By Daled Amos
Why did Kamala Harris lose the presidential election?
A Free Press article by Kat Rosenfield following Harris's loss notes how Democrats and pundits immediately blamed sexism. According to this view, voters across the country just couldn't bring themselves to vote for a woman who, according to former MSNBC Joy Reid, had conducted "a historic, flawlessly run campaign" (sic). Rosenfield notes the attraction of blaming biased voters:It’s not hard to see the appeal of this narrative. It displaces blame for Harris’s failure onto everyone but the candidate herself and allows her supporters to claim the moral high ground, in the face of abject defeat...Harris was perfect; it’s America that is wrong. And so she lost, yes, but only because the country itself is so full of losers.
This kind of framing is nothing new.
In July 2024, New York Attorney General Letitia James blamed racism and sexism as the real reasons why Harris lost:
[Republicans are] running very scared. That's what I think. They're running very scared, they have nothing else other than racism and sexism...The reality is that Kamala Harris, Vice President Harris, is qualified, and, you know, oftentimes she's underestimated but she’s an overachiever.
Blaming the critics is not limited to the political arena. When New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones was criticised for her 1619 Project, where she claimed that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” her allies framed factual criticisms as racist attacks. One person on X responded that "[Washington Post pundit George] Will should’ve just written Hannah-Jones was 'uppity'”. Later, Hannah-Jones belittled criticism of her thesis when she condescendingly wrote
to clarify that this sentence had never been meant to imply that every single colonist shared this motivation, we changed the sentence to read “some of the colonists.”
When a weapon like this is so widespread, you can be sure it will be used against Jews.
So, another area where critics are rebuffed with charges of racism instead of dealing with the merits of their arguments is progressive representatives of American Muslims. In 2018, when the Women's March was criticized over one of its leaders, Tamika Mallory, having a close connection to antisemite Louis Farrakhan, Linda Sarsour apologized to the Jewish women of the group for not addressing the issue fast enough--but not before lashing out the day before:
It’s very clear to me what the underlying issue is — I am a bold, outspoken BDS supporting Palestinian Muslim American woman and the opposition’s worst nightmare...by proxy they began attacking my sister Tamika Mallory — knowing all too well that in this country the most discardable woman is a Black woman.
Here, Sarsour solidified what has become the paradigm of attacking critics instead of dealing with their points.
Indeed, her self-portrayal as a defender of women was something of a stunt, considering that her defense of women was selective:
Further, in a 2017 Nation interview, Sarsour declared that a woman could not be both a Zionist and a feminist.
It was Sarsour who nodded approvingly and congratulated individuals who were kicked out of the hearing room for being out of order, for walking in front of individuals providing testimony in support of the resolution, and for shouting down our supporters with anti-Semitic slurs — all in the name of protecting free speech.
Sarsour will insist that her critics are proof that her claims hit home and reveal the truth of what she says. And if she can toss in that those critics are also racist and misogynistic, so much the better.
Ilhan Omar learned from Sarsour how to accuse critics of Islamophobia. Rashida Tlaib was criticized when she claimed that
There’s always kind of a calming feeling I tell folks when I think of the Holocaust… and the fact that it was my ancestors – Palestinians – who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood... all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-Holocaust… and I love the fact that my ancestors provided that in many ways.
In response to backlash from critics, Omar did not address the critics or their concerns in Tlaib's remarks. Instead, she fell back to the accusation that criticisms were "designed to silence, sideline, and sort of almost eliminate [the] public voice of Muslims from the public discourse." Left unanswered were the facts that were whitewashed by Tlaib's comment--historical facts such as:
o Arab protests against Jewish immigration left many stranded in Nazi Germany,
o Pe-1948 the Arabs were guilty of massacres of Jews,
o Palestinian Arab leader Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini collaborated with Hitler
o Jews created economic opportunities that benefitted the Arabs and their livelihood
We saw another example of this at the beginning of this year, Amnesty International found it expedient to accuse its Israeli chapter of "anti-Palestinian racism." The Israeli chapter is the same one that worked with Palestinians to condemn Israel, and argued that the IDF committed “crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing". But when they criticized Amnesty International's genocide accusation for not proving that Israel had specifically intended to kill Palestinians--as required by the definition of genocide under international law--Amnesty International silenced the group the only way it knew how, regardless of how ridiculous their claim was.
Any attempt by Jews to defend themselves is attacked. We see this in criticisms of the widely respected IHRA definition of antisemitism. According to the IHRA website:
As of February 1, 2025, 1,266 entities worldwide have adopted the definition. Among those, 45 countries have done so—including the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. In the U.S., 37 state governments have done so, along with 98 city and county governments.
That has not stopped opponents from claiming the definition is being weaponized to stifle criticism of Israel, but those accusations are more common than actual examples. Ali Abunimah has made this claim. On the Electronic Intifada, he accuses the Jewish community of "baselessly" manipulating the term antisemitism.
We oppose the cynical and baseless use of the term anti-Semitism as a tool for stifling criticism of Israel or opposition to Zionism, as this assumes simply because someone is Jewish, they support Zionism or the colonial and apartheid policies of the state of Israel - a false generalization.
It will not come as a surprise that there is a lengthy article on Wikipedia on the topic: The Weaponization of Antisemitism, but nothing similar on the weaponization of Islamophobia. There is just a very short article on Wikipedia called LetUsTalk, which is
a campaign against silencing criticism of the Islamic law and especially hijab in the West through accusations of Islamophobia. This campaign has started when a letter written by Dr Sherif Emil—a Canadian Children’s surgeon—and published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, in which he criticizes promotion of hijab as a symbol of diversity, was retracted due to the accusations of Islamophobia.
And now going a step further, we have Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, telling Mehdi Hasan, "There are far better representations of the concerns of Jewish New Yorkers than the ADL and Jonathan Greenblatt”-- this from the same guy who has no problem with aggressive protesters going around chanting "Globalize the Intifada" as they intimidate Jews.
Jews are so blessed to have politicians like Mamdani, who not only can decide what qualifies as antisemitism, but also are ready to tell us which leaders truly represent Jewish interests. Other minorities must be so jealous.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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