Nigel Farage Has a Message for the Democratic Party in America
https://www.nysun.com/editorials/nigel-farage-has-a-message-for-the-democratic/91524/
The heads-up this week to American Democrats from Nigel Farage strikes us as more newsworthy than its coverage so far would suggest. He’s warning that left-wing hostility to Israel could deliver to Democrats the kind of political catastrophe that befell Labor in Britain in December 2019. That’s when voters, reacting in part to Labor’s hostility to the Jewish state, gave Conservatives such a victory that Jeremy Corbyn was forced to resign.
On a visit here, Mr. Farage, a founding father of the Brexit movement, issued his warning in an interview Monday with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. He reckoned that Mr. Corbyn’s taking the Labor Party “in the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel but clearly also anti-Semitic direction” had prompted voters in “Middle England” to say “‘we don’t like this kind of extremism,’ and it did hurt the Labor Party.”
“I think,” Mr Farage also said, “there are many instances here in the USA of members of Congress who are supporting these Palestinian protests.” He scored the Democrats for failing to condemn attacks on Jews “in strong enough terms.” He suggested that “across the western world” the left has “openly supported a Palestinian cause that behaves more like a terrorist organization,” and “decent people don’t like this sort of thing.”
We don’t want to make too much of Mr. Farage’s comparison. There are differences between British Labor and America’s Democrats. One is that in 2019, Labor was long since out of power in Britain. The Democrats will enter our election in 2022, the campaign of which Mr. Farage warned, holding the presidency and both houses of Congress. One can say a lot about President Biden, but on Israel he is no Jeremy Corbyn.
Yet it would be a mistake, in our view, to make too little of Mr. Farage’s warning. It’s not just that he has proven himself a formidable political analyst, leading the call for the Brexit referendum and reading the mood of Briton’s voters in the long road to independence. Our own soundings suggest that millions still share the dream of Democrats like Harry Truman and the leaders of Big Labor who embraced the Jewish state.
All the more striking, though, is the refusal of the Democrats to confront the hostility to Israel, and to Jews more generally, that is spreading so rapidly in America. This came into focus two years ago, in March 1919, when Speaker Pelosi and other leading Democrats refused to issue a pointed condemnation of the anti-Semitism in their party and instead diluted the statement to a condemnation of all hatred.
Then in March 2019 in the Democratic primary debate at South Carolina, Senator Sanders, who had earlier labeled the pro-Israel lobby a “platform for bigotry,” called Prime Minister Netanyahu a “reactionary racist” — and not a single Democrat called him out on his libel. Today leftist mobs are attacking Jews in restaurants and on our streets. In New York, some Jews fear walking in public in religious garb.
Britain’s Labor Party, after their rout in the 2019 general election, elevated Keir Starmer to party leader. He declared the party would purge its anti-Semites. It’s clear Labor will need a long time to repair the damage from letting bigotry against Jews get out of control. Which underscores Mr. Farage’s warning on his visit to our side of the pond: Democrats will have to step up now and confront this issue or risk in 2022 a reckoning at the polls.
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