E arlier
this week at a Pennsylvania rally sponsored by Jewish Americans for
Obama and headlined by Democratic National Committee chair Debbie
Wasserman Schultz, the 1,000 Jews in attendance in a synagogue
auditorium heard one speaker portray the Republican Party as theocratic
anti-Semites who didn’t believe in the separation of church and state;
another Democrat described his experiences with anti-Semites in Arizona.
The message — that Republicans and their ilk are anti-Semites — is a
familiar one. Jews have long believed that right-wingers tend to be
anti-Semites, whether they identify as Nazis, members of the Ku Klux
Klan, John Birchers, conservatives, evangelicals, or Republicans. At the
height of the Tea Party movement, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
characterized the protesters as Nazis, saying “You be the judge.
They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on
health care.” On an earlier Bill Maher show, New York’s Democratic
Senator Chuck Schumer joked that most anti-Semites vote Republican.
But today, many Jews are no longer laughing along. The anti-Semite card
that Democrats have played so deftly over the years — the single-biggest
reason Jews provide Democrats with more than 50% of their campaign
funding — looks phony to many Jews. When Schultz got up to speak in
praise of Obama, the normally sedate Jewish audience heckled her,
leaving her visibly rattled.
The upset many Jews feel today is mostly directed toward Obama, whom
they see as tolerant of anti-Semites such as Louis Farrakhan, tolerant
of anti-Semitic organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and
intolerant, even hostile, to Israel. But Democrats on the whole need
beware — more than a presidential election is at stake.
When Jews began to perceive Canada’s Liberal Party as being tolerant of
anti-Semitism and unfair to Israel — such as through Liberal
participation in the UN Durban conference and the accusation that Israel
had committed a war crime — the rock-solid support that the Liberals
had long enjoyed from Jews evaporated. Over the last decade, Jewish
voters and Jewish money steadily moved toward the Conservatives, helping
first to give them minority governments and then, in an election last
year, swinging massively, helping to give the Conservatives a majority
government. The Liberal Party, which had governed Canada for most of the
last century and was considered “Canada’s natural governing party,”
became relegated to third-party status. Bereft of Jewish votes and, much
more importantly, much of the Jewish funding that in the past had
helped sustain it, the Liberal Party, some predict, may disappear.
America’s Jews, who for more than a century were prominent in the union
movement and the civil rights movement, traditionally found their home
in the Democratic Party, particularly since country club Republicans
didn’t consider Jews acceptable company. The left-leaning Jewish
community especially took to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a left-leaner
himself who appointed numerous Jews to top positions and stood by them,
despite intense criticism of his Jewish ties and his New Deal (also
known as the “Jew Deal”). FDR also won Jewish loyalty for his decision
to fight the Nazis in the Second World War, despite fierce opposition
from the America First Committee, whose flamboyant spokesman, Charles
Lindbergh, blamed pressure to enter the war on Jews and their “large
ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and
our government.” Anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli views by leading
Republicans and by evangelicals in the following decades reinforced the
view that Jews weren’t welcome in the Republican Party.
But today the politics is realigning. Anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli venom
is on the rise, and it is coming mostly from the left. Anti-Semitism on
U.S. college campuses is a “serious problem,” concluded the 2006 U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights. “There is more sympathy for Hamas [on U.S.
campuses] than there is in Ramallah,” wrote award-winning Palestinian
journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, who found during a 2009 speaking tour of
the U.S. that it “is not about supporting the Palestinians as much as it
is about promoting hatred for the Jewish state.”
Surveys by Jewish organizations confirm that anti-Semitism is on the
rise, as does a 2009 survey by researchers at Stanford and Columbia
University, designed to find explicit prejudice toward Jews as a result
of the financial meltdown. To the researchers’ surprise, they found that
“Democrats were especially prone to blaming Jews: while 32% of
Democrats accorded at least moderate blame, only 18.4% of Republicans
did so,” a difference that jars “given the presumed higher degree of
racial tolerance among liberals and the fact that Jews are a central
part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition.” Warning that “we
must take heed of prejudice and bigotry that have already started to
sink roots in the United States,” the authors noted that “Crises often
have the potential to stoke fears and resentment, and the current
economic collapse is likely no exception.”
Almost as if on cue, the Occupy Wall Street movement arose, with Jews
often crudely singled out for blame, and with prominent Democrats, Obama
and Pelosi among them, stoking the anti-1% sentiment. Anti-Semitism is
coming close to home for many of America’s Jews, who see themselves in
the 1% and who see their children — students at American campuses — too
intimidated to speak out against the anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli
activities that confront them.
As Jews are reassessing their support for Obama and other Democratic
candidates, they are also beginning to warm to Republicans. Much of the
credit here belongs to Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, who
made it unacceptable for evangelicals to be anti-Semitic. Evangelicals
and the American right are now unabashedly in the Jewish and Israeli
corner, leading many Jews to end their reflexive opposition to anything
labelled right-wing.
In Canada, Jewish alarm at Liberal tolerance of anti-Semitic and
anti-Israeli policies, coupled with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s
unequivocal stance against terrorism — “[There’s no] moral equivalence
between a pyromaniac and a firefighter” — persuaded Jewish captains of
industry who were also Liberal funders and fundraisers to tear up their
Liberal membership cards and throw their support behind the
Conservatives. In the U.S., where the Democrats are losing their ability
to play the anti-Semite card, a similar phenomenon could be underway.
2 comments:
Filthy jews have robbed and destroyed planet earth for over 2000 years. They killed Jesus Christ! Those cockroaches deserve nothing! I hope the Palestinians get back their land from those parasitic jews.
Thank you for demonstrating who and what you are-of course, the facts aka the truth will never confuse you-brilliant bigot that encompasses your very being-appreciate you coming out of the closet
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