-called Islamophobia does not seem to exist with Muslims getting punched around in the U.S.,” my father, a historian who’s been to Israel a half-dozen times, emailed me. “Nobody is eliminating the Muslims; they constitute somewhere about one-fourth of the world’s population, numbering in the billions. Jews? Not so much.”
Why is anti-Semitism the last socially acceptable form of bigotry?
Sadly, we don’t expect our media or academics to be honest about emotional issues, but when one party is controlled by its most unsavory elements, we all lose.
A.J. Kaufman
A.J. Kaufman is an Alpha News columnist. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Florida Sun-Sentinel, Indianapolis Star, Israel National News, Orange County Register, St. Cloud Times, Star-Tribune, and across AIM Media Midwest and the Internet. Kaufman previously worked as a school teacher and military historian.
