IGNORE IT AT YOUR PERIL
Just because Trump said it doesn’t mean it’s not true: The Democratic Party is becoming unsalvageable
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We have to stop talking about preventing the Corbynization of the Democratic Party, because it is already here.
And if you don’t believe me—if you want to draw a line under all of the above and hope that all the Democratic Party needs is some gentle nudging and organizing—I have bad news for you: The next thing coming down the pike is even worse.
Earlier this year, @BettyMcCollum04 (D.-Minn.) introduced a bill in the House of Representatives titled “H.R. 2047—Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act.”
In June, a host of high-profile Democrats co-sponsored her bill, including @sethmoulton, @AOC, @AyannaPressley @IlhanMN, and @RashidaTlaib.
The bill’s purpose is to require that “US funds do not support military detention, interrogation, abuse, or ill-treatment of Palestinian children.”
It then goes on to present a long list of citations from reports compiled by non-government organizations that accuse Israel of everything from applying coercive interrogation techniques against children as young as 11 to holding minors for days without a trial.
You could easily tear apart most of the bill’s cherry-picked claims by explaining, as the Israel Democracy Institute had, that Israel’s approach to underage suspects is far more complicated than the bill presents it to be.
But there is an even simpler, more enlightening explanation—especially after seeing Ocasio-Cortez’s glib tweet about the bill: “I don’t believe in caging kids. Pretty straightforward value. I don’t care if it’s American kids, Mexican kids, or Palestinian kids.”
Except, of course, that the bill doesn’t apply to Mexico or Egypt or South Africa—all of which receive substantial amounts in American foreign aid.
If it had, we’d be on solid moral ground. Instead, this bill—backed by a cadre of House Democrats who abjure anti-Semitism in theory and yet astonishingly manage to “accidentally” perpetrate it over and over—tracks, in an eerily perfect way, with a long and murderous tradition:
Fantasizing that Jews have a special fondness for killing, abducting, maiming, or otherwise abusing non-Jewish children, and leading mobs to attack them based on these accusations.
Sadly, blood libels are still popular today in the Arab world, where media outlets and high-ranking officials frequently report on the Jewish lust for the blood of the young.
Some American academics, too, are practitioners of this hateful art, like the Rutgers professor who accused Israel of killing Palestinian children in order to traffic in their organs.
If the history of anti-Semitism teaches us anything, it’s that when blood libels appear, real violence isn’t far to follow. If you harbored any reservations before now, H.R. 2047 should leave no doubt that the Democratic Party has a very real and very deep anti-Semitism problem.
Seeing Trump as an anti-Semite or even anti-Semite-adjacent requires leaving reason further behind than any educated citizen of a modern republic ought to ever do.
“Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism,” Louis Brandeis wrote, adding that “a man is a better citizen of the U.S. for being also a loyal citizen of his state, and of his city, for being loyal to his family…”
“...every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though he feels neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.”
Put simply, Brandeis believed that if you didn’t support Israel, you either lacked knowledge or showed a great disloyalty to your own people — a view that would’ve been utterly uncontroversial, even banal, until very recently.
Unless you require neither context nor reason and are inclined to hear everything the president says as hate speech, you can rest easy and understand his latest ‘gaffe’ as poorly stated, at worst.
The Democrat party appears to be well on its way to becoming something entirely hostile to Jews. The president we are told again and again is the single greatest menace to our community is many things, but certainly not that.
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