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Does Bernie Sanders Have a Breaking Point with Linda Sarsour?
It wasn’t hard to see the writing on the wall with Linda Sarsour, a former member of the Women’s March and hardcore progressive Lefty. In a column for the Jewish progressive paper The Forward nearly three years ago I warned that the Women’s March should be careful of the company they were keeping; that the warning signs were plain for anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention. Sarsour had a Jew problem then, and she has a Jew problem now. Here’s the latest:
.@lsarsour, prominent backer of, and surrogate for, @BernieSanders, says at @AMPalestine: Israel "is built on supremacy, that is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everybody else." Paging @USJewishDems… pic.twitter.com/SmF4OyEhn6
— Matthew Foldi (@MatthewFoldi) December 2, 2019
Her subsequent tweets on the matter after the video surfaced were just as bad:
This is a further attempt to paint the Left in USA & UK as antisemitic to disrupt potential transformative campaigns & opportunities for true progress for our nations. I'm a consistent advocate for human rights for ALL oppressed people all over the world. My track record is CLEAR
— Linda Sarsour (@lsarsour) December 3, 2019
Yes, indeed, her track record is clear. And it became too hard to ignore. Liberal actor Josh Malina tweeted:
Linda Sarsour is an antisemite.
— (((Josh Malina))) (@JoshMalina) December 3, 2019
And it went so far that even the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO (a former Obama staffer) spoke out as well:
She then compares American Jews’ support for Israel to domestic white supremacy. This is morally offensive and utterly dangerous. Millions of Jews have been murdered in the name of white supremacy, incl. 12 in US last year alone.
— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) December 3, 2019
Greenblatt went on to challenge Bernie Sanders, for whom Sarsour works, but of course, not by name. That would be a bridge too far for the ADL, who have made a small fortune putting President Trump on blast the last several years.
There should be no place for such hateful demagoguery or blatant prejudice in the public conversation. Responsible leaders should push back on such bigotry and call this out for what it is: anti-Semitism plain and simple.
— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) December 3, 2019
If Sarsour finally took it too far for a progressive Jewish actor and the ADL, has she finally taken it too far for Sanders as well? How explicitly does she have to express her own anti-Semitism for Sanders to care? It’s deeply disturbing watching a major Presidential candidate not only look the other way on an anti-Semite but allow himself to be represented by one as well.
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Unless Sarsour doubles down right away, I’d be surprised to see Bernie do a clean break with her, because among the most radical of the far left, it would be seen as a lack of commitment to The Cause. Odds are better she gets put in Time-Out by the Sanders campaign and is told through back-channels to tone it down for the next few weeks until all this blows over.
(The other thing that could force the issue would be if one or more of Bernie’s Democratic opponents actually called out Sarsour and made a point of challenging Sanders over her support. But that would risk having The Squad and others on the left rein Twitter attacks down on their campaign’s heads, and none of the candidates so far have exactly been a Profile in Courage in standing up to the party’s progressive wing.)
Bernie wont let her go, no matter what her views are. There is no such thing as an Alt-Left, no matter how nutter, extremist or hateful – No national leading democrat will let an inch of daylight in between them.
The left would be far more successful if they just invented an ‘alt-left’, dump all the nut jobs on that list, and pretend they have no influence.
I’m sure if Bernie could change his race and religion to “Socialist”, he would.
Trump has done more for Israel than any Jewish politician in history, Republican or Democrat. On top of that, his grandchildren go to a Talmud Torah school, another level of holiness that no Jewish politician, as far as I know, has reached.
It seems like every “peoples movement” in the country is soon corrupted by grifters or socialists.
It’s hard to overstate the indifference that the modern Left (including the modern Jewish Left) feels toward the state of Israel. In no way do they favor blatant anti-Semitism, but in their heart of hearts they think the Jewish state does not belong where it is … that it sits on land acquired violently and illegally … that it’s a destabilizing influence on the region … and that the region itself, and much of the world, would be better off if the Jews were to move their homeland someplace else.
This is what the modern Left believes. They didn’t used to believe it — back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and most of the 70s — but they do now.
You have a ctrl left, and an alt right. Delete them all, I say.
She know what she is saying, and it fuels division and prejudice. Were there any Jewish women at the march? People are people – and Bernie is an opportunist.
There is a little difference between the ‘soft’ left, who are liberals who hate Israel because since 1977 they’ve seen Likud as the equivalent to the Republican Party in the U.S. For them, Israeli voters continuing to vote in Likud-led governments makes it a Red State equivalent. As with their dreams about Texas, they’d love to turn it ‘Blue’ so they could go back to liking it again, as liberals did for the first 30 years when Labor governments ran things.
The hardcore, anti-Semitic left doesn’t give a damn who’s running Israel. They were the types who have collectively been angry at the state since if failed to go full Socialist on its own in 1947 and have been rooting for the Palestinians and the other Middle Eastern Arab states to drive it into the sea for the past 72 years. Even if you got a new Israeli government that was more conciliatory, they don’t want Israel to offer up new options for Gaza or the West Bank, they want the Palestinians to control everything between Gaza and the West Bank.
Bethany,
Leftism/socialism is a form of mental illness that can blind one to what should be obvious threats. Bernie is living in a socialist dream world that many Jews have lived in. Das Kapital was blatantly anti-semitic.
As the inherent contradictions of this mindset start to become obvious we assume that the sufferer of the mental illness will snap out of it. However, when such a personality is so deeply confirmed, affirmed and addicted to leftism they simply can’t see their hand in front of their faces.
Pelosi just told Marxist China that America is watching its Uyghur concentration camps. An America that is inherently racist, sexist, homophobic..etc. What would it matter? It matters because for all of our flaws we still stand the tallest on the issue of human rights.
Gd bless America.
Regards,
Jim
For Bernie to decide to cut off Sarsour would require Bernie to hear and to understand new information. Bernie seems incapable of hearing and understanding new information. Everything he says and all of the ideas he promotes are based entirely on what he learned more than 40 years ago. He shows no sign of having learned anything new since 1980.
I doubt Sanders will disavow Sarsour unless she does something the media can’t ignore, something an order of magnitude beyond what’s already public. Sarsour’s antagonism (I could use a stronger word) to Jews is a subset of her Islamism.
The salient social characteristic of a mind of the left is its drive to betray. The western left therefore values Islamism very highly indeed, it being the most powerful force openly arrayed against the society in which they live. Their love and support for this particular “other” is immune to the low place Islamists assign to women and all its other ugliness, because nothing else provides such an easy way to distinguish and differentiate one’s self by betrayal.
Self-hatred derives from a deep fear of being persecuted because of your identity. Sanders is a fearful man and thinks he can survive anti-Semitism by hobnobbing with anti-Semites although, if they ever came to power, Sanders would be among the first to face the firing squad. After all, how can you trust someone who betrays his own people?
I don’t think that Sanders considers the Jews as his own people. As Eustace mentioned above, “I’m sure if Bernie could change his race and religion to ‘Socialist’, he would. ”
Still, other people will always remind Jews of who they are, even when they themselves are reluctant to do so. Bernie also gives it the old “it’s in the Jewish tradition to fight for social justice” stuff on occasion, when asked about the role of religion in his life. So he does admit to affiliation with his born faith when it suits his agenda.
Their reasoning is pretty clear.
If it was wrong and racist for America to control immigration to maintain its ethnic balance, prior to 1965, then it’s wrong for Israel to do the same thing.
Of course, the difference is that open immigration into Israel would amount to immediate suicide, which is not the case here. (Well, not immediate, anyway!)