Judaism and Democrats
Ever since the attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, we have seen repeated examples of those on the left supporting the terrorist organization Hamas. Despite the savage butchery, sadism, rape, torture, beheading of infants, kidnapping and slaughter perpetrated upon the people of Israel, there has been support and even glee among untold number of Muslims around the word. Particularly distressing are the demonstrations and outright antisemitism displayed on America’s elite university campuses.
The day after the attacks, dozens of students at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., rallied in support of Palestinian political violence. A rally was held at California State University, Long Beach, to “Protest for Palestine,” displaying a poster with what looked to be one of the terrorists descending by hang glider to murder young people at a music festival.
At Tufts University, Students for Justice in Palestine praised Hamas terrorists as “liberation fighters”. At Swarthmore College, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter described Hamas’ atrocities as “legitimate resistance” and glorified the “valiant” fallen Hamas terrorists as “martyrs who have sacrificed their lives for liberation.”
At New York University, the head of a law student association declared that “Israel bears full responsibility” for the Hamas murders. A junior at Cornell issued death threats to Jewish students. More than 30 student groups at Harvard issued a joint letter calling Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”, as a Jewish student was mobbed by pro-Hamas demonstrators chanting “shame.”
In some campus demonstrations, students chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a genocidal call for the elimination of Israel—something that could only be achieved through violence.
On October 7 Hamas proved again just why it was designated as a terrorist organization by the United States in 1997. The shocking reaction of our university students is a further indictment of the ideology that has overtaken our American education system. Are these students, and the faculty that supports them in this cause, unaware that Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’ political bureau, promised that the attack on October 7 will not be the last, stating “We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again . . . Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country.” Do these students understand that nothing short of the elimination of Israel and the Jews who live there will ever satisfy Hamas? Or do they share this goal?
Jewish playwright David Mamet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for “Glengarry Glen Ross”, displayed his own abhorrence of this behavior and his struggle to understand liberal Democrats’ support for Hamas in an article entitled “How the Democrats betrayed the Jews”, published October 23, 2023 in UnHerd.
“We New York Jews have always voted for the Democrats . . . partly from tradition”, Mamet wrote. “A liberal Jew, when asked to defend or explain various absurd or inconsistent Democratic positions, may shrug and joke: ‘I’m a Congenital Democrat.’ I understand, for I was one, too.” But no longer. Jews are still voting for Democrats, says Mamet, and “electing Presidents who refused to meet with the Israeli Prime Minister (Obama and Biden) in times of ‘peace’, and who . . give aid to the terrorist state of Iran . . . American ‘Aid’ to Iran pays for the equipment and ordnance, which is, at this moment, eradicating Jews.”
“Many German Jews served the Kaiser during the First World War, and explained to the Nazi thugs that they were Good Germans. And they were killed. . . Today some Western liberal Jews ‘agree’ with the Squad [in Congress] that the terrorists, though they have ‘gone too far’, ‘may have a point’”.
“My generation, born right after the Holocaust, wondered: ‘Good God, didn’t you see what was happening around you? Are you literally willing to die rather than admit you were mistaken?’ The answer, today, to many liberal American Jews, is ‘Yes’.”
“There is no more mystery in the antisemitism of the Democratic Party”, says Mamet. “Representatives are affiliated with the Democratic Socialists and pro-Palestinians, calling for the end of the state of Israel — that is, for the death of the Jews. And Democrat Representatives repeat and refuse to retract the libel that Israel bombed a hospital, in spite of absolute proof to the contrary, and will not call out the unutterable atrocities of Hamas. The writing is on the wall. In blood.”
We might excuse our university students as being young, naïve, and ill-educated, but it is a mystery as to why Jewish citizens continue to stick with the Democratic party when less than a month after Islamic radicals executed the worst terrorist attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust, the Biden White House announced a national strategy to counter . . . wait for it . . . Islamophobia. The White House Press Secretary explained that “For too long, Muslims in America . . . have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents”, at the same time that the FBI reported that antisemitic threats are at an historic level, and that although Jewish citizens make up less than 3% of the American populace, they are the targets of 60% of crimes identified as hate crimes.
And we should not forget the number of people, long associated with the party, who continue to express the most outrageously antisemitic sentiments. The “Reverend” Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan both spent decades as the most vicious antisemites in American public life, and yet both remain venerated by Democrat politicians.
Congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Maxine Waters, and Rashida Tlaib, for example, are all happy to be seen with Farrakhan, and even President Obama appeared unconcerned to rub shoulders with a man who has described Judaism as a “Gutter Religion” and spoken of “Satanic Jews.”
During Obama’s tenure, Al Sharpton visited the White House almost 80 times and President Biden recently referred to him as his “good pal”. Both presidents and the media seem unconcerned with Sharpton’s 40-year history of virulent antisemitism. Vice President Kamala Harris attended his birthday party and agreed to be interviewed on his show on MSNBC, a network that appears to have no problem employing a man who was the subject of a House resolution condemning his “racist and anti-Semitic views.”
Here are just a few highlights of that House Resolution:
“Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton has referred to members of the Jewish faith as ‘bloodsucking Jews’, and ‘Jew bastards’ . . .’white interlopers’ and ‘diamond merchants’; Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton’s vicious verbal anti-Semitic attacks directed at members of the Jewish faith, and in particular, a Jewish landlord, arising from a simple landlord-tenant dispute with a black tenant, incited widespread violence, riots, and the murder of five innocent people; . . . Congress fervently urges elected officials and public servants who have condoned and legitimized the Reverend Al Sharpton’s incendiary words and actions, to publicly denounce and condemn such racist and anti-Semitic views.”
For this, Al Sharpton was rewarded with his own television show.
Prior to the foundation of the Jewish state, Mamet said, “the Jews had no protection whatever: from Cossacks, peasants, pogroms, the Crusades, Hitler, Stalin. . . We were at the mercy of anyone who wanted anything we had: our possessions, our children and women, our lives, our hair to make mattresses, our bones to make fertilizer. . . We appealed to Power for decent consideration as Human Beings; and Power in America, the Democratic Party, was always happy to take our money and our votes and ask us to wait in the Outer Office. As it does today.”
“Liberals have never done anything for the Jews”, he said, adding that the “only person” who ever did anything for the Jewish people was former President Trump. “He brought peace to the Middle East and liberal Jews are saying, ‘Oh, I don’t like this Trump. Well, it’s time to stop putting our heads in the sand.”
“The sick thrill of antisemitism,” Mamet said, “has a price: the surrender of reason, and, with it, of conscience.”