Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, and the Progressive Abandonment of Universal Human Rights

According to recent polling data Barack Obama is losing ground among Jewish voters.

Disapproval among Jewish voters exceeded approval of Obama's presidency for the first time during the current administration. Jewish approval of Obama’s performance as president declined to 45%, with another 48% disapproving and 7% undecided.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Astonishingly enough a greater percentage of American Jews now disapprove of Obama's job performance than approve of it.

{Shocking, I know.}

My prediction is that in November of next year Barack Obama will drop between 15 and 20 percent of the Jewish vote that he received last time around. That is, if Obama received about 80 percent of the Jewish vote in '08, I suspect that he will receive between 60 and 65 percent of the Jewish vote in '12. No matter what Obama does, however, he will still receive a majority of that vote. In fact, if Barack Obama were to hold a press conference in which he stripped down naked and danced the Macarena while shooting up heroin and kicking puppies, he would still receive a majority of the Jewish vote.

Most liberal Jews would rather yank their right arm out of its socket and beat themselves silly with it than vote for a Republican or against a Democrat. The Democratic Party and the progressive movement have us in the bag almost as much as they have Black people.

If African-Americans are the number 1 taken for granted group among Democrats, the Jews are very definitely number 2 on that list. I would like to recommend that we change this dynamic a little, though. I would like to recommend that in the coming years Jews avoid voting for Democrats so long as the Democratic Party remains a home to anti-Zionist bigots.

There is no reason in this world why Jewish people should be the only people on the planet who think that they must vote against their own best interests, not to mention the best interests of their children, on moral grounds.

I know that many Jewish liberals will think that voting for the Democrats is in their own best interests, or in the best interests of the Jewish people or the state of Israel, not to mention the American people. Of course, they are entirely wrong to think so, but at this point... after so many decades of slavish Jewish allegiance to the left... it will be exceedingly difficult to break them of this ugly habit in the near term.

What I would argue to my Jewish brothers and sisters is that Barack Obama has been a failure on I-P, that the grassroots of the Democratic Party is playing footsie with anti-Zionists (who are, themselves, playing footsie with actual Jihadis), and that the progressive-left has almost entirely abandoned any honest concern for universal human rights.

For me that is a big one.

The Democratic Party and the progressive-left have given up almost entirely on western ideals of universal human rights. If they cared about universal human rights then they would care about the genocides in Darfur and Congo, but they do not. While a contingent in the activist base spits poison at the Jewish state on a daily basis, they almost entirely ignore the far, far worse things going on elsewhere.

Did you know that only about 50,000 people have died in the I-P conflict since 1948? The numbers are somewhere in that area and about two-thirds of those were non-Jews and about one-third were Jews. 50,000 people is a lot of people, of course, but something like 5.5 million have died in the Congo over the last decade.

5.5 million. {Look it up.}

This tells me that the progressive-left stands for virtually nothing. Because universal human rights have been replaced as an ideal on the Left by multiculturalism, this means the death of both feminism and humanitarianism as guiding principles within the progressive movement. That feminism is dead is without a doubt. Once feminists start justifying gender apartheid, and all that entails, in the Arab world, then you know for certain that feminism is dead in the west.

If I recall correctly, Phyllis Chesler credits Edward Said with placing Arab men, particularly Palestinians, above women, in general, as the primary uber-victims of choice for liberals. In practice what this means is that Arab men get a pass on behavior that white men do not get. That is to say, western feminists will still fight for their own rights in western countries, because they have a rational self-interest in doing so, but have given Arab men a free pass to stone Arab women to death for the crime of getting raped or to honor kill their daughters or to cover their women from head to toe in a big, black tent.

Today's feminists have virtually nothing to say about the abuse of women in the Muslim world, because they do not want to offend Arab or Muslim men or those few privileged, elite non-western Muslim women who they may be in dialogue with. Furthermore, some Arab or Muslim women tell western feminists that Sharia is liberating and that they like living under a big, black tent, so who are we to judge? After all, if we as white people are the source of racism and imperialism and colonialism and oppression and genocide and ethnic cleansing and apartheid and racism, then we are in no position to lecture our victims on matters of social justice, now are we?

So? What does this have to do with the dropping off of Jewish support for Barack Obama? In some measure Jewish displeasure with Obama is because of Obama's obvious failures on the domestic front and the foreign policy front, including major failures on the I-P front. However, in some measure, it is likely that Jewish displeasure with Barack Obama is a function of Jewish displeasure with the progressive-left, the movement that Barack comes out of. Jewish people who care about politics, and particularly Jewish people who care about the state of Israel, know that the progressive movement is, as a general rule, hostile to the Jewish state and thereby, in an oblique way, hostile to the Jewish people.

I suspect that some of the reason that we saw this stunning Democratic loss in NY-09, a congressional district that had been held by the Democratic Party continuously since 1923, is because Jews are not only becoming disenchanted with Barack Obama, but because Jews are becoming disenchanted with the progressive-left and the Democratic Party.

Slowly. Slowly. Slowly.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The times, they are a'changing.