Israel is a "Burden" to the Democratic Party

Michael Lumish

{Also published at the Elder of Ziyon, Jews Down Under, and The Jewish Press.}

In a recent piece by Times of Israel staff we learn that, according to the Brookings Institution, a majority of Democrats consider Israel a "burden."

The great majority of Americans, however - 76 percent - disregard Democratic Party disdain for the Jewish state and see Israel as a "strategic asset." And they should. Aside from all the medical and technological breakthroughs that Israel is responsible for, it is also one of best allies the United States has in the world. Israel not only shares key intelligence information with the US government, it is also a bulwark of liberal democracy in a part of the world famous for brutal, head-chopping theocratic regimes that loathe both countries on religious grounds.

But none of this is new.

The Democratic Party betrayed the State of Israel and the Jewish people when it decided that making a home for itself of anti-Semitic anti-Zionists was a dandy idea. In almost any political venue controlled by Democrats anti-Semitic anti-Zionists hold a well-respected seat at the table alongside the Jews that they perpetually spit at as racist, colonialist, imperialist, militaristic, apartheid, scum.

From Daily Kos to the National Democratic Party, Jewish Democrats are taken for granted and held in contempt. And why shouldn't they be? American Jews are at least as slavish to the Democrats as are American black people and the party leadership knows it. This is why they did not hesitate to put up an anti-Zionist, like Keith Ellison, as the primary contender for DNC Chair.

After listening to arguments, I've decided that Democrats are right to back Ellison. Ellison is staunch in his support of the party, he is the first Muslim-American to join the ranks of Congress, and he, in both votes and values, represents the character of the Democratic Party as it is in the early twenty-first century.

A Touch of Historical Backdrop

From FDR to the present, great numbers of Americans viewed the Democratic Party as the vehicle for the people. If the Republicans allegedly represented the party of uncaring plutocrats, the Democrats developed a reputation for standing with American workers, the labor unions, and the regular people. Rolling into the 1930s and the Great Depression, government and business ruled the United States. It took many decades of fighting and dying for the labor movement in the US to earn the recognition and power that it received under FDR and the New Deal, thereby creating the economic possibility of a burgeoning American middle-class after World War II.

Following that war, American liberalism shifted from a focus on labor to a focus on ethnic minorities, or what you might call "rights liberalism," which would come to dominate Democratic politics in the form of "identity politics" by the turn of the century. So, for many of us growing up on the coasts following the Vietnam War, politics seemed simple and Manichean. It was a black and white choice between the forces of freedom and fairness versus the forces of traditional repression and prejudice.

In the early 1980s, however, the American cultural-political zeitgeist shifted quickly under president Ronald Reagan. Suddenly, according to singer-songwriter Huey Lewis (who I loathed) it was "hip to be square" and American college students shifted from a focus on the humanities and social sciences to business administration and the art of money-making. What those of us who held fast to the earlier, 1960s visions of our older brothers and sisters did not at first realize was that the social justice vision of American politics was strengthening beneath the surface of Reagan's America. It may have been a New Day for American conservatism, but the ideological children of Abbie Hoffman, if not Robert Kennedy, were gaining power just beneath the surface of American public life, particularly at the universities.

Why Trump Won

For many liberals it seemed that Reagan had done such a good job of trashing their political movement that they changed their primary self-identifying term from "liberal" to "progressive." The American Left was so savaged by the Gipper that by the end of the 1980s the very word "liberal" had fallen into disfavor. By the 1990s, when we were all familiarizing ourselves with Bill and Hillary, the progressive-left moved back into the foreground, yet seemed entirely incognizant of the amazing strides that the American people had made concerning fairness and decency toward ethnic minorities, women, and Gay people in the previous decades. By the Era of Clinton, the bad old days of de jeure racism was long over, Gay men and women were emerging from their closets, and almost everyone considered female corporate executives as natural as daytime. 

Things were not perfect, and things will never be "perfect," but the United States had come a very long way in a very short period of time toward equality of opportunity for all Americans, regardless of ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.  Instead of acknowledging this and moving forward in a potential spirit of harmony, the progressive-left during the Obama administration used gender, race, and class as political weaponry with which to demean, defame, and even ruin the lives of people who might fairly disagree with them on substantive issues. 

Political Correctness became stifling to thoughtful people who realized it was no longer about fairness toward others, but about ideological bullying, repression of alternative thought and speech, social shaming, and legal harassment for the purpose of political dominance and power.

In this way, perfectly reasonable questions concerning the rise of political Islam became entirely verboten among the allegedly "sophisticated" on the coasts. Likewise, Americans who saw the chaos and violence and rapes associated with the Muslim immigration crisis in Europe, and who dared raise concerns, were lambasted as the worst people on the planet. Furthermore, Jewish American college students who support Israel, and thus the movement for Jewish freedom, were spit upon as baby killers and racists and supporters of genocide by those who claimed to represent the Left.

There were many reasons why Hillary Clinton got beat. The common wisdom is that a combination of angry white working-class racists and fearful white upper-class racists did Hillary in. As we got closer to November the progressives and the Democrats beat the drum of racism and sexism and hatred so intensely that they scared the holy hell out of their own children who hoped not to be snatched out of their beds by Nazis or Klansmen by the morning of November 10.

And this represents a major, and largely overlooked, reason why Democrats and progressives were weeping into their beers the next day. You cannot go around telling regular Americans, of any ethnicity, that they're a bunch of heinous racist, sexist, Nazis and then expect them to support your candidate. 

However, if the Democrats believe that Israel is a burden to the United States then they need to bring in Representative Ellison to help relieve them of that burden. We all know about Keith Ellison by this point. He's an anti-Zionist who promoted the notion that Israel is an "apartheid" state, who voted against funding Israel's Iron Dome defense system, and who was a long-time admirer and supporter of Farrakhan's anti-Semitic (and stone-cold crazy) Nation of Islam.

Nonetheless, the Democrats should bring in Ellison as Chair of the DNC because it's important to Jewish people that they stop playing hide-the-salami with their anti-Zionism.

It's just good to know where people actually stand.

Just where is "Palestine," anyways?

Michael Lumish

Apparently it is just south of Narnia and a wee-bit north of Whoville.

The Democratic Party has Tuned Out the Jihad... if it ever tuned it in to begin with

Michael Lumish

{Also published at the Elder of Ziyon and Jews Down Under.}

The Ohio State University Jihad attack a few days ago did not really happen.

Or, to be more precise, for many Americans it did not really happen because they simply don't care about Islamic theological violence against their fellow Americans. The reason that many Americans, particularly of the progressive variety, tend not to care about this kind of violence is because to do so is considered "racist" by president Obama, the leadership of the Democratic Party, and the elite media.

Koranically-based attacks on innocent Americans are, therefore, perceived like the weather. A typhoon or a flood or an earthquake may happen now and again, but what can you do? You cannot dwell on such things. They are simply "acts of God" and there is very little to be done or said, for most of us, beyond, "Gee, how unlucky."

The truth is that the Ohio State attack will, with the obvious exception of 9/11, slide down the memory hole along with all the others. Abdul Razak Ali Artan, apparently inspired by the Palestinian-Arab "car ramming intifada," put eleven people in the hospital for reasons of Muslim religious intolerance while Democrats cannot even bring themselves to utter the words "radical Islamic terrorism."

We know, however, that the attack was done for religious reasons - and was thereby a Jihadi attack - because Abdul told us so on a recent Facebook posting where he wrote, "By Allah, I am willing to kill a billion infidels." It should also be noted, shamefully enough, that ONLY conservative outlets are covering this angle of the story.

The problem is that after eight years of Obama administration, and Democratic Party, obfuscation concerning the rise of political Islam people are terrified to so much as discuss the matter lest they get smeared as racist... which is part of the reason that we just saw the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Progressive-left Democrats are not afraid that if they speak out against the most fascistic and widespread political movement in the world today that some crazed Shaheed will leap from the bushes with a scimitar, but something far worse. They are afraid that their own friends will look down upon them as Neanderthal racist pig farmers.

So, people won't discuss the Jihad because there is too much at stake. Friendships and reputations and, even, employment can be at risk. In Europe one can literally go on trial for questioning immigration policy in manners too blunt. Alternatively, in the United States we tend to apply social and economic pressure, rather than the direct threat of imprisonment, for crimes of political incorrectness.

Furthermore, in the US we all understand that the good people favor open immigration, because the US is a country of immigrants. It's only the bad people - the rat-bastard racist Trumpeteers - who want to significantly screen Arab-Muslim immigrants for ties to political Islam. Those who prefer open borders, however, insist that just as our ancestors came to this country with no intention other than to build better lives for themselves and their families, so people throughout the Middle East and North Africa are likewise seeking better lives. 

And, needless to say, no one should be more cognizant of this than American Jews, such as myself.

{My parents had me rather late in life, but my father came through Ellis Island as a baby in the arms of my grandmother early in the twentieth-century from the Ukraine via Argentina. They fled the Ukraine and the town of Medzhybizh which, as it happens, was the birthplace of the Chasidic movement. The Nazis also paid a visit to my paternal ancestral hometown in Operation Barbarossa during World War II. Were it not for my family's earlier departure, not a one of them would have survived, chances are.}

But, the point is that there is intense social pressure within the United States to avoid discussing either the Jihad or the potential problems with large-scale Arab-Muslim immigration. Consequently, we rarely even think about these questions, because as human beings we tend not to fret about things which have no real place within our cultural-political frameworks. So, because we don't discuss it, we don't think about it, and because we don't think about it we don't pursue vital questions around such issues.

It is for this reason that the great majority of Americans have not the slightest clue what is happening in Europe, particularly in Germany and Sweden, under the burden of mass Arab-Muslim immigration. They don't know about the Rape Game called "taharrush" or rising rates of immigrant crime or the never-ending violent conflicts with the cops and the indigenous population. To the extent that Americans have even heard of figures as Geert Wilders, they are vaguely dismissed as the irrational and hate-filled vestiges of hard-right White Supremacy in Europe.

Thus most Americans, like most Europeans before them, are simply tuning out the Jihad when it arrives in their own neighborhoods.

The Obama administration refuses to acknowledge it, the major media barely discusses it, and virtually no one in the Democratic Party does so beyond smearing the reputations of those of us who would like to open a national discussion on the question.

The truth, of course, is that there is nothing the least little bit "racist" about opposing Koranically-based violence in the United States, or anywhere else, for that matter. Opposing Islamic terrorism is no more racist than opposing German National Socialism or Soviet Communism. It has nothing to do with skin color or ethnicity and everything to do with a political-theocratic ideology that demands the submission or death of the infidel, the violent elimination of Gay people, the conquest of Jerusalem, and the complete domination of women.

And this is part of the reason why Trump took the White House.

Perhaps things will change when, or if, liberals rediscover their liberalism.

Spat Upon on the 7 Bus in San Francisco (or, Why Hillary Got Beat)

Michael Lumish

A number of years ago, when I taught American History at City College of San Francisco, I was making my way home one evening when I found myself rolling up Haight Street on the number 7 bus with one of my favorite students.

He was a smart and educated kid with something of an edge... if you get me. He was of a sort that I tended to befriend when I was in college. His education primarily took place outside of the classroom where he was exploring philosophy and art on his own, while indulging in God-Only-Knows what kind of vices with God-Only-Knows what kind of people.

Anyway, we were heading up Haight Street towards my stop when I found myself in discussion with this kid about cultural exchanges... or what is now often derogatorily referred to as "cultural appropriation."

We were discussing how Matt Miller - a guy from my old neck of the universe, just outside of New York City - blended devout Chasidic Judaism with Rasta and emerged as Matisyahu.



The next thing I know some African-American gentleman, apparently overhearing our conversation, stood up and spit at me directly in the face as the bus was rolling up to my stop at Haight and Broderick. My student jumped up with a fighting spirit as if he was going to punch the guy straight in the face. I stood up, just as the door opened, put my hand on my student's chest, told him to forget about it, and I simply walked off the bus.

From that day to this, the question that I've always asked myself is, what upset that guy?

I cannot know for certain, but unless he was simply crazy, he was actually offended at the notion of a Jewish kid (or perhaps any non-black kid) taking on and adapting and changing and playing with a black art form like Reggae.

When I would tell this story, I would often hesitate at the mention of my assailant's ethnicity because I wondered if I was not being racist and would be thought of as such by my friends. The truth, however, is that on that day, I was the victim of a minor "hate crime." And the reason for that bit of annoyance is because - I am more and more convinced - westerners have so fetishized issues of race that we are dooming ourselves, and our children and our cultures, to never-ending racial conflict.

It seems as if the more headway we make toward ethnic diversity and equality, the more the Left tend to shake their little fists at us and the more people like that idiot on the bus feel free to make an issue of "cultural appropriation."

And this - in the larger scheme of things - is just one small reason why Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the recent presidential election.

American liberals are getting tired of being smeared as racist by all those racist anti-racists, of any color, enjoying the hospitality of the progressive-left.