Progressive Jews who have spent years supporting racial equity, gay and transgender rights, abortion rights and other causes on the American left — including opposing Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank — are suddenly feeling abandoned by those who they long thought of as allies. This wartime shift represents a fundamental break within a liberal coalition that has long powered the Democratic Party.
Why do they feel abandoned? Are their leftist allies suddenly acting radically in opposition to long-held and clearly-expressed principles and trends? Or did these Progressive Jews expect some sort of gratitude for supporting these policies? Don't they hold those positions themselves? If so, why do they expect gratitude for acting in their own interests? If not, why did they decide to befriend the leftists?
Secondly, as mentioned above, was not their killing wrong and showing empathy to the victims simply sufficient in itself for being the right thing to do? (Will we get a quote from the local Asian American community how useful, helpful or registering on their awareness the empathy demonstrated by the Jews/progressive private school actually was? ) Is there some sort of quid-pro-quo in doing the right thing?
“When a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense,” Black Lives Matter Los Angeles posted on Facebook, in its first response to the attack. A reproductive-rights group sharply criticized the “Zionist occupation,” saying that the Israeli government denied “Palestinians control over their bodies” and that “there can be no justice, peace or reproductive freedom underneath colonial occupation.”
I am curious as to whether or not abortions are more readily available in normal Israel or in areas governed by Hamas.
I remember when Legolas brought it to our attention about seven years ago with an article saying that the American right had been correct for the seventy years or so in claiming that the Western leftwing academia and journalism were basically mouthpieces of Josef Stalin.
A hallmark of the progressive left is their claiming of exclusive right to use certain words they demand others be punished for employing. Like "Jewry".
But in the Hamas attacks, many saw an existential threat, evoking memories of the Holocaust and generations of antisemitism,
Killing Jews is not automatically anti-Semitism. Sometimes it just means the Jews are between you and something you want. This is a distinction that Progressives understand very well whenever a white person is murdered by a minority. Even when it is being done by a non-white government against a white minority in the country, like Israel's one-time ally South Africa. Hey, Bibi, ever read a poet called Niemoller?
That American Jews might be subjected to terrorist attacks by Palestinians and their supporters is something for which the Progressive Jews might want to rethink their positions vis a vis border security and immigration. Muslim bans were appalling when the terrorists were shooting up or US Army bases or gay nightclubs. First they came for the soldiers...
“I am in such a state of despair — in my generation, we have been warned how quickly people would turn on us and we just thought no way,” said Nick Melvoin, 38, a member of the Los Angeles Unified School Board who is now running for Congress and keeps a framed picture of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his office. “Now we see, this is how that happens: When you dehumanize the group. This indoctrination that many of us have been warned about hit us like a ton of bricks.”
The most rattling episodes have occurred on college campuses or on social media, where statements from small organizations have been amplified across the globe. But during a worldwide conflict, those statements have taken on totemic status, heightening fears that they are a precursor to a more treacherous and lasting shift in the standing of Jews in America.
Eric Spiegelman, a lawyer and podcast producer in Los Angeles who serves on municipal boards, was enraged by the protest in New York City promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America after the attack. He sent hundreds of letters to Los Angeles city officials urging them to denounce the organization and label it a “hate group.” The D.S.A. has since backed away from the protest and apologized “for not making our values explicit.”
“It’s like, I belong to this political organization that believes in three things: affordable housing, raising the minimum wage, and the wholesale murder of Jews,” said Mr. Spiegelman, his voice dripping with sarcasm as he condemned local leaders who are affiliated with the group. “Two out of three ain’t bad!”
With President Biden making a personal show of support through an unprecedented wartime visit to Israel this week — and promising the country billions in aid — traditional Democratic support for Israel is not in doubt. The crisis has largely unified the Democratic Party establishment, including many progressive elected officials. Polling since the attacks indicates strong national backing for Israel, including a notable uptick in support among Democrats.
Still, cracks have begun to emerge among the Democratic coalition. Younger and more liberal voters remain more focused on the Palestinian cause than older generations, a split that emerged in the last two decades and accelerated during the Trump administration. Among them are many American Jews who are far more critical of Israel than their forebears and have flocked to groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, which staged a protest in the U.S. Capitol calling for a cease-fire and has repeatedly accused Israel of planning genocide in Gaza.
Maybe they believe genocide is bad. Are they going to demand the progressive left prove their case beyond a shadow of a doubt whenever they protest something from now on? Should Jewish solidarity extend even to supporting genocide if that's what the Likud decides to get up to, as the Progressives regularly accuse their American ideological counterparts in the Republican party?
By whom?
By contrast, many progressive activists have long expressed an affinity and identification with Palestinians, viewing them as a minority group whose plight is ignored or dismissed by those with more power.
“The left doesn’t have a level of sophisticated understanding of antisemitism that we need if we are going to defeat white nationalism and fascism in this country,”
Maybe they are more concerned with the problems white nationalism and fascism will cause for EVERYONE, instead of just the Jews. The last serious effort at white nationalism that everyone can agree on, was the secession of the Confederate States of America, who included in their cabinet, a Jewish person (named Judah, if there was any doubt) a good 45 years before any Jews reached the US Cabinet. And that was, I believe Secretary of
Still, Ms. Ware said she would not hesitate to work with groups on the progressive left for racial justice and other causes. Other activists are less certain.
What exactly is your commitment to gender & racial equality, reproductive freedom, economic opportunity and availability of social services, if you're going to join up with the white nationalists, when things get tough, because they're more likely to shoot Arabs?
“It felt like betrayal, not of us as allies, but of the values we all stand for,” Mr. Sokatch said. He added: “On a personal level, I would think twice before just showing up in certain corners of the political world. I would want to check and understand who was there and how they felt about these things.”
Two days after somberly standing behind Mr. Biden in the White House as he denounced the attack as “sheer evil,” Vice President Kamala Harris spoke on Oct. 12 to an auditorium filled with Latino and Black students at the College of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas, as part of a fall tour focusing on young voters of color. For nearly an hour, she addressed pressing concerns such as climate change and student loans and offered a passionate defense of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. She made no mention of the attack in Israel.
On Oct. 10, Bo Lauder, the head of Friends Seminary, an exclusive New York City private school, wrote to parents acknowledging the “failing” of his first response, and stating: “Let me be clear: The attacks on Israel by Hamas terrorists were wrong and indefensible, and Friends Seminary condemns, in no uncertain terms, the killing, kidnapping and torture of innocent civilians.”
The lack of more forceful and instantaneous condemnation shocked some liberal Jews, who remembered the outpouring of support from other Americans after the 2018 mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue by a gunman inspired by the far right.
The left are acting in a coherent and consistent fashion on this issue. Israelis, most from the West, and the "global north" and driven by, and permitted because of, European events, rather than any local upwelling of support or invitation, moved into a land long occupied by Muslims and Arabs, established their own state and drove out those who happened to be living there. That is exactly the sort of thing the progressive left has been denouncing since they realized it would be a useful excuse to impede Western foreign policy in opposition to international Communism way back when. This article both demands a conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and a double standard in favor of the Jews. And then there is the bit that anti-semitic propaganda for years has denounced the supposedly strawman figure of the International Jew, the "rootless cosmopolite" to a borrow a term from the Grandaddy of Progressivism Joe Stalin, who has a greater loyalty to his own, foreign roots, than whatever country or side he allegedly resides in, or aligns with. According to that article in 2016, Stalin began his own persecution of Soviet Jews when he saw the fervent support Golda Meier enjoyed on a visit to the USSR. Because that was consistent with Stalin's MO, to crush any potential rivals for power or contenders for the loyalty of Soviet subjects citizens. First they came for the Romanovs, then they came for the capitalists, then they came for the kulaks... And yet, all of a sudden, we have all these Western Progressive Jews turning on their allies for acting in a manner completely consistent with their beliefs, because the opposition happens to be Jewish. It's almost like the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" knew something the rest of us didn't. The article even gives explicit reasons for the Progressives' views and failure to recognize the danger American Jews are in from Islamic terrorists whose primary goal is acquiring land in the Levant, but expects them to ignore these reasons, because Jews deserve priority.
I'll never forget how betrayed I felt watching a quarter-Jewish actor play an Irish-American Catholic who thwarted the nationalistic expression of the abused and downtrodden Irish in the movie "Patriot Games" written by self-hating Irish Catholic American author Tom Clancy, with the Irish liberation patriots being played by two Englishman, a Scot and only one Irish actor! Oh, wait. I didn't. Because I am not insane. My loyalties are not based on cramming every country and ethnic group into the same set of ideological boxes, or what part of the world sucked so bad my ancestors left it to come here, nor have I been the least bit impressed by those Presidents of my country to share my religion.
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*
