Progressive Democrat Anti-Semitism

By Douglas V. Gibbs

Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host

Four years ago at the Democrat National Convention the attendees voted on whether or not to keep God on their platform.  The vote was pretty even, but deemed to be a "yes," amidst a massive number of boos that was largely performed by Muslim members of the party, as well as the hard left.  They booed Israel, while they were at it.

According to the Gatestone Institute, God is not the only thing the progressives are trying to get Democrats to renounce.

Hard left activists are trying to exclude Jews who do not renounce Israel from "progressive" organizations.

Last year, Rabbi Susan Talve, a longtime activist on race issues in the St. Louis area was told that her advocacy for Israel was incompatible with the objectives of Black Lives Matter: "Solidarity from Ferguson to Palestine has become a central tenet of the movement" she was informed, because "Israeli and U.S. state oppression are deeply interconnected." Similarly, a student who attended a Black Lives Matter rally at Northwestern University last year was told "you support Israel, so you cannot also support us." 

Recently, that seems to be the response of many of the hard left activists who dominate so-called "progressive" social justice movements.

When Hillary Clinton was asked the difference between socialism and the Democrat Party, she was unable to answer.  Instead, she insisted she's a "progressive Democrat."  Progressive is the term the socialists called themselves until the term fell into ruin because of the failed policies surrounding it.  It was then the leftists stole the term "liberalism" from the limited government supporters.

Over the past several years, progressive Jews, and progressive supporters of Israel have had to come to terms with the reality that those who do not reject Israel and accept Boycott Divestment Sanctions ("BDS") and its unique brand of bigotry are no longer welcome in some progressive circles. And while both Democratic and Republican parties have embraced the importance of the U.S. alliance with Israel, that dynamic is under threat more so than at any point in my lifetime. 

The self-described "progressive wing" of the Democratic Party—represented by radical and often repressive organizations such as MoveOn, CodePink, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter—has become openly opposed to the nation state of the Jewish people. Increasingly, these organizations demand that their members and "allies" renounce support for Israel and for Zionism in order to belong. Using the pretext of intersectionality—a pseudo-academic theory which insists that all social justice movements, except those supportive of Jews or Israel, are inexorably linked—anti-Israel activists have successfully made opposition to Israel and support for BDS a litmus test, especially for Jews, to belong to "progressive" movements focused on a wide range of issues.

Israel is the only stability the Middle East knows, and is among the few remaining obstacles against an all out war with Islam as they set their eyes on a worldwide jihad, and a global caliphate.  As Sharren Haskel of the Israeli Knesset said during a speech in Murrieta, California last May 1, "Israel is not the problem in the Middle East, Israel is the solution."  I believe her wholeheartedly.  Also, as a Christian, I also believe we are cursed if we ever turn our back on Israel.

Earlier this year, supporters of the LGBTQ community in Israel learned this lesson the hard way, when BDS activists together with a local Black Lives Matter chapter broke up a gay pride event, because it featured a presentation by an Israeli group. The protestors claimed that the event organizers had engaged in "pinkwashing" the Israeli occupation by showing solidarity with the Israeli LGBTQ community.

It has fascinated me that the gay community remains in the Democrat Party as the leftist ideology embraces Islam as a partner. . . an ideology posing as a religion that not only rejects the gay community, but carries out countless incidents of slaughtering gays.

Members of the National Women's Studies Association ("NWSA") who also support Israel have been similarly excluded. Last year, that organization voted to endorse BDS, and as one pro-BDS activist explained: "What is significant about this particular resolution is the rationale; the fact that the resolution makes it explicit that BDS is a feminist issues... that one cannot call themselves a feminist... without taking a stand on what is happening in Palestine." (Apparently, one can call oneself a feminist without taking a stand on Syria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other nations that grossly violate human rights).

As the Gatestone article suggests, how is it that the women's rights crowd stay a part of the Democrat Party as they rub elbows with Islam?  Muslims are the greatest violators of women's rights, and human rights, on this planet.

This type of repressive ideological packaging has left progressive Jews, and liberal supporters of Israel in an increasingly uncomfortable position. On the one hand, they care deeply about causes such as women's rights, criminal justice reform, income inequality, environmental protection and LGBT rights. On the other, they find themselves excluded from the groups that advance those very causes, because—while they are often critical of specific Israeli policies regarding settlements and the occupation—they refuse to renounce Israel as a national liberation movement of the Jewish People.

For hard left activists, this sort of nuanced position is impossible to accept. Their hostility towards Israel does not stem from any particular Israeli actions or policies. Even if Israel were to withdraw from the West Bank, destroy the security barrier, and recognize Hamas as a legitimate political organization, it would still not be enough. For these radicals, it is not what Israel does; it is about what Israel is: the nation state of the Jewish people—or to use hard-left terminology: an imperialistic, apartheid and genocidal, colonialist enterprise. The recently released Black Lives Matter policy platform offers a perfect example of such extreme rhetoric: it states that U.S. military and economic support for Israel makes American citizens complicit in "the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people." 

The fact that the BLM platform reads like it was lifted from a BDS screed is hardly coincidence: the two groups enjoy a longstanding relationship, and a prominent BDS activist apparently helped draft elements of the BLM declaration. But BLM is far from the only hard left organization that has been infected by BDS vitriol. In fact, BDS has pressured a wide range of progressive organizations into assuming an anti-Israel posture. The American Green Party, for example—which has become a haven for disaffected progressive activists this election cycle—recently came out in support of BDS and called for the US to end its support for "the Israeli apartheid regime".

 The reality is that Marxism has infiltrated, and now controls, the Democrat Party and the hard left progressives.  The agenda has become the only thing that matters, and societies who hold on to the ideals of liberty like Israel are the enemy.  The communist nature of the Democrat Party is anti-freedom, and anti-God, therefore all groups that hold on to those two hated concepts are the enemy.  Islam is exempted because theirs is still an authoritarian system the Democrats believe they can use to gain power, and then exert control over once the useful idiots of Islam are no longer needed.

This trend has been particularly pronounced on college campuses, where a host of academic groups—most absurdly the Native American Scholars Association and the Americans Studies Association—have passed resolutions in favor of BDS. Many of these organizations have also endorsed the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott ("PACBI"), which encourages participants to engage in McCarthyite blacklisting of Israeli academic institutions, as well as groups and individuals who promote "Brand Israel." This category apparently includes artists like Matisyahu, and academics like me, as I found out last year when a prominent BDS advocate refused to debate me at the Oxford Student Union.

As Hitler observed, you must get to the younger generation to gain control over a society. "When an opponent declares,'I will not come over to your side.' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already…
What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp.
In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'" -- Adolf Hitler

Another quote by Adolf Hitler also sounds a lot lie today's Democrats.

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." --Adolf Hitler, Quoted in John Toland, "Adolf Hitler", p224.

We must remember that Hitler's first and primary campaign promise was, by the way, free health care for all.

The PACBI also explicitly denounces "normalization projects"—programs or events aimed at Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation that do not sufficiently emphasize the colonialist nature of the state of Israel. These are exactly the types of initiatives widely supported and promoted by progressives who are critical of settlements, but remain supportive of Israel and of a two state solution. It is no coincidence that BDS has singled them out for special treatment. BDS campaigners want to force any supporters of Israel—no matter their stances on other political issues—outside of the progressive tent.

Progressivism has no room for dissent, and will force those who do not renounce Israel's right to exist.  Now, dissent within their movement is punished and pushed away.  Once they gain control of government with single party rule, which may happen if Hillary wins in November, any dissent of any kind, by anybody, will be punished. . . and silenced.

This effort has proved alarmingly successful thus far, but despite the pressure from the hard left, liberals and progressives who support Israel must continue to carve out a political space for themselves. In doing so, they can follow the example of the Jewish Community Relations Council, which dissociated itself "from the Black Lives Matter platform and those BLM organizations that embrace[d] it" but committed itself "unequivocally to the pursuit of justice for all Americans, and to working together with our friends and neighbors in the African-American community, whose experience of the criminal justice system is, far too often, determined by race." Such efforts are critical to ensure that it is not supporters of Israel but rather those repressive bigots who falsely claim the mantle of progressivism and who subscribe to the identity politics practiced by BDS that are delegitimated by mainstream progressives and liberals.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary