{"id":109348,"date":"2023-12-15T18:05:44","date_gmt":"2023-12-15T16:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=109348"},"modified":"2023-12-15T09:15:43","modified_gmt":"2023-12-15T07:15:43","slug":"21-05-96","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=109348","title":{"rendered":"American Jews Need to Stop Being Stupid About Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>American Jews Need to Stop Being Stupid About Politics<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n


\nJULIA HAHN<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

And start taking policy seriously.<\/strong><\/span>
\n.<\/h4>\n
A pro-Palestinian demonstrator places a Palestinian flag on a menorah on New Haven Green, Dec. 10, 2023 \/ @JAKE_THE_LAWYER_ VIA INSTAGRAM<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
.<\/div>\n
\n

In the aftermath of Oct. 7, the assault on American Jewish liberal reality has come from all sides: from universities, favored media outlets, Hollywood, and the political leaders for whom many American Jews had voted and donated large sums of money. The day following the attack, the Biden White House held a barbecue for staff\u2014apparently the events of the day prior didn\u2019t call for a postponement of festivities. That weekend, the administration pushed out not one, but two tweets (which were subsequently deleted) pressing for a cease-fire<\/a>\u00a0before Israel had finished counting its dead. Since then, the administration has made a point of emphasizing that its main priority following the war\u2019s end is the speedy establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. Apparently, Palestinians are to be rewarded for the mass killing of Jews, while Israelis will be forced to live with the imminent threat of a repeat of Oct. 7\u2014this time coming from two fronts instead of one.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

It is no surprise, then, that the social signaling from the White House has made itself felt wherever progressives hold power. Academics at esteemed universities made statements explaining that Hamas\u2019 savagery was justified. It would seem that the violent gang rape of Jewish women\u2014unlike so many unfortunate college frat house dalliances\u2014is not black and white, and instead requires \u201ccontext\u201d and endless questioning of the victims, who are often proclaimed to be fake.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Former President Barack Obama\u00a0exhibited true restraint<\/a>\u00a0and waited until after the weekend had passed before he put forward his\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0about the events of Oct. 7. When the cerebral Obama eventually chose to elaborate on his views in an\u00a0interview<\/a>, he characterized the situation of the Palestinian people as \u201cunbearable.\u201d \u201cYou have to admit that nobody\u2019s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree,\u201d blathered the former president, who had championed and signed the Iran nuclear deal.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

American Jews need to be clear about their own interests and opt out of the political verticals that are pushing them to engage in self-harm.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

While we were perhaps not surprised to see an outpouring of support for Hamas in the Europe Angela Merkel made, conditions in the U.S. were not much different. Over 300,000 pro-Palestinian protesters gathered in D.C. for a rally in which they attempted to scale the White House gates, vandalized public property, and defaced the \u201cPeople\u2019s House\u201d with painted red \u201cbloody\u201d handprints in what ABC News\u00a0described<\/a>\u00a0as a \u201cpassionate\u201d protest. In New York, pro-Palestinian protesters climbed flag poles to tear down American flags and attempted to\u00a0break down<\/a>\u00a0the doors of Grand Central station, temporarily closing access to the terminal. Jewish kids on a college campus cowered in fear,\u00a0trapped in the library<\/a>\u00a0as pro-Palestinian students jeered outside. Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights were warned to stay indoors on Shabbat. In Los Angeles, a 69-year-old Jewish man was allegedly\u00a0struck on the head<\/a>\u00a0by a pro-Palestinian protester with a megaphone resulting in his death, in what the medical examiner\u00a0ruled<\/a>\u00a0as a homicide\u2014or as an NBC News\u00a0headline<\/a>\u00a0put it, \u201cMan dies after hitting head.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The insanity seemed unending. Black Lives Matter came out on the side of Hamas\u2014could it be that the BLM movement doesn<\/em>\u2019t actually care about the persecution of a historic minority?<\/em>\u00a0pro-BLM Jews began to wonder. Queers for Palestine made their alliances known at every major rally. All of a sudden, many American Jewish liberals began to notice that those rag-tag groups of victims with whom they had previously allied themselves did not seem superfocused on justice or peace. Rather, they were hellbent on the dissolution of the so-called \u201coppressor\u201d class, \u201cby any means necessary.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

American Jewish liberals realized in the last two months that even though they represent only 0.2% of the global population and were nearly exterminated in Nazi gas chambers 80 years ago, they do not qualify as one of the oppressed minorities that they had so passionately advocated for. They were in fact the \u201coppressor\u201d that \u201cmovements for justice\u201d hope to destroy.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Antisemitism and Political Verticals<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Over the course of two months, American Jews witnessed the vaporization of what they had previously imagined to be the best era, in the greatest country, for Jews in history. Wealthy Jews began questioning what had been done with the many millions of dollars they had donated to their alma maters. Some even began to wonder about all the money they donated to the Democratic Party. But voting for Republicans still appears to be a bridge too far. In fact, the first poll of U.S. Jewish voters since Oct. 7,\u00a0shows<\/a>\u00a074% approval of Biden\u2019s approach on Israel and Gaza, and 68% of U.S. Jewish voters backing Biden over Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has given us a good glimpse into what an afterthought the Jews are for the president, who allegedly ran for office because of Charlottesville. When asked on Oct. 23 about the rise in antisemitic attacks since the beginning of the war in Gaza, she refused both times to address them at the podium. The White House had not seen \u201cany credible threats\u201d of increased antisemitism, the press secretary\u00a0said<\/a>, as she pivoted and read from her binder about the increase in \u201chate-fueled\u201d Islamophobic attacks. When asked about antisemitic protests on college campuses, she said simply that she was \u201cnot going to go into\u201d that.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Being serious about antisemitism means being wise to the administration\u2019s belitting of antisemitism by juxtaposing it with other forms of \u201chate.\u201d It also means being discerning\u00a0<\/strong>about what actually counts as antisemitism. The administration feels it can get away with its relativization of antisemitism in part because, for too long, we have allowed those in authority to claim that attacking liberal policies is somehow an attack on Judaism\u2014or that attacking prominent supporters of Iran\u00a0apologists<\/a>\u00a0and far-left ideologues like George Soros is inherently antisemitic.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

But in pretending that anti-liberalism is antisemitism, we\u2019ve allowed ourselves to be distracted and emotionally manipulated by people who do not have the best interests of American Jews at heart, and whose preferred policies\u2014including large-scale immigration from countries where antisemitism is rampant\u2014pose a clear and obvious danger to Jewish lives.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The latest prominent individual to find himself the victim of the left\u2019s faux antisemitic manipulation campaign is Elon Musk, whose crime was essentially agreeing with someone who criticized the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and some American Jews for not being in touch with reality. The White House was quick to pounce,\u00a0calling<\/a>\u00a0it a \u201chideous lie.\u201d While unartfully articulated, this claim was not antisemitic. A Tablet\u00a0editorial<\/a>\u00a0in October, for instance, criticized the ADL for having become a \u201chandmaiden of power.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

A well-organized campaign highlighting Musk\u2019s \u201cantisemitic\u201d post is now bent on forcing advertisers from Musk\u2019s platform\u2014using the lie of Musk\u2019s antisemitism to damage a public figure they see as a political enemy. Interestingly, we have seen no similar news coverage of the companies that have been pressured into joining this campaign\u2014which include Apple, Comcast, Disney, IBM, Lions Gate, NBC Universal, Paramount, and Warner Brothers\u2014for\u00a0advertising<\/a>\u00a0on TikTok, the Chinese communist-run social media platform that algorithmically pushes far more openly\u00a0antisemitic content<\/a>\u00a0than either X or Instagram.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Allowing political manipulators to play on the fears of a besieged community by convincing them to act against their own interests is worse than manipulative\u2014it is sick and sadistic. Instead of signing on, American Jews need to be clear about their own interests and opt out of the political verticals that are pushing them to engage in self-harm.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

We cannot be sidetracked from squarely facing threats to our lives and to our hard-won positions in American life. \u201cThe Jewish principle of\u00a0tikkun olam<\/em>\u201d is not a commandment by which G-d Almighty mandates voting for the Democratic Party, nor is it a commandment that decrees the expansion of Jew-hating DEI bureaucracies into every corner of American institutional and corporate life.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The argument one now hears from American Jewish liberals searching for an excuse not to have to vote with conservatives is that there are right-wing antisemites, too. While that is obviously true, it amounts to the observation that vile antisemitism exists everywhere, just as it always has. The question is where is it being rewarded, celebrated, and institutionalized. As Yoram Hazony\u00a0writes<\/a>\u00a0in a post on X: \u201cthe anti-Semitic right still has only a tiny fraction of the real public presence and political influence that is wielded by the anti-Semitic left and [its] close allies \u2026 It is the anti-Semitic left that is flooding the campuses and the streets and inciting to violence throughout the West. Nothing remotely on this scale has been organized by anti-Semitic elements on the right in the decades [sic].\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Antisemitism and Democratic Foreign Policy<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n
\n

The media, of course, wants you to believe otherwise. That is why it has spent the last seven years screaming that Donald Trump is\u00a0literally Hitler.<\/em>\u00a0Yes, the president who brokered historic Mideast peace agreements, recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and moved the American Embassy there, acknowledged Israel\u2019s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, withdrew the U.S. from the United Nations\u2019 Human Rights Council because of its anti-Israel bias, and made Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act apply to antisemitic discrimination is \u201cliterally Hitler.\u201d This lie is no different from when Vice President Joe Biden told African Americans in 2012 that the Republican Party of Mitt Romney was planning to \u201cput y\u2019all back in chains<\/a>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Israel shouldn\u2019t be a partisan issue, many liberal Jews demur. Except, it is. In fact, pretending that Israel is not a partisan issue requires one to ignore both the evidence of the present moment as well as the eight-year long record of the Obama administration, when the Democratic Party openly threatened its Jewish voters and supporters if they didn\u2019t support the new policy of realignment with the Jew-hating theocracy in Iran, which eventually sponsored the Oct. 7 attacks.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

While the media has hosted us to a barrage of puff pieces about how deeply Biden personally cares about Israel, his administration\u2019s policies suggest otherwise. Prior to Oct. 7, these actions included:\u00a0restarting<\/a>\u00a0assistance<\/a>\u00a0worth\u00a0hundreds of millions<\/a>\u00a0of dollars for the West Bank and Hamas-controlled Gaza, which the Trump administration had previously stopped; reengaging Iran and unfreezing $6 billion in funds for Tehran, and extending a sanctions waiver that allows the Iranians to access another $10 billion; and gifting Iran a monetary windfall, with which Iran could potentially fund Hamas terrorism, by failing to enforce Iranian oil sanctions. Post-Oct. 7, the administration has tried to strong-arm Israel into a cease-fire; announced it would veto an Israel-only aid bill with bipartisan support unless it also included far more controversial funding for Ukraine; and, like a Norm Macdonald\u00a0joke<\/a>\u00a0brought back to life,\u00a0launched<\/a>\u00a0a national strategy to counter Islamophobia less than a month after the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Here, too, the counterargument one often hears\u2014for example from\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0columnist\u00a0Bret Stephens<\/a>\u00a0on Nov. 7, is that antisemitism is just as bad or worse on the \u201cneo-isolationist right,\u201d which \u201cwould be mainstreamed by a second Trump term.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>In essence, people like Stephens warn American Jews against a second term for the most pro-Israel president in modern American history because that administration might also reject the views of the foreign policy establishment. American Jews simply cannot pretend that the isolationist right and its supposed lack of support for NATO are a bigger threat than those on the left calling for the eradication of the only Jewish state, justifying Hamas\u2019 beheading of Jewish babies, and desecrating posters of kidnapped Jewish children. Now that we have seen what genocidal antisemitism looks like with our own eyes, in our own lifetimes, we cannot afford to continue to pretend that disagreements about foreign policy are somehow the same as attempts to exterminate us.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Antisemitism and Immigration<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n

While the media will continue to generate a lot of noise about who\u2019s better on Israel and whose antisemitism is worse, the truth is that on the other critical issues concerning American Jews, there is no doubt where our interests lie. Chief among these issues is immigration. Almost every Democratic figure, including Israel supporters like Hillary Clinton and John Fetterman, also support importing huge inflows of people who are hostile to Jews. Indeed, prominent Democrats such as Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal are\u00a0demanding<\/a>\u00a0the Biden administration allow large numbers of Palestinians to migrate to the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Regardless of how you feel about the conflict or the treatment of the Palestinian people, the fact remains that according to recent polling, 75% of Palestinians say that they support Hamas\u2019 savagery on Oct. 7. It is a gross understatement to say that bringing in huge numbers of like-minded individuals from the Palestinian territories and other places in the region where Jew hatred and terrorism are salient, will not lead America into the progressive and inclusive future liberals claim they want to create. It will, however, greatly exacerbate and increase antisemitism in America, the way it has in France, Germany, and Great Britain.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Watching the events of the past month, many American Jewish liberals have quietly begun to acknowledge what conservatives have been warning against for decades: that much of the antisemitic radicalism we see on the streets of large American cities and on college campuses does not look or feel \u201chome-grown.\u201d Bringing the \u201cArab Street\u201d to the streets of New York and Los Angeles hardly seems like a good idea, especially if you are Jewish.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The problem posed by importing foreign nationals from countries where Jew-hatred has been normalized has proven to be particularly acute on college campuses\u2014whose administrators have become complicit in supporting the vile prejudices of many of their students. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has\u00a0acknowledged<\/a>\u00a0that the reason it didn\u2019t suspend pro-Palestinian students who threatened Jews was because they could face deportation as a result, since they are not U.S. citizens. The anti-Israel students at Harvard similarly\u00a0indicated<\/a>\u00a0that their immigration status would suffer if their universities imposed consequences for their vile actions.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Why should American Jews advocate for the admission of people to the United States who want to kill us? Why are we turning our universities\u2014many of them generously funded by Jewish donors\u2014into shields to prevent Jew-hating maniacs from being deported under U.S. law, which denies a visa to any alien who endorses or espouses terrorist activity, and instead educate them at our expense? How is it that when a former Hamas leader calls for a \u201cglobal day of jihad,\u201d Americans thousands of miles away\u2014 especially young Jews\u2014have to brace themselves for it?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

George W. Bush once said his war strategy in the Middle East was to \u201cfight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.\u201d If the pro-Palestinian protests of the last several weeks across Europe and the United States are any indication, that strategy does not seem to have aged well, thanks in part to immigration policies that verge on madness. Hundreds of thousands of American Jews have relatives and ancestors who fled Jew-hatred in countries like Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Iraq, where their families lived for centuries. The idea that Jews now willingly support importing those same murderous hatreds to America defies belief.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In a moment when American Jews seem to be asking themselves many new questions, immigration is certainly a good place to start. Where is the progressive and enlightened America that supporters of open borders promised? Is it possible mass immigration has not been an unalloyed good? Could it be that importing people who do not share the values of our nation was perhaps a risky experiment\u2014especially for vulnerable minorities such as Jews?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In a recent\u00a0piece<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>, David Leonhardt argues that if we want to have an immigration policy that serves our national interest, we must move away from the trope that more immigration is always better, and instead begin by asking not only\u00a0how many<\/em>\u00a0people we should be admitting, but also\u00a0who<\/em>\u00a0we want to make our fellow citizens. As a people who have always celebrated rational inquiry, Jews should be at the forefront of this effort\u2014especially now that we have seen the consequences of avoiding uncomfortable questions.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n

Julia Hahn<\/strong> is a Jewish American writer and former deputy White House communications director.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em>
\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.
\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:
\n<\/em>webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American Jews Need to Stop Being Stupid About Politics JULIA HAHN And start taking policy seriously. . A pro-Palestinian demonstrator places a Palestinian flag on a menorah on New Haven Green, Dec. 10, 2023 \/ @JAKE_THE_LAWYER_ VIA INSTAGRAM . In the aftermath of Oct. 7, the assault on American Jewish liberal reality has come from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109348"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=109348"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109388,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109348\/revisions\/109388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=109348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=109348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=109348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}