RUTHFULLY YOURS

Despite the organization’s efforts to bury the evidence, CNN’s Jake Tapper helpfully reminded his followers on Thursday that the first reaction to the October 7 massacre of the New York chapter of the far-left group Democratic Socialists of America was to affirm the legitimacy of that unspeakable slaughter.

“In solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist 75 years of occupation and apartheid,” the group implored its allies to flood Times Square and register their satisfaction with Hamas’s barbarism. That is what is meant by the word “solidarity,” after all — a fellowship formed around shared goals and objectives. It describes a state of commonality and kinship. To judge by DSA’s actions, its organizers chose the right word to describe their outlook.

Well-meaning liberals and progressives who take exception to some Israeli policies are often quick to assure their skeptics that Hamas’s actions are unrepresentative of the Palestinian people writ large or even the Gazans over whom the terrorist organization illegitimately rules. The DSA disagrees. To judge from its reaction to the multiaxial attack on Israeli civilians, culminating in acts of murder, rape, dismemberment, and torture so obscene it would have made the Roman Colosseum blush, the DSA’s members seem incapable of denouncing Hamas’s tactics. Perhaps that’s why we’ve seen so many DSA followers deliberately menace American Jews and supporters of Israel’s right to defend itself against an avowedly genocidal terrorist group.

The October 8 pro-Hamas rally the DSA championed occurred as scheduled. There, protesters “cheered the rocket barrage that devastated Israeli citizens,” the New York Times reported, horrifying the politicians “aligned with New York’s left.” If the DSA’s allies were horrified then, imagine the psychological torment they’re enduring nearly a month into the outfit’s campaign of intimidation against American Jews and their allies.

At least 139 people were arrested, including a DSA-affiliated member of the New York City Council and a state senator, during a menacing nighttime march through Gotham’s streets on October 23 billed as a demonstration calling on Israel to stand down and absorb the murder of its civilians. “I do not condemn Hamas,” read the signs they carried. “There is only one solution,” they droned in unison as they paraded down emptied streets and past lighted windows behind which the targets of their intimidation took shelter. “Intifada. Revolution.” This was another event sponsored by the DSA, which the organization’s social-media account gleefully promoted.

“We are calling for full liberation of all of Palestine,” a demonstrator shouted at a rally named “Flood Brooklyn for Gaza,” a deliberate homage to the name Hamas gave its October 7 massacre. “To every single inch,” the protester continued, “from the river to the sea.” The event that featured numerous calls for the eradication of Israel and, presumably, its residents received glowing praise from a publication that bills itself as the voice of the “Bread & Roses caucus of Democratic Socialists of America.”

Jewish security organizations urged practitioners of the faith to keep their distance from the combustible group cascading down Brooklyn’s streets, and not unwisely. It’s reasonable to assume that a protest in which thousands denounced “Zionist genocide” and called for “intifada revolution” “by any means necessary” would be a dangerous place for Jews.

The DSA might have finally crossed a line this week when it sicced its wild-eyed devotees on Democratic lawmakers. It was one of three sponsors of a demonstration that descended on the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. There, rioters demonstrated their commitment to peace by violently assaulting the police officers tasked with defending the party’s home office, six of whom were treated for injuries they sustained in the mêlée. Numerous federal lawmakers, including some of the party’s most senior elected officials in Washington, were reportedly evacuated from the premises.

DSA’s antics have caused some of its political allies in saner quarters within the progressive political firmament to distance themselves from the group — or, at least, from the unhinged rhetorical excesses and extralegal activities to which its members are prone. To this, the DSA has anointed itself the real victim.

Deploying all the diversionary tactics socialist activists have practiced on American campuses for years, the DSA and its allies insist that no true Scotsman would deploy the hateful symbols and antisemitic chants that are so common at the demonstrations it promotes. Any condemnation the DSA receives is an effort to “tarnish” the group, discredit its calls for radically redistributionists economic policies, and bully its members into silence. But that is what a civilized society does to organizations with records like the one DSA has built for itself.

The DSA’s misconduct has produced some high-profile defections. One of what he called the “hate-filled and antisemitic” incidents that typify DSA-sponsored events led Democratic representative Shri Thanedar to renounce his membership in the organization. “I left to protest the DSA leadership’s politically and morally bankrupt response to the horrific Hamas October 7 anti-Jewish pogrom,” Hamilton College professor Maurice Isserman wrote in a searing op-ed for the left-wing publication the Nation. But these few exceptions prove the rule.

For now, it seems, DSA-affiliated lawmakers at the state and federal level seem perfectly comfortable associating themselves with this outfit. The consciences of Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Greg Casar are apparently clean. The hundreds of state-level officials whose names grace the DSA roster seem unvexed by the terrorization of American Jews that is under way in their names.

Defenders of the DSA are likely to draw fine distinctions between the group’s more overzealous chapters and the national organization, but they never acknowledge the national organization’s failure to denounce or make examples of its more menacing elements. DSA’s proponents hide behind the noble intentions their enterprise retails — fairness and justice and peace — ignoring the mockery its conduct makes of the anodyne liberal sloganeering it uses to disguise its true designs. If the DSA’s members are at all troubled by the group’s conduct, they don’t show it.

The Democratic Socialists of America is a hate group. It’s not the sort of hate group that the industry that has been erected around anathematizing right-wing political activism would ever see as one, but the corruption of those institutions shouldn’t keep Americans with a functioning moral compass from rendering that obvious verdict. If the United States continues to regard the threat DSA poses to civil society as an esoteric feature of progressive politics, the country will be guilty of the charge with which the Democratic Socialists so often smear their detractors: complicity.