Thursday, November 8, 2012

Why I Beat Up on the Progressive-Left

Mike L.

{Originally published at JewsNews, a new start-up that has yet to officially launch and that is associated with the most active Jewish Facebook page.}

Anyone who reads my material, either at the Times of Israel or at Israel Thrives or Geoffff's Joint or Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers, knows that I spend considerable effort beating up on the progressive-left, in general, and the Jewish left, in particular. Some will say that I do so for partisan political purposes and because I am a hard-line, right-wing, ZioNazi From Hell, but they would be mistaken. The truth of the matter is that the progressive-left, as a movement, has betrayed its Jewish constituency and the sooner that we acknowledge this the better off we will be.

The left has betrayed the Jews.

This is a broad reiteration of a central truth that resides within almost everything that I write concerning the never-ending Arab-Muslim war against us in the Middle East. Decade upon decade, no one has done more than the Jewish people to promote ideas that reside at the heart of the progressive movement. As one of the most persecuted peoples on the planet it was natural for us to advance notions of social justice, universal human rights, and an end to racism. In the United States Jews were at the forefront of pushing for the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-War movement, women’s rights, Gay rights, environmentalism, the counterculture, and the entire hodge-podge of political sub-movements associated with the New Left of the 1960s and the 1970s. For Jews in the United States supporting the left, or at the very least, the Democratic party, is deeply encoded in our DNA and it will take generations to free ourselves from that encoding.

We need to do so, however, because the left is proving itself toxic to the well-being of the Jewish people precisely because it fails to live up to its core values. If the progressive-left ever actually stood for social justice or universal human rights it does so no longer. One cannot smack around the tiny, lone Jewish State of Israel on a daily basis while ignoring the 5.5 million dead in the Congo, or the Islamic genocide against non-Muslims in Darfur, and still claim to stand for universal human rights. It, frankly, could not be more obvious. One cannot stand up for “justice” for the Palestinian people while entirely ignoring the fate of women, Gay people, and non-Muslims throughout the Muslim Middle East and still claim to stand for universal human rights.

Furthermore, it must be acknowledged that the progressive-left is, with the lone exception of political Islam, the most racist political movement operating in the west today. While the progressives claim to be anti-racist, and fling around charges of racism toward others as if they were confetti, they are simultaneously, tragically, deeply racist themselves. Most western progressives would not acknowledge the Jihad if they were bound hands and feet and on their knees in some basement in Karachi. The reason for this is because progressives treat “people of color,” and particularly Arab-Muslim people of color, as if they were little children without any historical agency in this world. It is what Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld calls ”humanitarian racism.”

Because they hold a superior and imperial attitude towards non-white people they honestly believe, as a group, that only white people can be racist. Because non-whites are held to be the eternal victims of white colonialism they can never be held responsible for anything that they may say or do. Thus if much of the Muslim Middle East holds to the most screaming genocidal anti-Semitism imaginable, an anti-Semitism at least as ferocious as the Nazi variety, they can never be called out on it because, really, it’s not their fault. Progressive-left racists think that non-whites only ever react to what we do or what the west does or what the United States does. There is virtually no recognition that Islam was for centuries the most powerful, cruel, and expansive empire the world had ever seen. To recognize this would be to subvert the “Muslim as victim” narrative that progressives promote and that resides at the heart of their notions of foreign policy.

It is for this reason that, on the political level, white progressives treat non-whites as something other than adults responsible for their own behavior.

However, if the western left has betrayed its Jewish constituency they have also placed progressive-left Jews in a very untenable situation. Jewish political activists within the western progressive-left are increasingly in the position of having to choose between the Jewish State of Israel and the progressive-left, itself. Rising left-wing hostility toward Israel is making it harder and harder for Jewish people to operate in a spirit of solidarity with their non-Jewish friends and allies. On a daily basis throughout progressive-left venues like Daily Kos or the Huffington Post or the UK Guardian, left-wing Israel Haters and anti-Semitic anti-Zionists attack Israel and Jewish progressives either defend the Jewish state or join in the attacks. Jewish progressives who defend Israel are spit upon and demeaned and told that they are something other than “good liberals” because no good liberal would ever defend the racist, imperialist, colonialist, apartheid, racist State of Israel.

And thus we come to just why I am constantly calling out the left for their betrayal of their own alleged values and for their betrayal of the Jewish people. Jews represent only a tiny proportion of the world population and almost half of us reside in the Middle East. The Jews of the Middle East were for thirteen hundred years, between the rise of Islam and Jewish freedom from dhimmitude with World War I, a people subject to persecution by the much larger Arab-Muslim majority population. In some places and times it was better, and in some places and times it was worse, but even at its best Jewish dhimmitude under the boot of imperial Islam was never better than black people had it in the American “Jim Crow” south. For thirteen centuries the Jews of the Middle East were a persecuted minority and as soon as they gained their freedom, in the early part of the twentieth century, the Arab-Muslim world launched a war against them that continues to this day.

And this is why progressive disdain for Israel represents such a betrayal. It was Zionism that redeemed the Jewish people and not just for those of us who happen to live in Israel. If Israel is sometimes harsh with the local Arab population it is because the Arabs outnumber the Jews fifty or sixty to one in the Middle East and they simply refuse to allow those Jews to live in peace, free from ongoing harassment, genocidal incitement, and outright murder. 

And that is what the progressive-left, including progressive-left Jews, seem not to understand.

8 comments:

  1. An email from JStreet (aka fuck Israel street)

    "All 49 JStreetPAC-endorsed incumbents in the House – elected.

    All 7 JStreetPAC-endorsed Senate candidates – elected.

    JStreetPAC's challengers and candidates for open seats – elected in 13 out of 15 races (Ami Bera hanging on to a razor thin lead in his race for a Congressional seat in Sacramento would make it 14 of 15.)

    You helped raise and contribute over $1.8 million to these 71 pro-Israel, pro-peace candidates for Congress, and, thanks to you the 113th Congress will have 50 percent more JStreetPAC-endorsed members than are in Congress today. Not only did you help elect champions like Tammy Baldwin, Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine to the Senate, you defeated some of the most outrageous voices on our issue. Come January the House of Representatives will no longer have One-State Caucus members like Joe Walsh, Allen West, Bobby Schilling, Frank Guinta, or Ann Marie Buerkle.

    This is an incredible victory – one that is part of transforming the political atmosphere around Israel in the U.S. that has blocked meaningful American efforts to achieve a two-state solution for decades."

    http://israelmatzav.blogspot.ca/

    The evolution of American Jewish support for Israel looks like J Street. Look out Israel. Democrats are heavy on "transforming the political atmosphere around Israel in the U.S...." Heh.

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  2. "Obama supporters out celebrating his win on election night gathered on State Street Tuesday evening. I asked one man why he was celebrating Obama, and what that meant to him. He said, “It really means to me, no more Israel…Mitt Romney would go to war with Iran…Obama said f*** that shit. Kill those mother f***ers.”

    Another said, “Palestine was there first, and Israel moved in in the 1940s and that’s an unfair attack.” A man of Jewish heritage accompanying him said, “I really do not think that us being with Israel is a good choice for us”:"

    http://rebelpundit.com/2012/11/obama-supporters-celebrate-no-more-israel-kill-those-motherfers/

    And so it goes...

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    Replies
    1. After watching the video at another site, I said it's somber to think what the demographic shift means for the country when one understands the lack of knowledge shown by this uniformed electorate. Being raised in a social network world sucks away knowledge and polarizes people to believe as gospel any slant put forth by leaders, media and the educational system.

      I wonder if the first guy in the media gas a view on immigration or gays. I am amazed at the ignorance of so many who act like they knowing.

      Delete
    2. "The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein

      Delete
    3. Ah-ha-ha-ha!!!

      Doodad, that's a terrific quote.

      Oh, man, I'm laughing my ass off!

      :O)

      Delete
  3. http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-american-jewish-left-and-israel/?singlepage=true

    Interesting article with links to another article which delves into the kinds of themes we discuss here. Highly recommend. Major premise is that American progressives can never support Israel.

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  4. Ten Deadly Lies about Israel
    by Ambassador Ron Dermer:


    www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/ten-deadly-lies-about-israel-213272
    ________________________________
    Why Israel’s 1967 Borders are Undefendable:

    https://shilohmusings.blogspot.com/2017/03/guest-post-why-1967-borders-are-suicide.html
    ________________________________

    Ancient Roman historians connected Jews with the Land of Israel:

    http://shilohmusings.blogspot.com/2016/05/guest-post-cornelius-tacticus.html

    https://shilohmusings.blogspot.com/2017/02/guest-post-josephus-vs-muslim-liars.html
    ________________________________

    How a pro-Palestinian American reporter
    changed his views on Israel and the conflict
    :
    by Hunter Stuart, 2017 February 15


    www.jpost.com/Jerusalem-Report/A-view-from-the-frontlines-480829
    ________________________________

    ReplyDelete