A Craven Attempt to Paper Over the Left’s Antisemitism Problem

You might think that the explosion of unreconstructed antisemitic rhetoric, vandalism, and even violence on American college campuses and city streets was indicative of a troubling level of Jew-hatred on the political Left. Maybe you could be forgiven for assuming that this phenomenon represents the culmination of a series of antecedents — the rise of the Women’s March, which discriminated against its Jewish members; the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement’s slog through academia; the promotion of voguish intellectual exercises that brand Jews oppressors and relegate them to the lower rungs on a hierarchical order of genetic privilege, and so on. But you would be wrong.

According to New York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait, antisemitism is primarily (although not exclusively) a feature of the American Right. Indeed, the outburst of anti-Jewish sentiment perversely inspired by the slaughter of innocents in Israel and October 7 has highlighted the degree to which the Left’s “antisemitism” problem is wildly overblown.

Chait’s argument rests primarily on the distinctions between the activist Left and the Democratic Party. He dwells on the former’s hostility toward the latter. Chait is not wrong, though the observation fails to advance his thesis. Blessedly, responsible institutional stewards in the Democratic Party have largely refused to indulge the ugly sentiments expressed by the activists in high orbit around the party. But the same could be said of institutionalists within the GOP. Unreconstructed antisemitism is a fringe belief and, from time immemorial, a symptom of a broader psychological malady. That’s an unobjectionable observation. But Chait didn’t stop there.

What about some of the more vocal elements within the Democratic Party who subscribe to the beliefs of the fringes but nonetheless occupy positions of authority? What about Representative Rashida Tlaib, for example? “Tlaib has made a lot of statements I consider reckless, or blinkered, and I certainly wish Democrats would nominate a more responsible candidate to represent the 13th district in Michigan,” Chait confessed, “but she has never actually uttered anything a reasonable person would deem antisemitic.”

. . . Really?

The targets of antisemitic remarks are used to having to present those who deny the validity of their experience with a dispassionate, prosecutorial litany of offenses for the benefit of those who reject the evidence of their own eyes. So here goes.

Chait claims that Tlaib’s support for slogans like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is not “per se antisemitic.” Tell that to the Palestinians. As survey research from the Ramallah-based pollster Arab World Research & Development (AWRD) recently demonstrated, when West Bank and Gaza residents were given a choice between a “one-state solution for two peoples,” a “two-state solution for two peoples” or “a Palestinian state from the river to the sea,” 74.7 percent chose the latter. The poll is useful insofar as it eliminates the ambiguity in which defenders of this expression take refuge, and it exposes the otherwise veiled implications about what should happen to the Jews who are presently in the way. Given her self-described cultural fluency, we should assume Tlaib knows what she’s saying better than those who translate her comments into something more anodyne.

But that is only the most recent infraction — one for which Tlaib was censured by her colleagues in Congress but “praised” by her constituents. Tlaib has accused her fellow members who fail to support the BDS movement’s efforts to stigmatize American Jews and remove them from positions of authority because they are Jews of dual loyalty to Israel. They “forgot what country they represent,” she insisted.

Tlaib has surrounded herself and promoted her associations with people like Abbas Hamideh, who has likened Zionism to Nazism. She reported experiencing “a calming feeling” when she contemplates the Holocaust because, in the ahistorical narrative in her head, it preceded the Palestinians’ voluntary sacrifice of their “human dignity” so that Jews might have a homeland in a territory in which they didn’t belong.

“If you open the curtain and look behind the curtain, it’s the same people that make money and, yes, they do, off of racism, off of these broken policies,” Tlaib told the hateful organization Democratic Socialists of America of the nefarious moneyed interests secretly in control of events. “There is someone there making money.”

If Chait cannot see the antisemitism in these and many other remarks that consistently err in the same direction, that is not everyone else’s problem.

Okay, well, how about Representative Ilhan Omar? To explain away her penchant for antisemitic remarks, Chait offered a revisionist history. “Well, the party made clear those comments were unacceptable,” he insisted. “Omar apologized, and Democrats supported a Congressional resolution denouncing them. That is how a healthy party operates.” This sequence of events bears no resemblance to the historical record.

“Israel has hypnotized the world,” Omar wrote in 2012 amid a round of Israeli airstrikes on targets in Gaza in response to an attack on Israeli military patrol followed by a barrage of rocket fire toward civilian targets in Israel. The remark branding Jews as seductive, mesmeric manipulators was unsurfaced and chastised, and Omar apologized for it. “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby,” Omar later said of American lawmakers who devote themselves to “defending a foreign nation.” Once again, she was criticized, and once again, she relented. It was her third antisemitic scandal, one for which Omar steadfastly refused to apologize, that resulted in the effort to censure her.

“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK to push for allegiance to a foreign country,” Omar said, retailing the dual-loyalty canard. Reluctantly, Democratic House leadership attempted to pass a resolution condemning Omar’s remark, but that enterprise failed. A revolt among members of the House Progressive and Congressional Black Caucuses scuttled the initiative. In the end, the only resolution the Democrat-led House could endorse was a watery document that failed to name Omar and managed only to condemn hate in all its forms. As progressives know full well, assuming they meant one word of the lectures to which they committed the country at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, adulterating condemnations of the specific hate that produced the moment we’re in by introducing a variety of competing hates into the discussion all but condones that bigotry.

The American Right has an antisemitism problem, too, of course. No one who was the recipient of gas chamber memes in 2016 or who today watches the New Right’s professionally transgressive activists popularize Medieval blood libels would deny it. But the antisemitism in the Left’s ranks most certainly does present a challenge to responsible Democrats. As long as the party can rely on its partisans to paper over that problem, Democrats can go on pretending as though it doesn’t exist. And it will get worse.