Showing posts with label Opinion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Opinion. Show all posts

Sunday, March 05, 2017



Charlie Hebdo Cover, Oct 2014
Many westerners seem to believe that opposition to political Islam (Jihad) is equivalent to racism.

This is why progressives - or what Dave Rubin, and others, refer to as the "regressive-left" - so vehemently oppose the vetting of Arab-Muslim immigrants into the United States.

They honestly do not care about the rise of political Islam, or Koranically-based violence against innocent people, because they tend to believe that Jews, Americans, and westerners deserve whatever beating radical Muslims are prepared to dish out.

As an American of the Jewish persuasion, however, I would very much prefer it if newly minted Americans from the most antisemitic part of the world did not think that the Jewish people were the unnatural cosmic offspring of swine and orangutan in need of a good slaughtering in the name of Allah.

Does this make me a bad, or ignorant, person?

Probably.

But if you assume that opposing political Islam is the same as opposing Muslims then you must think that all Muslims are jihadis who wish to spread Sharia by any means necessary.

They aren't.

In fact, I might even go so far as to suggest that if you think that denigrating or mocking or opposing jihadism is the same as "Islamophobia" than it is you who are the racist.

The defenders of political Islam, and mass Muslim immigration into the West, need to stop confusing Muslims with jihadis and they need to stop conflating opposition to political Islam with racism. Suggesting that western opposition to the Jihad is the same as opposition to Muslims is something akin to suggesting that British opposition to Nazism during World War II was the same as a racist opposition Germans.

It isn't and it wasn't and the very notion is both hateful and absurd while turning history inside-out and backwards.

Furthermore, "progressives" need to stop implying that Jewish opposition to the murder of our own family somehow indicates an essentialized Zionist form of racism. They need to stop suggesting that speaking out against the rise of political Islam, from any quarter, is a form of retrograde white redneck bigotry against a perfectly innocent indigenous population "of color."

And, make no mistake, this is precisely what the Left and the Democrats say to their Jewish friends when they suggest that opposing unvetted Arab-Muslim immigration into the United States is "racist."

It isn't because it does not matter where a person comes from or the color of their skin.

It does not matter what languages they speak or what deity they worship or refuse to worship.

It does not matter what their sexual orientation is.

It does matter, however, when people from the Middle East or North Africa teach their children to despise non-Muslims as a religious imperative even as they seek immigration into the West.

These are a people with a long and proud history that predates the rise of European civilization and they should be accorded respect. In doing so, however, they should be treated as equals and therefore as responsible for their own views and behavior, including their views on Jewish people.

This matters very much.

According to Anti-Defamation League polling statistics the Muslim Middle East is absolutely roiling with hatred toward the Jews. 75 percent of Egyptians despise Jews. 78 percent of Lebanese despise Jews and a whopping 93 percent of Palestinian-Arabs do so.

And it is spreading.

Mosques emphasize Arab-Muslim innocence and western / Jewish aggression in Haifa and Malmö and Brooklyn, NY... home of our friend, Linda Sarsour.

They teach ideologically-inspired hatred toward Jews and "crusaders" in Paris and London and Berlin.

The truth, of course, is that Islam is the single most successful theocratic imperial project in world history.

muslim conquests
Early Islamic Imperial Expansion
Therefore, those of us who care about how Islam meets the contemporary secular west are watching the results unfold in Europe and most of what we see is violent and ugly.

We remember the jihadi murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, a one-time colleague of Islamic apostate Aayan Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands. We remember the fatwā placed on the head of author Salman Rushdie for daring to pen The Satanic Verses. We remember the unbelievably brutal near-beheading of Lee Rigby in the streets of southeast London in broad daylight. We are cognizant of such things as Islamic rape-gangs in Britain.

And we are well-aware that aggression toward indigenous peoples throughout world history is not the privilege of Europeans alone.

The Failure of Discussion

Thus the question of Muslim immigration into the West is an exceedingly serious matter that must be honestly discussed... but it is not.

The western-left and the Democratic Party have made any such discussion impossible via the politically-correct tactic of silencing, shunning, and de-platforming "deplorable" speakers... which is to say, anyone whom they disagree with.

And this is the reason that we end up with fascistic "anti-fascists" beating the hell out of innocent people at UC Berkeley at the mere presence of Milo Yiannopoulos who, whatever else he may be, is not a white nationalist.

The fire of progressive-left hatred toward Trump and his supporters is so intense, so polarizing, and so irrational that normal discussion on important issues, such as immigration, have become impossible.

When "progressives" and Democrats shut down discussion of Arab-Muslim immigration into the United States as "racist" they also block discussion of anti-feminist, anti-Jewish, anti-liberal, pro-Sharia influences into Europe and coming to an American movie theater near you.

This shutting down of discussion on immigration also blurs any candid distinction between jihadi immigration and the immigration of regular Muslims.

This is not a matter of "racism" against jihadis - as if there could be such a thing - but it is a matter of ideological blinkertude on the part of westerners who condescend to Muslims as little children in need of a cookie.

If mainstream and non-traditional opinionators throughout the West would look up for a moment from their incessant, self-serving, emotionally-driven Trump-bashing, they might consider honestly discussing the question of mass Muslim immigration into the West.

polling2But they don't.

Nonetheless, according to recent Pew poll, terrorism was second only to the economy in the election that brought Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

Along with economic issues, whether progressives and Democrats like it or not, immigration combined with terrorism top the political charts.

The reason that many of us came to the rational conclusion that we need a tightening on immigration policies is because for too long the European Union, with the assistance of globalist neo-liberals like Angela Merkel, refused to do so and we see the results.

For example, the other day Trump referenced the immigration crisis in Sweden and was roundly spit upon by media and politicians, both here and there.

The truth, however, is that Sweden and Germany are experiencing street violence and serious social consequences due to their open-borders policies and because of Muslim disinterest in European social and cultural integration.

Democrats need to understand, as philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris emphasizes, that Hillary's failure to honestly discuss the problems of mass Muslim immigration into the West is one of the reasons why she lost the recent election.

If Democrats wish to take back the U.S. Presidency in 2020 it might be helpful to be forthright with the American people concerning the immigration crisis in Europe and what that suggests for U.S. immigration policy going forward. We need not draw foregone conclusions, but we very much need to have an open and fair national discussion around the question free of partisan demonization.

It might also be helpful if the Democratic Party would let their constituency know that opposing the Jihad on American soil is not racist toward Muslims. This will have to be something hashed-out between the Bernie / Ellison semi-socialist wing and the Obama / Hillary neo-liberal, corporate wing of the Democratic Party.

However, until western-progressives affirm and honestly discuss the meaning of political Islam to western immigration policies then they are deceiving their own people and deserve whatever electoral beatings that they get.

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.







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Thursday, March 02, 2017



 I have a Jerusalem ritual.
Whenever we visit, before we leave, we go to visit the Kotel.
It doesn’t matter what time of day it is. The Kotel is always there, waiting.

 The Kotel. A wall so important it needs no other name, besides: “The Wall.”

 Cutting through the heart of Jerusalem, she stands.
Golden and patient.

 She calls, beckoning silently:
“Come to me. You belong to me. I am your past, your present, your future.
I have remembered you for centuries. I am waiting for you now.”

 There are always people at the Kotel; at 2:00 am. When it’s cold. When it’s hot. When it’s rainy.
Sometimes it is so packed you can hardly move. Sometimes there are only a few people.
There’s always someone: singing, dancing, praying, learning, teaching, sleeping, weeping, coming of age, alone, with friends, with brothers in arms... the Nation of Israel, in all her colors and variations.
And visiting friends – not of our Nation, but welcome just the same.

 When I visit the Kotel I get dizzy.
Every time.

 The closer I get, the louder I hear the throbbing in my veins.
And when I place my hands on the stones so many others have touched,
My head begins to ache.

 Like blood pumping through clogged arteries,
A heart beating, strong and hard,
Blood trying to bring oxygen to every cell of the body -
Succeeding,
But with difficulty.

 The Kotel is not the heart,
It stands between me and the heart.

 It is the Temple, not the Kotel.
As the wall, next to where I park my car, outside my home is not the place that calms my heart.
My soul breathes easy after I walk inside.

 Being almost there isn’t enough.

 How long would you stand beside the wall that stands outside the home that was once yours?
How many times would you come back to it, just to be there?
To be close to the place where your heart rested easy?

 Would you teach your children about the home of your heart?
And your children’s children?
And their children?

 Stolen from you, destroyed, reused by other people,
Would you keep coming back to stand next to the wall,
To touch it, to speak the yearnings of your soul?
The only remaining part of the place where your heart belongs
Or, to be more accurate, the only place you can freely approach.

 Year after year, generation after generation...
Would you remember?

 After you had a new place to live, would you remember that it is only temporary?
Comfortable as it may be, that it is not your true home?
Would you remember?
For how long?

 How many times a day would you speak of the place where your heart belongs?
How many times would you utter its name in your prayers?
How many times would you tell your children: “Next year we will be there and it will be rebuilt”?

 Generation after generation, century after century,
Everywhere Jews have lived
No matter how easy or how hard their lives were,
In Europe or the Middle East,
Ethiopia,
Russia,
India,
America…

 There was always Jerusalem
And in her heart,
The place where our hearts belong.

 My Jerusalem ritual keeps calling me back to the Kotel.
Keeper of our memory,
Witness of our yearning.

 I touch the wall and feel the weight of centuries.
Of my people,
And our longing.

 Being almost there isn’t enough.




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 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column


It seems like every day brings a new anti-Jewish incident in the US. Journalists are harassed by anti-Jewish Twitter trolls, cemeteries are desecrated and Jewish organizations receive bomb threats. Of course it is not like Jew-hatred in France, where Jewish fingers are sawed off, but it is still shocking. People expect it in Europe, much of which agreed with Hitler that the Jews were the misfortune of the countries they lived in, but America since WWII has been the one place in the world other than Israel where a Jew could forget (most of the time) to watch his back.

The ADL and FBI maintain statistics on anti-Jewish acts. The FBI’s “hate crimes” numbers are available from 1996 to 2015, and show a steady decline in anti-Jewish crimes from over 1100 in 1996 to 664 in 2015. The ADL keeps track of “incidents” which may or may not be crimes, and statistics have been presented in annual “audits” since 1979. The recent trend is similar to the FBI statistics, although the numbers are somewhat higher (for example, they report 941 incidents in 2015). The peak year was 1994, in which the ADL reported 2,066 incidents, including 25 arsons, 10 attempted arsons, and a mass shooting in which one person was murdered (by a Lebanese immigrant as revenge for the Baruch Goldstein massacre). One of the changes over the years is an increasing number of incidents on college campuses, mostly on background of the Middle East conflict. 

But with the 2016 presidential campaign, it seems as though there has been an explosion of Jew-hatred. Is this true? Who is responsible?

It seems to me that there are three kinds of perpetrators of anti-Jewish acts. First there are the organized neo-Nazis, skinheads, white supremacists, and so forth. Then there are anti-Israel “activists.” Finally, there is the kind of Jew-hatred that I remember from my childhood, ordinary people who express their dislike of Jews in the context of neighborhood disputes, teenage bullying, or petty crime.

Has there been a sudden increase in membership among neo-Nazi groups? I doubt it. And I think that the “ordinary people” category has been becoming smaller in recent years. On the other hand, anti-Israel activity, especially on campuses, has grown rapidly. Radical delegitimization of Israel in the alternative media (and even in the left-leaning segments of the mainstream media) has motivated and excused extremist activists to express themselves in anti-Jewish ways. It really doesn’t make sense to hate Israel and love Jews, as some suggest they do, and how better to support the Palestinian people than by drawing a swastika on someone’s door? 

There is also a revival of traditional anti-Jewish attitudes on the Left, such as appeared in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which liked to talk about Jewish control of banks and media. And more recently, the Black Lives Matter movement’s “intersectional” embrace of the Palestinian movement has given impetus to already simmering black antisemitism. 

But despite all this, the “explosion of Jew-hatred” associated with the election has been blamed on Trump and the Right.

In 2016 a very well-publicized anti-Jewish event occurred: Jewish journalists were harassed by thousands of hateful tweets. Interestingly, while they included the usual traditional memes (banks, Holocaust, media control, etc.) the most common subjects had to do with Zionism and Israel. The ADL’s analysis showed that 68% of some 20,000 anti-Jewish tweets directed at journalists came from only 1,600 Twitter accounts, illustrating the force-multiplier effect of social media. And since journalists were targeted, we were guaranteed to hear about it. Much of the activity could have been automated. We saw a technically similar (but far less vicious) phenomenon when Ron Paul ran for president in 2012, and online polls and website comments sections were inundated with pro-Paul material. A small group was able to have a disproportionally large effect.

The campaign against the Jewish journalists was related to the campaign of Donald Trump, both as a trigger (journalists who criticized him were targeted) and in content (anti-Jewish tweeters suggested that Trump was on their side). The tweeters were encouraged by white supremacist web sites, and it is clear that this element has adopted Trump as its champion. I don’t intend to try to analyze Trump’s thinking and motivations here, but I do not believe that he shares their ideology. And he definitely does not benefit from the association.

The public manifestation of Jew-hatred by white supremacists adds to the anti-Jewish signals coming from the pro-Palestinian Left. The fact that people now hear and see this stuff all the time legitimizes it and emphasizes it. Just as words can be said on television today that once were never heard at all in polite society, ideas that were considered too ugly to be expressed in public have become not just thinkable, but sayable. Many Americans have always held classically anti-Jewish beliefs (see Tuvia Tenenbom’s book The Lies they Tell), but the public expression of these ideas has always been socially unacceptable – at least until recently. This adds to the impression that Jew-hatred is at an all-time high.

Now we come to the latest manifestations of Jew-hatred in America, the bomb threat campaign in which at least 100 threats have been made against Jewish institutions in 5 waves (as of Wednesday), and the damaging of headstones in two Jewish cemeteries.

The bomb threat is one of the easiest and most inexpensive means to create chaos – and get media attention – imaginable. In about 10 seconds of googling, I found countless websites that offered services and applications to make anonymous phone calls. Some bragged that they don’t log IP addresses and some were outside of the US. Some offered text-to-speech conversion, so the perpetrator doesn’t even have to disguise his or her voice. The use of a VPN with such a site would make it doubly hard to track down the caller (although there are ways…).

Something which in the past was risky – I remember “bomb scares” at my middle school in which the perpetrators were caught the next day and expelled, sent to what was called “reform school” – is now trivial and safe. Any 14-year old can do it and not get caught, at least for a while. All 100 calls could easily have been made by one or two persons. It is not indicative of a wave of Jew-hatred.

The cemetery vandalism has also been given publicity far beyond its importance. Cemetery vandalism happens all the time, including to Jewish cemeteries. Sometimes it’s anti-Jewish and sometimes not. According to a blog written by Emily Ford, who owns  a company that provides planning, maintenance, restoration and research services to cemeteries, there were 127 incidents of vandalism affecting “at least 1,811 individual markers … costing at least $488,000” in the US in 2016. And this is a conservative estimate, because much vandalism isn’t reported. Three Jewish cemeteries were among those hit last year, but so was a cemetery containing the graves of notable Confederate figures, which were tagged with “anti-racist” graffiti. “Vandalism is almost inevitable in any sparsely-staffed cemetery,” Ford writes. “If 2016’s data is any indicator, nobody should be shocked by cemetery vandalism.” Indeed, and normally it is not of interest to the media.

To summarize:

  • With the exception of certain highly publicized events, there are fewer anti-Jewish hate crimes and incidents than in the recent past.
  • Neo-Nazis and white supremacists are still around, but more and more of the Jew-hatred is coming from the pro-Palestinian extreme Left.
  • A smallish group of provocateurs was responsible for the massive anti-Jewish harassment of journalists on Twitter.
  • It has become more acceptable to publically express dislike or even hatred of Jews. But there’s no reason to think these attitudes have suddenly gotten stronger or more popular.
  • The bomb threat calls could have been made by one or two people and have no real significance as an indicator of a “spike” in Jew-hatred.
  • Cemetery vandalism is common. There is nothing out-of-the-ordinary in two Jewish cemeteries being vandalized, except the media attention. Usually it’s teenagers that knock down headstones.

So, should we just say “nothing to see here, move along?”

No, I don’t think so. It is probably true that the country is not becoming more anti-Jewish. There is not a real spike in anti-Jewish incidents or behavior. But there may be something else. 

Trump has claimed that “the other side” is responsible for the bomb threats. Ha ha, that crazy narcissistic Trump. But what if he’s right? What if the tweets and bomb threats were part of a plan, a plan that may just be getting off the ground, to delegitimize him and destabilize his administration? What if the idea is to make it impossible for him to make appointments or to get congressional support for his initiatives? To build an increasingly numerous and vociferous group of protestors that won’t give him a moment’s rest? 

Add to this the fabrications against Bannon and Gorka throughout liberal media. If it’s possible to tar Trump and his key people with the brush of antisemitism, it will go a long way toward destroying him.

They don’t need a complicated conspiracy. Just the ability to do a few simple dirty tricks and to use fortuitous events, perhaps like the cemetery vandalism, to amplify the effect. And a media “echo chamber.” Sound familiar?

I have no idea who “they” might be – his domestic opposition, people in the intelligence community, or even an international actor. Maybe I’m as hysterical as the rest, and there are no connections between events, just a few delinquent teenagers making sophisticated prank calls.

But if there is something to it, then – whatever you may think about Trump – it is one of the most profoundly anti-democratic maneuvers in American history





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Wednesday, March 01, 2017



A month and a half in, all the gung ho Trump people are still maintaining that The Donald is God’s gift to the Jews and to Israel. But if you look at his rhetoric and that of his inner circle, it’s anything but clear. Take the issue of moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, for instance. Back on October 27, Trump could not have been clearer in his speech to AIPAC. “We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.” 

Donald Trump Promises To Move Embassy From Tel Aviv To Jerusalem from Now The End Begins on Vimeo.

But in January, after assuming office, Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that he didn’t want to talk about it. “It’s too early,” he said.

And now? “I’m thinking about it. I’m learning the issue and we’ll see what happens. It’s not an easy decision. It’s been discussed for so many years. No one wants to make this decision, and I’m thinking about it seriously.”

Translation: he doesn’t want to make the decision. He’s thinking about it.

Then Friday night, Vice President Pence, speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas seemed to distance the prospects of an American embassy in Jerusalem even further when he said that Trump’s administration is "reviewing additional steps to demonstrate America's support including assessing whether the American embassy in Israel should be relocated to Jerusalem."

Note the use of the word “whether.” We’ve gone from “We will move the embassy,” to debating “Whether we should move the embassy.”

In the language of the Talmud, this would be going from the vadai to the safek—from the certain to the questionable, which is an unnatural order for how things should be.

In examining the shift from electoral promise to placing the issue on the backburner, one cannot discount the idea that it is Jerusalem pouring cold water on the idea of moving the embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu has publicly said he wants the embassy moved to Jerusalem; that in fact, Israel’s policy is that all embassies should be in Jerusalem. And still, it is possible there is more to this picture than any of us know. We the people never know what is going on behind closed doors. And if it is Bibi who doesn’t want the embassy moved, it isn’t as though it would be politic for Trump to say so.

Then there’s this: could it be that the apparent change in policy proves Trump never really intended to go through with moving the embassy in the first place? This is, of course, more than possible. Every candidate makes promises. Every candidate breaks promises.

And finally, there is the matter of Trump’s alt right base. Trump has been reluctant to appear philosemitic on several occasions. Take his alteration of the Holocaust Day speech prepared for him by the State Department. The original speech made explicit mention of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. But Trump (or one of his lackeys) changed the wording, omitting any reference to the Jewish people, to make the speech more “inclusive.”

Trump, it is said, is meanwhile thinking about cutting several special envoy positions, including one dedicated to battling antisemitism. Right at the time that antisemitic incidents are exploding all over the globe, including in the United States, where we have hundreds of gravestones overturned in Philly, swastikas sprayed on cars in Buffalo, and a wave of bomb scares hitting JCC’s all across the country. Allegations have been made that Trump said that the Jews themselves are behind these incidents. These allegations are anecdotal, however, and at least one of the parties taking umbrage, Steven Goldstein, of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect has a liberal axe to grind, hence a credibility problem.

In any event, the feeling is that Trump is not coming out sufficiently strong enough against these expressions of hatred. He had his press secretary make a statement: “The president continues to be deeply disappointed and concerned by the reports of further vandalism at Jewish cemeteries."
“Disappointment” just doesn’t cut it. Would Trump have expressed “disappointment” in Hitler (may his name and memory be erased) for gassing the 6 million? Or perhaps “deep concern?”


All this is a far cry from how Trump presented himself to the Jewish people in the run up to the election. Take, for instance, the way Trump allowed David Friedman to be his Jewish “face.” Friedman made a speech in October in which he came right out and called the State Department antisemitic for refusing to move the embassy.

"In 1995, Congress enacted a law that required the embassy of the United States to move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem," said Friedman at the Jerusalem rally while stumping for Trump. "That's 21 years ago. Hasn't happened. Why? Because the law provides that the obligation to move the embassy to Jerusalem can be waived at the desire of the State Department, the same State Department that has been anti-Israel and anti-Semitic for the past 70 years."

"Now every president gets elected and he says to the State Department, 'what about this law? Should we move the embassy to Jerusalem,'" said Friedman. "The State Department says, 'absolutely not. Absolutely not.' The lifers in the State Department are absolutely, positively committed to never moving the embassy to Jerusalem. What's different about Donald Trump? You all know Donald Trump. If there's anybody in the world of politics who could stand up to the State Department, it is Donald Trump."



But Donald Trump is NOT standing up to the State Department. He is not moving the embassy. He’s not doing anything about the sudden burgeoning of antisemitism in the United States. To the contrary, he’s mulling over cutting the special antisemitism envoy’s position.

Donald has a Jewish daughter and grandchildren. He counts a number of right wing Jews among his closest advisers and confidantes. But Trump also has a very strong alt right base and he is reluctant to appear at odds with their ethos.


There is no question that this is a very bad thing. Egregious. It is absolutely imperative that he stand up when it counts and face these expressions of antisemitism. He must stand up to his alt right base and denounce antisemitism in no uncertain terms. Trump cannot continue to coast on the Jewish creds of his family and advisers, but must himself take the bull by the horns. Far from cutting the antisemitism envoy position, Trump should be creating a taskforce to deal with the current rise in Jew-hatred.

None of us should be giving Trump a pass, looking the other way, insisting he wouldn’t hurt Israel or the Jews because Ivanka and Jared. It doesn’t wash. It never did.

Trump must be judged not on campaign promises or by his relatives and associates but by his own actions and deeds post-election. Now is the time for Trump to step up to the plate and show his mettle.

The Jews are the canaries in the coal mine, the harbinger of larger dangers in the immediate environment. Trump would be wise to see the warning for what it is and deal with it in no uncertain terms. He should be moving that embassy today. He should be crushing that alt right base, he needs to decry and disavow them, shame them. He needs to let them know that he is NOT their man.


And if he doesn’t, if he won’t. Well then. He IS.


This piece has been updated for clarity.




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Sunday, February 26, 2017


Edward Moran - Unveiling The Statue of Liberty 
Enlightening the World
, 1886
Two of the most significant political questions facing the West today are those of immigration policy and identity politics. 

Women's March organizer, Linda Sarsour, stands at the crux of both and has successfully put pro-Israel diaspora Jewry between the horns of a political dilemma. 

Sarsour just raised considerable funds for the restoration of a recently desecrated Jewish cemetery near St. Louis, Missouri. Thus, even as she despises Israel she goes out of her way to help American Jewry. 

Meanwhile, as disappointed ideologues from both left and right spit an endless stream of vitriol at U.S. President Donald Trump for everything from corruption to racism, the issues of immigration and identity politics garner the most rancor.

Concerns around both are vital and divisive because they cut a sharp line down the central contradictions agitating the progressive-left and the Democratic Party.

These central contradictions are those between the foundational ideological pillars of  universal human rights and the multicultural ideal, upon which the western-left stakes its moral authority.


Progressive-Left Ideals

The foundational thinking behind the ideals of universal human rights and multiculturalism is grounded in the history of western Christianity, imperialism, slavery, and war as interpreted through the lens of Enlightenment liberalism.

Concepts around universal human rights can easily be thought to bolster progressive-left immigration policies, while the multicultural ideal drives the kind of "identity politics" associated with groups like Black Lives Matter or activists like Sarsour.

The problem, however, is that these foundational ideological pillars are logically inconsistent and mutually exclusive. A person cannot simultaneously support universal human rights and the multicultural ideal if the former must defer to the latter's disinclination to make ethical judgments between cultures.

For example, a person cannot honestly claim to stand for universal human rights if that person fears speaking out for Yazidis buried alive under Islamist imperial aggression. A person cannot favor universal human rights if he or she does not really care about the desecration of Palmyra. Nor can a person honestly care about universal human rights if they aren't the least bothered by the genocide of the Christians throughout the Middle East under the boot of Arab-Muslim religious domination.

It is precisely for this reason that someone like Sarsour cannot support feminism while also embracing Sharia under the banner of multiculturalism. They are mutually exclusive concepts. Western feminism, at its most basic, is embedded within the ideal of universal human rights. The very foundation of western feminism is universal human rights. Multiculturalism as expressed in identity politics, however, insists upon holding individuals to prejudicial standards of behavior according to skin color or gendered orientation.

In this way, identity politics repudiates Martin Luther King, Jr., without his temerity to come out and honestly say so,

And this is part of the reason why the progressive-left claim to moral exemplarism, grounded in social justice, is deeply problematic and why identity politics actually promotes racism, not its diminishment.

The left only cares about social justice and human rights according to where one's "identity group" falls on the hierarchy of victimhood. In this way "identity politics" draws young people away from notions of individual freedom and equality in favor of a cultivated group victim status in competition with other ethnic or gendered minorities, including the Jewish minority.

This "cultural Marxist" way of viewing human social interactions encourages racial hatred, street violence, a manichean, black and white, Good versus Evil manner of living politics while potentially cultivating a white nationalist backlash in response.

Furthermore, it is the left-leaning, post-structural, anti-imperialist political viewpoint which frames the Arab-Muslim war against the Jews in the Middle East as actually an unjust war waged by racist, imperialist, Zionist Jews against an innocent, indigenous people "of color" who therefore have every right to fight back by any means necessary.


Diaspora Jewry


democratsThis increasingly-pressurized political dynamic puts progressive Jews - who represent the great majority of diaspora Jewry - in difficult social and political positions because increasingly they may either be pro-Israel or "progressive" but not both.

This is nothing new. The distrust and dislike between liberal pro-Israel Jewry and progressive-left, Democratic Party, anti-Zionism has been simmering for years.

The Washington Post tells us that today:

"While conservative Republicans favored Israel by a 44-point margin in 2001, the margin is now 70 points. And while liberal Democrats favored Israel by 30 points at the turn of the century, they now favor the Palestinians by 12 points."

This is the high wire that someone like, for example, Sarah Silverman must cross in an intensely public way. Silverman does not share this problem with Bernie Sanders because Sanders is not particularly pro-Israel to begin with. 

Silverman honestly is pro-Israel and, if I judge her correctly, she is someone going through the process of sorting through and rearranging her political baggage.

{Shortly after the recent election Silverman interviewed Sanders and I put together a little audio something in response.}

But she is a stand-up and an actor, not a politician, so she gets the benefit of the doubt.

Nonetheless, Silverman represents stresses within the diaspora Jewish community between their allegiance to universal concepts of social justice and Tikkun Olam versus the well-being of the Jewish people as a distinct national group. Although diaspora Jews have shown a remarkable loyalty to social democratic ideals, the people who most strongly vouch for those ideals - i.e., the international Left and the Democratic Party - do not reciprocate the friendship as we see from the Pew Research Poll (above) published in the Washington Post from last month.

The reason for this is because western progressives increasingly see Palestinian-Arabs as innocent, indigenous "Davids" bravely facing-off against the malicious, invading Zionist "Goliath." They also - in a manner both racist and condescending - view the great Muslim people as without agency and, thus, without responsibility for the foreseeable outcome of their own behavior.

Like nineteenth-century western imperialists, progressive-left identitarians treats non-whites as small children in need of fatherly protection.

And it is for this reason that so many western liberal Jews favor either loose immigration policies or open borders. To do otherwise is conceived as a betrayal of essential Jewish values of kindness, fairness, justice, and compassion. It is also seen as a betrayal of the coastal, anti-Trump resistance which can easily cost people friendships and jobs.

In other words, unless western Jews favor the unvetted importation of millions of people from among a population that generally despises us... it makes us racist. 

If we object to bringing these millions into our home countries without responsible vetting procedures - despite the fact that for thirteen hundred years we lived under Arab-Muslim imperial rule as second and third-class non-citizens - this makes us terrible people and Islamophobes. Even though much of the Arab religious leadership continues to screech for the genocide of the Jewish people, diaspora Jews are irredeemable, backwards, xenophobes for merely desiring the exclusion of jihadis into our home countries.

{Why should western Jews care, after all, if their own kids get harassed by anti-Semitic anti-Zionists during their college years after forking over perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition?}

Nonetheless, I probably speak for something close to a majority of diaspora Jews when I say that we welcome immigrants from anywhere in the world into our home countries. 

The only thing that we ask is that they pass through regular legal channels and not include jihadis among their number.

Given the history of the Jewish people under millennia of Christian and Muslim domination, this seem like a rather small and commonsensical request.


Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.








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