RUTHFULLY YOURS

The ascendancy of the hard Left, which is Barack Obama’s lasting legacy, is transforming life in America for Jews. The comfort, safety, and equality of American Jews are not acceptable to leftists. According to the doctrine of intersectionality, minority groups are united in grievances against Western Civilization and whiteness. The Left began with blacklisting and boycotting conservatives. Now American Jews are in the crosshairs, no matter how liberal their politics.

The response from the mainstream Democratic Party has been to jump on the bandwagon. Will American Jews jump off? Not as long as they continue to live in Democrat communities and work in the professions on the two coasts and college towns, where becoming Republican means losing your friends, being shunned at synagogue, and stunting your career—or if you are starting out in life, being shut out of careers in academia, the arts, mainstream journalism, and Silicon Valley. For most Jews, the social and career cost of changing party affiliation is a such a tall cliff, it feels suicidal, that is, the loss of their entire identity. People don’t make changes like that easily.

Why do American leftists have such a problem with Jews? The short explanation is the identity politics that are President Obama’s toxic legacy to the country, by which he and his thousands of trained activists have redefined the Democrat Party. You’ve got to fit into a favored grievance group, and no matter how left-wing they are, Jews are white. Equally bad, their ethnic group as a whole is wildly successful. Jewish success strips the grievance crowd of their main argument.

Jews have suffered huge discrimination in America. They arrived penniless and made it in one or two generations, embracing America with love despite the discrimination they faced everywhere. Jews do not do grievance and envy and self-destructive addictions, it is just not in their Biblical culture. Shut out of corporate America, elite colleges, medical schools, law offices and banks, they created their own. As small and large independent businessmen, Jews made it in America. Jews are living proof  that nothing can stand in your way in America if you have good values like education and a strong family. The identity politics, blame-America crowd can’t stand the Jewish-American success story.

American Jews count their blessings for our wonderful country where we all have the God given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, in recognition that God created all men of equal worth in His eyes. America is the only country on earth, outside of Israel, where Jews have been treated fairly and allowed to flourish. The left hates America. Sohrab Ahmari points out “The intersectional left is committed to the opposite idea–that everywhere in the West, there are hidden ‘structures of oppression’ that trap minorities along the lines of race, gender and sexuality.” Jews have no place in this ideology. So they are cast out.

On campuses, liberal Jewish students are kicked out of social justice groups, pro-choice rallies, anti-rape demonstrations, Black Lives Matter events, and racial justice events. A professor at University of California lists more than 600 anti-Semitic incidents on American campuses in 2018. The left-wing and Muslim organizers, often members of Marxist- or Muslim Brotherhood-funded groups, state their goal is to make it uncomfortable to be openly Jewish on campus.

Here is an almost comical sign of the new leftist anti-Semitism, from the Times of Israel, Jewish cafe owner in San Francisco hounded over his “Zionist ideals.” The café owner in question, Manny Yekutiel, is a progressive himself. He has checked off every politically correct box. He is an immigrant; his family originally comes from Afghanistan. He is gay, interned in the Obama White House and was the fundraising director for Clinton in Silicon Valley. His cafe has a food prep staff of bilingual, homeless, formerly incarcerated and low-income community members. (You couldn’t make it up.) Community groups can use his café’s big public meeting room for free. His café hosted Nancy Pelosi, San Francisco’s mayor, and Black Lives Matter.

Now a black Marxist group is trying to put him out of business. Boycotting Yekutiel’s business is clearly not about politics. It is about hating whites, and Jews.

The Lucy Parsons Project, a self-described “radical black queer direct action group fighting anti-blackness in the Bay Area,” is picketing his café, declaring, “We will not tolerate gentrifiers and Zionists attempts at invading and destroying our community.”

Group namesake Lucy Parsons was an American black-Hispanic-Native American socialist and anarcho-Communist labor organizer in 19th-century Chicago. (Again, you couldn’t make it up.) One of the ringleaders of the Parsons boycott, is a “radical black queer,” whose Twitter page declares solidarity with #JailKillerCops and features a quote from Lenin, adorned with hammer and sickle.

I couldn’t find any public statement from Pelosi coming to Yekutiel’s defense.

It used to be easy to dismiss each unsavory anti-Semitic incident from the Left as aberrant and irrelevant to American politics—no more. Democrats are mainstreaming anti-Semitic candidates who support the economic isolation and destruction of Israel through a boycott. The 2018 midterms made history with two anti-Semitic Democratic congresswomen, thanks to a Muslim majority in congressional districts in Minnesota and Michigan. They join seven unapologetic Farrakhan supporting congressmen in the Black Caucus. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), after pressure from the Left, stated she supports the end of Israel as a Jewish state (although to be fair, it doesn’t seem as if she understands that’s what “one state solution” means). The Democrat candidate for governor of Florida, Andrew Gillum, another leftist, is also an anti-Israel and a BDS supporter.

These openly left-wing candidates follow the trailblazing President Obama.

Obama legitimized the loathsome Al Sharpton, who was invited to his White House over a hundred times. Sharpton will make history for inciting two pogroms against Jews in New York, which led to the deaths by riot and arson of twelve innocents, mostly black shoppers and employees in a Jewish owned store.

I will never forget the bizarre utterances of President Obama in 2015 when jihadis in Paris shot up a Jewish-owned theatre, killing 130 people, targeted the Prime Minister of France at a soccer game, but made a detour to shoot up one Jewish delicatessen, where they could kill Jews shopping for the sabbath. President Obama’s statement: “you randomly shot a bunch of folks in a deli.”

What kind of person talks like that? “You randomly shot a bunch of folks in a deli.” Obama didn’t want to say the victims were Jews or that the killers were Muslims or terrorists. Answer: The kind of man who talked like that is the same man who went to Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s anti-Semitic, racist church for 20 years and adopted the hate-filled pastor as his spiritual mentor. Obama has always been given a free pass on his obvious embrace of anti-semites.

President Obama, while in office, was required to issue statements on ethnic holidays. These are a feel-good ritual like kissing babies. The President traditionally says happy holiday and honors the ethnic or religious group’s contribution to America. Obama’s Ramadan message was a weird outpouring of praise of “Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings. … Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.” This is an accurate list of what Islam is not.

These precise virtues are strikingly true of American Jews, however, for whom Obama had not one good thing to say on the Jewish holidays. Crickets. I have spoken to a non-Jewish friend who attended an Obama Hanukkah party, and she told me the atmosphere in person was chilly indeed, with Michelle looking as if she’d swallowed a bug, and neither one of them schmoozing with the guests.

In his first Rosh Hashanah Presidential statement, Obama could barely say the word Jew, didn’t mention Judaism, or choke out a single compliment. For Jewish American Heritage Month, he called for a Palestinian state. For Rosh Hashanah, Jews were lectured to help the needy, embrace diversity and choose the Two State Solution. Obama cut the Hanukkah guest list in half, but had room to add an anti-Israeli group. At the White House party, that group’s board member was honored to light the candles, which she did with the words, “Inshallah (“If Allah wills,” in Arabic), I stand here to light these lights to say no to the darkness of Islamophobia and Homophobia and Transphobia.” Happy Hanukkah!

Jews, whatever their politics, have been a favorite Marxist scapegoat for a century. Same old, come to America.

It is an incredible propaganda coup for the Democrats to vilify President Trump as a Nazi and white supremacist in the minds of liberal Jews. President Trump is the best president for Jews America has ever had—he has a heart for Jews, supports Israel and has zero tolerance for anti-semitism. His protective attitude towards all Americans is extended wholeheartedly to American Jews. His will to fight America’s enemies such as ISIS and Iran, makes him a strong ally of Israel.

Obama’s personal distaste for Israel, pro-Iran agenda, and public attacks on Jewish community leaders who opposed him on Iran, as well as siccing the FBI on them, led to an unprecedented drop in Jewish support in Obama’s second term to 64 percent. Hillary Clinton’s support did not return to normal levels of Democrat loyalty, although it was still a hefty 71 percent. Gore won 79 percent of the Jewish vote.

A new factor is that secular Jews in America are intermarrying and, having only one or no children, are moving quickly towards population collapse, while the religiously observant Orthodox Jews are flourishing. Half of the Orthodox are enthusiastic Trump supporters.

Trump got far more Jewish votes Jewish votes than most Republican candidates in the last 30 years. George W. Bush won only 19 percent in 2000 and 24 percent in 2004, after 9/11; Dole, 16 percent; Bush Sr. 11 percent in 1992. The only exception was Romney’s 30 percent, from Jews who couldn’t ignore Obama’s hostility towards them and Israel.

A Jewish friend and staunch MAGA supporter, related the following incident after the midterms. Her visiting Gen X daughter picked a fight over abortion, stormed from the table, screaming, “how can you be so conservative?” and shut herself up in the guest room. My friend turned to her 17-year-old granddaughter, usually only interested in sports and clothes. The granddaughter chirped, “These liberals are crazy.”

The kid says she wants to apply to colleges in the South, where the students are patriotic and interested in having fun, not politics. Why does she want out of the liberal fold? Twitter. On the anniversary of 9/11 last year, the Muslim kids in her public school posted celebratory tweets. Someone drew a swastika on a blackboard. The only thing that was done is the principal privately offered sympathy. My friend’s granddaughter is sick of her liberal schoolmates bad mouthing America. She thinks they are idiots to be against having a military.

As a kid, she is not insulated from progressive ugliness. She is experiencing it every day, and it is a total turnoff.

The normalization of antisemitism by the Democrat party will eventually force more American Jews out of their comfort zone. As Trump’s positive policies continue to prove themselves, we can all devoutly hope that reality will pierce the overwhelming din of #TheResistance.

Daniel Greenfield puts it succinctly: “There is no future for Jews on the left except as collaborators in anti-Semitism.”

Jews who stay Democrat will be forced to jettison their Jewish identity.

They will also be forced to jettison their American identity. Equality and the American dream will have to give way to a race-based spoils system in which whites and successful people are second class citizens. The older generations of liberal Jews may be too stuck to change, but the younger generation is unlikely to keep eating the sickening stew of class warfare, racism and anti-semitism that Democrats are dishing out.