Hey Dems: Jewish Lives Fucking Matter, Too
Hey Dems: Jewish Lives Fucking Matter, Too
Stay Dirty, Stay Moderate Ep 88
Today’s poisonous partisan divide is perilous in at least two key ways. First, it divides a country with 330 million into categories in which a majority of them don’t fit. But second, and perhaps more importantly, the Republican/Democrat cleavage consigns issues which are full of implications, moral, political or otherwise, into reductive boxes entirely hostage to groupthink. The recent ousting of Ilhan Omar from a seat on the House Foreign Relations Committee is a case in point.
The vote to remove the Minnesota Congresswoman was along purely partisan lines. In the world of Washington parlor games, payback is a dish best served by losing power. Pelosi and the Democrats (rightly) removed Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar for their incendiary comments about January 6th and other threats of violence. The GOP also vengefully dispensed with Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell. Whereas Schiff’s and Swalwell’s removal was little more than bloody chum for the MAGA sharks, the expulsion of Omar for her anti-Semitic comments and her open hostility to Israel was more than deserved.
The Democrats used the cudgel of race and ethnicity (Islamophobia) against the Republicans’ attack on Omar, and yes, it’s impossible to defend the GOP against charges of racism and Anti-Semitism, given Greene’s comments about “Jewish Space Lasers,” and Gosar’s dalliance with White Nationalism, among other deplorable acts. But the Democrats undermined their own moral authority by giving Omar’s detestable rhetoric a pass. Misguidedly, this was a pass at the expense of American Jews.
Ilhan Omar was a freshman member of Congress back in 2019, and not a moment too soon did she begin her Jew baiting. Her comments about Israel’s “hypnotizing the world” was both specious and dangerously untrue. Omar has long been an ardent supporter of the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) that attempts to use economic leverage to target Israel with punishment. And she famously earned the ire of both Republicans and Democrats when she tweeted that Jews are bribing members of Congress in exchange for their bedrock support of Israel, claiming it was “all about the Benjamins.”
Ever the savvy and cynical operator, Omar played dumb when it came to age-old tropes about Jews and money, and even issued an “unequivocal apology.” But in the game of what is derisively (and accurately) known as the Oppression Olympics, she knew that any claims about her being an anti-Semite would be immunized by the fact that she is a black woman and an immigrant. Put another way, she was a pawn in the hands of a white supremacist system which was attempting to censor her anti-racist, anti-establishment views and given the discrimination she experiences as a Somali immigrant woman, she herself could only be a victim of prejudice, never a perpetrator.
But what use is history or facts when a misguided, dangerous moral equivalency has transformed the existential nature of being a Jew, and all things related to Israel into a hodgepodge of double standards, short-sighted idealism and the Democratic Party’s downplaying of the world’s most enduring and reprehensible hatred? The incendiary language and epithets hurtled at Israel, and consequently Jews writ large, is not just noxious in words only. The mouth-frothing and phony virtue signaling by many ‘activists’ over Israel (ignorantly) being labeled as an “Apartheid State,” and the all too frequent erasure of Jews from Progressive spaces for their perceived “whiteness,” never mind the complexity of their racial identity, has wittingly or not, contributed the the terrifying rise in anti-Semitism and the ongoing spate of attacks against Jews.
If the precarious existence of being Jewish is safeguarded by a strong and secure Israel (and it is), then by definition, Omar’s views, which discredit and seek to destroy Israel are unequivocally antisemitic. Critics often scoff at this implication, especially many Democrats who can only see hatred on the right, and are happy to stoke that animus in the service of their own electoral fortunes.
But all of this has less to do with principle than it does with misbegotten identity politics and a Democratic Party wrestling with its woke left flank. Indeed, it is nothing less than grotesque that the perilous trajectory of a nearly 6,000 year Jewish diaspora, one in which resulted in the mass murder of Europe’s Jews at the hands of the Nazi death machine, could ever be taken less than seriously by the far left, let alone the Democratic Party. Or worse, minimizing the anti-Semitism of one of their own, so as to score partisan points while placating the intersectional left.
The state of Israel was founded 75 years ago, and not a moment has passed when this small, beleaguered democracy hasn’t assumed a posture of self-defense.
Security, not to mention strategy, is not a choice for Israel, but an essential precondition of its existence. Founded on roughly one-sixth of one percent of land which the Israelites once called home, was also under Turkish rule as part of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years.
After centuries of displacement, the state of Israel came into being in the wake of the Holocaust, and yet has not known anything resembling peace since the United Nations proposed its partition plan on November 29th 1947. On May 14th 1948, David Ben-Gurion, who was Israel’s key founder, and who became Israel’s first prime minister, declared the existence of the Jewish state. The following day, its Arab neighbors attacked it. The assault would be the first of many attempts since then to obliterate it.
This just in: Jewish lives fucking matter, too. I expected more from the Democrats. Do they think that keeping Omar on the committee would be free from consequences? Perhaps magically, the profusion of antisemitic incidents generated by unending attacks on the Jewish homeland—and on Jews themselves— will suddenly subside or disappear, in spite of whatever anti-Semitic propaganda Omar might spew. Tragically, this bodes more than ill for the party which is ostensibly a bulwark against the rise of American fascism. How ghastly only 78 years after the soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Keep it dirty, moderates,
Adam
For more on why Jewish lives fucking matter, too listen to Episode 87 of Stay Dirty, Stay Moderate here:
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If you want to watch Adam get all fired up about why Jewish lives fucking matter, too, click here for the video version of Episode 87 of Stay Dirty, Stay Moderate here: