Thread by @JewhadiTM

POLITICAL POWERLESSNESS IS EXPENSIVE

American Jews have only begun to pay the price demanded by the Democratic Party’s new math tabletmag.com/jewish-news-an…

A new Gallup poll released last week shows that while most Americans favor Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (59 percent to 21 percent), net sympathy for Israel is declining dramatically among liberal Democrats.

Since 2013-2016, “the percentage who sympathize more with Israel minus those sympathizing more with the Palestinians” has gone from +17 to +3. In other words, Palestinians are replacing Israelis in the hearts of the party’s base.

The inability of senior U.S. Dems, including senior Jewish members of Congress, to muster a counteroffensive, or even much of a defense, shows that a pillar of increasingly disoriented liberal political establishment is being pulled down by institutionalized identity politics.

Liberal Jews are being replaced—but by whom or what, exactly? It’s hard to put a name on it. Let’s call it progressivism, or the American version of the U.K. Labour Party’s Corbynism.

It’s intersectional, sectarian, nominally collectivist in its economics, and boldly Third Worldist in its political convictions. It is also, therefore, fundamentally anti-Israel.

Maybe the Democratic Party’s new math is why no one is making too much of the African-American kids beating up Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn.

Because the former sit at the top of the hierarchy of grievance, it’s OK for them to work through their pain by punching down at the latter. Condemning them, or @IlhanMN, would only cause more pain.

Omar’s statements are not accidental, not slips of the tongue, they will not disappear after more dialogue—no matter how much advice she receives about how the proper way to criticize Israel is to focus narrowly on the Likud Party or Netanyahu.

Nope, it’s all fair game—she’s going after Israel, the very physical fact of it, as well as the American Jews who dare support a U.S. ally which is also supported by a large majority of the American public.

The Democratic Party leadership is complicit. Nancy Pelosi gave Omar a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee even though she knew Omar would use it as a platform to attack the U.S.-Israel relationship, which she openly rejected and disdained.

Or did the 32-year-long congressional veteran really think a woman who tweeted how the Jewish state had “hypnotized the world” was going to argue for giving more money for Israel’s missile defense?

Pelosi is on her way out, retiring after this session. Like the New York representatives who drafted the resolution, her energy is waning and no match for the ‘charisma’ of Omar and her allies.

Is Omar an anti-Semite? “It is possible for leaders,” Barack Obama said of the Iranian regime, “to be cruel, bigoted, twisted in their world views and still make rational calculations.”

Omar’s rhetoric communicates the agenda that she and her allies are driving—their rational calculations.

It’s Obama’s agenda. It is too painful to identify the real source of the problem: An American president that the Jewish community not only overwhelmingly supported but also defended even as his language and his policies clearly spelled danger for them.

They believed his validators because they wanted to—the Jewish journalists, diplomats, policymakers, Obama’s envoys to the Jewish community who all vouched for him, how he felt love for Israel and the Jews in his “kishkes.”

At the end of last week Omar seemed to criticize Obama, listing the Obama policies she disliked—immigration, deportation, drone strikes, etc.

Omar later contended she wasn’t running down the previous president, but it’s a common dynamic in progressive political movements: Pointing out the failures of the fathers (and mothers) is how you keep the second generation mobilized.

Where Obama and his surrogates always claimed that re-aligning the U.S. with Iran, or tilting towards the Palestinians, or condemning Israel at the U.N., were measures being taken for Israel’s own good, and therefore in fact proved how much they cared about Israel...

... progressives like Omar feel no compunction to engage in such rhetorical flimflam, to palliate “donors” or anyone else. Their pitch is simple: Israel is evil and should be eradicated.

What Obama and his surrogates whispered and implied, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and their fellow progressives now feel confident enough to say openly.

Without AIPAC and its infrastructure, there is no institutional U.S. support for the peace process. Why? Because only 21 percent of Americans sympathize more with the Palestinians than with the Israelis.

Just as the evangelical Christian community is the base of U.S. support for the Jewish state, it is the liberal Jewish establishment that advances the idea of a Palestinian state.

So why did Obama rub this community’s nose in the ground? Why did he have to corner AIPAC by appointing Chuck Hagel as sec of defense, a man who referred to it as the “Jewish lobby” and proudly announced that, unlike some of his peers, he was not an “Israeli senator”?

Then there was the Iran deal, the making and marketing of which was a bloody affair, intended not only to secure the president’s key foreign policy initiative, but also to humiliate his opponents.

Accordingly, the president, and a complicit press corps, used anti-Semitic conceits to bludgeon Jewish community leaders, Democrats as well as Republicans.

They were beholden to “donors” and “lobbies,” and more loyal to Israel than their own country. There’s barely a stone’s throw from what Obama said to what Omar has said and tweeted.

Obama explained that the Islamic Republic uses anti-Semitic rhetoric as an “organizing tool.” He went after AIPAC not because he personally dislikes Jews or Israel, but because he promised to radically transform America.

So he had to start with the one institution he had absolute control over: the Democratic Party. He hacked away at the Jewish community because American Jewry is the pillar of the liberal political establishment.

By targeting AIPAC, and rejecting the foundational nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship, Obama crippled the party’s then-dominant liberal wing and empowered the progressives, whose ranks the Jews are more than welcome to join—but on new terms. On Rep. Ilhan Omar’s terms.