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Jews: The Canary in the Coal Mine for the Democratic Party?
A number of posts have been written about Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and their anti-Semitic remarks, including my own. Many of us have speculated on the reasons for Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s silence regarding those comments, or their apologies on behalf of these two representatives. I’ve looked into the reasons for their not condemning their behavior, and the results were even more disturbing than I anticipated. (For the record, I don’t separate attitudes about Israel and the Jewish community.)
The U.S. has been known, since its inception, as a country that welcomes all religions, particularly Judaism. It’s only in the last few years that we’ve seen a shift in support by Democrats and Republicans. From a 2018 opinion survey by Pew Research:
The partisan divide in Middle East sympathies, for Israel or the Palestinians, is now wider than at any point since 1978. Currently, 79% of Republicans say they sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians, compared with just 27% of Democrats.
Since 2001, the share of Republicans sympathizing more with Israel than the Palestinians has increased 29 percentage points, from 50% to 79%. Over the same period, the share of Democrats saying this has declined 11 points, from 38% to 27%.
With these numbers from our citizenry, it’s no wonder that the Democrats want to please their base. They are also trying to prevent an all-out war between their more moderate members and the far Left. Many people might ask why the Jews themselves are protecting Omar and Tlaib. Rep. Jan Schakowsky made this statement to Politico:
. . . she doesn’t think Omar is an anti-Semite. Politico makes much of the fact that Schakowsky is a Jew, and she is. She also happens to be a supporter and devotee of J Street, the Democratic organization that exists to criticize Israel and the pro-Israel community in the United States.
There is also Ayanna Pressley who spoke out about the resolution on anti-Semitism:
We need to have an equity in our outrage. Islamophobia needs to be included in this. We need to denounce all forms of hate. There is not a hierarchy of hurt.
The message seems to be that the Jews are not victims of hate more than any other minority group. Also, Democratic Jews are supposed to espouse tolerance, so how could they possibly be supporting anti-Semites?
Lastly, as part of stating the obvious, Republicans can be attacked for beating up on Muslim women:
Also, by judging critics based on the identity of those being criticized, rather than on the merits of the criticism, the left seeks to render debate in America impossible. Democrats have argued that scrutiny of Muslim congresswomen represents ‘Islamophobic incitement.’ This fits the European anti-free speech paradigm whereby ‘hate speech’—as defined by enlightened progressive leaders—somehow equates to violence, and is criminalized.
As the Democrats continue to move farther Left, they will have a built-in support system: college graduates. Besides the students’ inculcation by the professors on the Left, pro-Muslim and anti-Israel groups on campus (which are supposedly not anti-Semitic) have proliferated.
In terms of the U.S. population, Muslims are growing and Jews are declining:
Muslim Americans will be a political growth industry for the Democratic Party that will offset any losses attributable to Jewish voters and supporters of assumed Jewish causes.
Consider that a record number of Muslim Americans ran for state or national office in the 2018 election cycle, the most in nearly two decades. Nearly 70 percent of Muslims in America are Democrats. The U.S. Muslim population is expected to double by 2050. Presumably, the number of Muslim candidates and voters will only grow.
Conversely, the Jewish population, which also votes reliably Democrat, is expected to decline from 1.8 percent to 1.4 percent by 2050. The only Jewish cohort that is growing, Orthodox Jews, tends to vote majority Republican.
Certainly, the Democrats will take into account the nature of their constituents.
Finally, we have to wonder about the far-left wealthy financiers of Democrats. My guess is that they are willing to do whatever it takes to put Democrats into power and keep them there, no matter who or what they damage along the way.
So the situation looks dire not only for Jews, but also for all religions, those people who embrace free speech and a traditional understanding of the Constitution. I’ll end with a quote from Ben Weingarten of The Federalist:
One would be hard pressed to find any Democrat who would condemn Tlaib and Omar and face a political backlash among their constituents for doing so. The silence of the gutless Democratic establishment makes it complicit. As with Western civilization, Israel and the Jews are serving as the canary in the coal mine for the Democratic Party.
Does Weingarten speak in hyperbole, or are the Jews the canary in the coal mine for the Democratic Party? Even more important, what is he saying about the future of our country?
Published in Politics
Without having looked up the definition, I was thinking the absence of the strong military and agricultural attributes might set apart the Jews in Israel from those in America.
Maybe the phenomenon you are describing is derived from American Democrat Party Jews putting politics ahead of their ethnicity. For the Globalists, neither ethnicity nor religion takes precedence. It has been spoken of before what ultimately would take place in a confrontation between Globalists and Islamists, but we are not there.
Globalists work to eliminate nationalism of the American, European, or Israeli ilk. Islam joins in since it is socialist but has no sense of nationalism since the religion encompasses all that. This is how I see the Jewish divide politically.
@bobthompson, I’m not following your thinking. I understand your first sentence, I think: since most Jews are on the Left, they would be Globalists and be against any type of nationalism. I’m not sure I agree I agree about Islam; after all, they want the whole world to be in the House of Islam. I guess that would rule out any other kinds of “nationalism.” I’m not clear on what you mean by “Jewish divide”–divide from whom or what? Thanks for clarifying.
Israel has a history of military defense being important to the Jewish State and I would think of that as a form of nationalism. Their own population has diminished some in this characteristic in recent years. But Israel is clearly differentiated from most Jewish people in the rest of the world. That likely makes those Congressional Muslims feel safe in attacking Israelis and using the long-standing Palestinian issues as bait. So Pelosi and Schumer likely see the problem as specific to Israeli supporting Jews and not general anti-Semitism. I don’t see the concept of a nation-state as important in the big scheme of Islam – its the Caliphate which they want to be the world.
I don’t think Tlaib and Omar care what others think. Although some people insist that Jews here and Israelis over there are different, many of us believe that when one group is attacked the other is attacked. There are too many times when their comments have been specific to Jews, and Schumer and Pelosi are smart enough to know just what those women are trying to do. They just don’t want to upset anyone–especially their Muslim constituents.
Bigotry is by its nature irrational. Success or failure of a group are not reasons, they are excuses.
It makes sense to argue the point if you want someone to face some cognitive dissonance in hopes of eliciting a change, but there is no value (imho) in taking these excuses as serious bits of thought. They aren’t.
According to them Muslims are a nation (like Jews, Christians, Etc). They define nation by religious community (millet) rather than language or ethnicity. ‘They’ being classical Islam’s view.