A RADICAL SQUAD'S JEW-HATE

The cancer of anti-Semitism takes firm root in the Democratic Party.

By: Ari Liberman

Outlet: Front Page Magazine

Date: July 17, 2019

This week’s brouhaha between Donald Trump and the radical left-wing of the Democratic Party or the so-called “Squad,” has exposed deep fissures within the Party itself, with centrist Democrats becoming an ever increasing rare breed. The Democratic Party is eating itself alive, the result of open warfare between moderates and radical progressives, and the extremists appear to have the upper hand. More troubling is the level of anti-Semitic rhetoric routinely spewed by the radicals and the deafening silence of Party leaders in response to this deleterious trend. The Democratic Party of today, with its Jew-hating, Israel-bashing rhetoric is sounding more and more like its Labour cousin across the Atlantic.

The British Labour Party itself has experienced some rough sailing these last few months. In May, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) announced it had launched an investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party. It’s not every day that the EHRC opens an investigation of this type against a major British political party. In fact, it is unprecedented. Last week, three senior Labour lawmakers in the upper house of the parliament resignedfrom Labour because the Party’s failure to address its antisemitism problem.

The trio join a steady stream of Labour MPs who have resigned in disgust over what they termed as Labour's turning a blind eye to, or even encouraging antisemitism within the Party. One of the resignees, David Triesman, referred to Britain’s Labour Party as “institutionally anti-Semitic,” and further noted that UK Labour was “no longer a safe political environment for Jewish people.” Harsh words for a former hardcore Labour loyalist.

Last Wednesday, the BBC’s current affairs documentary program Panorama aired a damning exposé featuring a number of former Labour Party members who either experienced anti-Semitic attacks by fellow Labour members or witnessed attempts by Labour Party leaders to quash and suppress investigations into Labour antisemitism. Six of those who were interviewed braved non-disclosure agreements in an effort to draw attention to the seriousness of the situation.

Instead of addressing the problem, Labour is demanding that he BBC remove the Panorama documentary off iPlayer and is attacking the credibility of those interviewed. Rather than take responsibility for its hideous actions, Labour is attacking the messenger.

This tact by Labour is unsurprising. Its party boss, Jeremy Corbyn, is anti-Semitic to his core. He has referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as his friends. In September 2014 he laid a wreath over the graves of terrorists responsible for orchestrating the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli athletes in Munich. He defended a mural depicting Jewish bankers (with grotesquely exaggerated facial features) exploiting minorities, and actively participated in Facebook groups in which anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and memes were casually tossed about. He offered praise for Raed Salah, a rabid Muslim preacher who referred to Jews as “germs” and claimed that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish children for ritualistic purposes.  After 16 Egyptian soldiers and policemen were killed in an ISIS ambush in Sinai, Corbyn, in an interview with an Iranian propaganda site, blamed Israel saying that the Israelis had most to gain from the deaths of Egyptians. He also offered praise and wrote the foreword for a reprint of a book whose author alleged that Jews control world economies through their domination of the financial and banking sectors.  

This is the mere tip of the iceberg for Corbyn. Unfortunately, Corbyn’s malign ideology has not only infected his Party, it has metastasized to the United States Democratic Party. The so-called progressive wing of the Democratic Party, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have repeatedly engaged in anti-Semitic tropes, propagated ahistorical fiction and dabbled with Holocaust revisionism.

Omar and Tlaib are unapologetic anti-Semites who have couched their hatred for Jews in terms of anti-Zionism. Their constant demonization and delegitimization of Israel places them squarely within the State Department’s definition of antisemitism.

Omar, whose history and social media feed is replete with anti-Semitic invective, outraged Jews and supporters of Israel when she implied that support for Israel is driven by Jewish money and that Jews maintain divided loyalties. Even the left-leaning Anti-Defamation League condemned her remarks. But the Democrat-controlled congress, pressured from the radical left, could not bring itself to condemn her expressions of hate. Instead, it made do with passing a meaningless, watered down condemnation of antisemitism, which looped this insidious form of hate with “Islamophobia” and about a dozen or so other expressions of racism. It was a shameful, craven display of the workings of a political party wholly influenced by the Squad with its toxic agenda.

In June, AOC trivialized the horrors of the Shoah when she compared ICE detention facilities meant to house illegal aliens to the Nazi concentration camps. This comparison is beyond asinine and is a form of Holocaust denial. AOC is either ignorant of the horrors of the Holocaust or deliberately mendacious. I suspect it’s the latter as shortly after making the comparison, she refused an invitation by Holocaust survivor Edward Mosberg to tour a Nazi concentration camp.

I always feared that the potential existed for the Democratic Party to be subsumed by the radical agenda pushed by extremist socialists within their ranks but never imagined that the descent into Corbynism would be so swift and devastating. Democrats have a serious antisemitism problem that mirrors British Labour. If the current ideological trajectory continues, Democrats will not only face insurmountable odds in 2020, they will lose a vital constituency and cause irreparable harm to their Party.