…revealing the virulent anti-Jewish bigotry beneath.
I suppose I sort of understand how so many progressives and Democrats get seduced by the “Palestinians are oppressed people” myth, and go from there to virulent anti-Semitism, or more accurately, Jew Hate. Leftism is an ideology that routinely ignores facts and history to reach convenient conclusions: the history of the Israel-Palastinian conflict does not support the narrative, so either the knee-jerks deliberately remain ignorant (contrived ignorance, which is unethical) or just pretend what has happened didn’t. The Left also likes bad analogies, and since “oppressed groups,” real or imagined, form the heart of the progressive coalition, sloppy thinking and bad history make the Jews (that is, Israel) the equivalents of those evil whites, and the Palestinians stand-ins for blacks, Native Americans, women, and LGTBQ+ victims, though Arabs are no less “white” than Israelis are. The intersectionality obsession makes one stupid, and this is a prime example.
The history is complicated, but the ethics reality is clear: the Palestinians have refused to accept that the nation of Israel is a legitimate nation and have rejected multiple opportunities to be granted a separate sovereign state if it would reject that hateful and hostile position and act accordingly. They have now relied on violence and terrorism for multiple generations to the point that its entrenched hatred can probably never be fixed, and so Israel’s refusal to trust the residents of Gaza–who elected a terrorist organization as their government—is fair, responsible and a matter of self-preservation.
The Palestinians, in short, blew it. They have oppressed themselves. Blindly supporting their position—which has automatically meant supporting violence against Jews—can only be explained by three things, individually or in various combinations: bigotry against Jews, ignorance, or cynical political posturing.
When I was growing up (and before I had researched the history), I assumed that anti-Semitism was entirely the obsession of the political Right. There were the Nazis, of course, and the American Nazi Party. Jews were primary targets of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, and associated with Communism, the Right’s boogeyman. The KKK hated Jews; so did the John Birch Society. Later, I found out how much anti-Jewish sentiment infected the administration of the Democratic Party’s most revered President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and FDR himself. Though the reliably Democrat-voting Jewish community soft-pedaled the truth, it is now clear that many thousands of Jewish Holocaust victims would have survived if there were not so many powerful anti-Jew voices with Roosevelt’s ear. Oh, there were plenty of Republican anti-Semites in office too, make no mistake about that. But the narrative assumes that conservatives are bigots.
I have long been fascinated that no Democratic Presidential candidate has been Jewish. The only ethnic Jew to run was a Republican, Barry Goldwater, whose grandparents were both Jewish though his parents raised him as an Episcopalian. Democrats have ostentatiously nominated the first female candidate and the first black candidate, but have never nominated a Presidential candidate from the group that has been as influential on U.S. politics as either. The closest any Jew has come to the Democratic nomination was Bernie Sanders, and the party rigged the process to make sure he couldn’t prevail over Hillary Clinton. All of this could be mere happenstance, but watching so many Democrats and progressives react to a terror attack on Israel by arguing that it was justified and seeking to deny Israel its necessary response, I have to wonder. The degree of hostility towards Jews and Israel in the bastions of progressive advocacy—the educational establishment and journalism—as well as the Democratic Party itself has become blazingly apparent since the Hamas attack.
As to that revelation, good. The truth is out, the mask is off. In Part 2, I’ll review exactly how ugly what we now can see is, and some of the reactions to it.
