WARNING TO AMERICAN JEWS:
WAKE UP BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!
BY ED BRODOW
Since I was a kid, Jews have been married to the Democratic Party. Everyone in my Brooklyn neighborhood — primarily Jews, Irish, and blacks — voted straight Democratic. If you announced a deviation from the party line, they would look at you as though you were from outer space. It made a lot of sense. The Democratic Party of the 1950s was the party of the underdog. In contrast, today’s Democrats represent America’s social and cultural elites. “How is it possible,” asked author David Horowitz, “that Democrats can pose as defenders of minorities, the middle class, and the poor? Democratic policies,” he says, “have devastated all three.”
Yet the majority of today’s Jews still cling to the Donkey’s skirt. Exit polls indicate that 71% of American Jews voted for Hillary and 76% voted Democratic in the midterm elections. There are two main reasons: (1) Jews always have been afraid of conservative politicians; and (2) they don’t want to betray the values of their beloved parents. Most Jews don’t realize that the entire picture has flipped. The Democratic Party of their parents and grandparents is not the party of today. Ironically, the liberal Democrat of 1950 is today’s conservative Republican. I have the same worldview that I had in the 50s and 60s, yet I am now a conservative. So what the hell happened?
What happened is that the Democratic Party was hijacked by neo-Marxists who reject all American values. They militate for increased governmental control over every aspect of our lives; limitations on free speech and freedom of the press; replacement of capitalism with socialism; replacement of meritocracy with race-based criteria; and a dysfunctional version of social justice that promotes anti-Semitism. These are the values of Venezuela and Cuba. All of these items were part of the Democratic platform under President Obama. His negative attitude toward Jews was exposed by his attachment to Jew haters Reverend Wright and Louis Farrakhan.
The Jews’ fear of conservative politics has been misplaced. Their fear ought to be reserved for leftists. Since the 1960s, “hatred of Jews in America has moved from being primarily a prejudice of the right to being primarily a prejudice of the left,” says Mosaic. The Democrats have embraced “social justice” and “identity politics,” both of which are designed to divide the country into warring factions based on the idea that minority groups are oppressed by “racist white America.” And guess what—Jews, says author Victor Davis Hanson, are viewed as part of the oppressor class. The Democratic Party has used identity politics to inflame anti-Semitism.
The atmosphere for Jews in America, observes David Horowitz, is more hostile than at any time in the last 70 years. In 2017, for example, 60% of religiously motivated hate crimes in the U.S. were against Jews, who represent less than 2% of the population. “The continuing successes of front organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine,” says Horowitz, “are ominous indicators of the dangers that confront us, and should be a wake-up call.”
The role of the Democratic Party in the rise of anti-Semitism cannot be denied. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The Democrats have an anti-Semitism problem, and it isn’t subtle.” Former Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison “accused the shifty Jews of running American foreign policy,” says the Detroit News. Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the first two Muslim women to be elected to Congress, support boycotting, sanctioning and divesting from Israel. Omar recently tweeted that congressional support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins baby,” a slang term for $100 bills and an obvious anti-Semitic trope. “When you say that Jews have magical hypnotic powers to control other people, you’re an anti-Semite,” writes John Podhoretz in the New York Post. “When you say Jews control other people through money, you’re an anti-Semite. When you say Jews have conspired to force you to apologize for saying anti-Semitic things, you’re an anti-Semite. ¬Ilhan Omar is an anti-Semite.” Several Jewish lawmakers have denounced Omar and Tlaib, as have two Jewish groups affiliated with the Democratic Party.
But what about the party itself? The Democrats have been conspicuously reluctant to discipline the obvious anti-Semitism within their ranks. “None of the leaders of the Democratic Party,” David Harsanyi wrote in the New York Post, “has said anything about the activist wing pushing these age-old hatreds.” And what about the Democratic-controlled media? “The media,” said Harsanyi, “has a track record of tenaciously ignoring the anti-Semitism creeping into Democratic Party politics.”
Instead of demanding that Omar be removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, left-wing elements within the party, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, actually have defended the offensive comments made by Omar and Tlaib. Party leaders Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi recently supported Omar’s anti-Semitic ravings by saying the equivalent of “she did not mean it that way.” The Washington Free Beacon put its finger on the problem: “The real Ilhan Omar scandal isn’t that a high-profile member of a powerful House committee hates Jews and Israel. The real scandal is that progressives don’t think her hate is a problem, and in fact they don’t even consider it hate. For many progressives today, bigotry against the right kind of people is a virtue.”
“Democrats need the votes of people who hate Israel,” observes the Jerusalem Post. “In doing so, politicians such as Nancy Pelosi within the Democratic establishment look the other way when certain viewpoints correlate to anti-Semitism.” Bret Stephens agrees in the New York Times: “If Pelosi can’t muster a powerful and unequivocal resolution condemning anti-Semitism, then Omar will have secured her political future and won a critical battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. At that point, the days when American Jews can live comfortably within the Democratic fold will be numbered.”
The majority of American Jews, who are largely secular and have been assimilated into American society, are stuck in their misplaced loyalty to the Democratic Party. In startling contrast, ultra-Orthodox Jews voted overwhelmingly for Trump. The folks with the beards and fur hats have large families and understand the threat to their way of life that is posed by the Democrats. Their secular cousins ought to take note.
Perhaps many secular Jews think the upsurge of Democratic Party anti-Semitism will go away. This is akin to what many German Jews believed in the 1930s. Wake up, my friends. The handwriting is on the wall.
Ed Brodow is a political commentator, negotiation expert, and author of seven books including his latest, Tyranny of the Minority: How the Left is Destroying America.
