Friday, August 23, 2019

A Jewish Liberal Writer Warns Jewish Democrats, Ignore the Signs at your Peril

Today in Tablet,  Liel Leibovitz warns his fellow Jewish liberals that, no matter how much they may despise President Trump, they ignore at their peril the warning signs regarding the anti-Semitic path taken by their party.  Of special concern to Leibovitz, beyond the whole phenomenon of "the Squad"'s anti-Zionist activity and the Democratic failure to confront them:
Earlier this year, Rep. Betty McCollum (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 Seth Moulton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.
The bill’s purpose is to require that “United States 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.
...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.

In my view, what is needed most now is for Cory Booker, Julian Castro and Kamala Harris to vociferously and directly confront the anti-Semitism in their party. A good start would be to openly oppose not only this bill, and the Squad, but also to repudiate support from Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton, who these same candidates have been patronizing. I mention these three candidates because they are persons of color, while the same actions by the other candidates might well be dismissed by the Left as a display of white privilege. However, I concede that it is highly unlikely that my advice will be taken up by the Democratic leadership.