Daniel Greenfield
November 02, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog
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When Sunrise Movement DC issued its
ultimatum that either the Jews had to be kicked out or it would boycott a
D.C. statehood rally, it was a familiar purity test. And, like most
purity tests, was about testing a willingness to hate people and endorse
a new extremist position on demand.
Purity
tests that have no constructive purpose except to undermine and oust a
leadership that is insufficiently radical have become commonplace in the
Reign of Terror era of American politics.
When Democrats adopt
socialism, endorse the elimination of the police, tear down the statues
of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, champion critical race theory,
and insist that there’s no such thing as men and women, it’s as the
result of an escalating series of purity tests.
Hating Jews is just the latest progressive purity test.
Sunrise
DC declared that it would not participate in events with what it
falsely claimed were Zionist groups, but were actually, mostly fellow
leftists who hate Israel as much as they do.
The
National Council of Jewish Women,
one of the three groups singled out by Sunrise DC, had supported or
allied with Linda Sarsour, Peter Beinart, and Rep. Ilhan Omar. The NCJW
had gone as far out of its way to align with the Hamas caucus as it was
possible without actually turning into an anti-Israel protest group.
Revealingly, nothing it had done was good enough.
It never is.
Why
beat up on Sarsour and Omar’s pals? Sunrise DC was actually imposing an
anti-Semitism purity test on the Declaration for American Democracy, a
pro-election rigging coalition. And true to form, its ultimatum was met
with an uncomfortable refusal by other leftist groups and politicians to
either condemn anti-Semitism or condemn the Jews. The purity test had
succeeded.
Black Lives Matter D.C. swiftly jumped in to declare
that Sunrise D.C's "statement wasn't anti-Semitic, no matter how many
times oppressors want to repeat it." This was as much a threat to any
leftist, prog, or liberal who might want to stand up to anti-Semitism,
as it was to Jews. Fail the anti-Semitism purity test and Black Lives
Matter will damn you as an oppressor.
Even before the BLM threat, the message had been received. And the outcome noted.
The
same Democrat establishment that tossed away American history,
including its own, opposition to racism, support for women’s rights, and
dozens of other things that it used to claim were principles, but
actually turned out to be mere shibboleths, was ready to throw Jews on
the bonfire of its convictions. Not that it should have surprised anyone
except Jewish leftists.
The anti-Semitism purity test was
inevitable based on the history of the last two centuries and a much
more recent history of modern institutional anti-Semitism at colleges
and universities.
Sunrise DC and BLM DC were running the same
play that their members had likely taken part in on college campuses
where Jewish students are routinely ousted from student government and
campus positions on the pretext that they must be Zionists. Like safe
spaces and pronoun police, what happens on campus doesn’t stay on
campus. Only now the entire civic space is playing the role of the
helpless university administrators who don’t want to offend the
radicals.
The leap of these anti-Semitic purges from the campus
to major leftist advocacy groups foreshadows the next stage of the leap
when they become a fundamental reality of public life in the
institutions, private and public, controlled by the new generation of
identity politics leftists.
Hating Jews, under the putative guise
of opposing Zionism, is about to become a core progressive value. And
those values have become the moral code of the ruling class.
The Jewish groups that failed to fight campus anti-Semitism are about to live under it.
A
movement like this is not just the product of a few activists with a
social media account. Nor is the evolution of the anti-Semitism purity
test a tantrum being thrown by a few obscure groups.
When you follow the money, it becomes all too obvious what is really taking place here.
The Sunrise Movement is
funded by George Soros and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, among others. Soros and the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
are the premier funders of the anti-Israel movement in America. It’s
unlikely that the Sunrise Movement, an environmental group that
previously showed little interest in Israel, suddenly decided to boycott
a completely unrelated rally because organizations with the “J” word in
their name were going to be present.
Likewise, it’s implausible
that the Movement for Black Lives, a BLM umbrella group, launched its
support for BDS and opposition to the Jewish State, for reasons
unrelated to its close ties to the Ford Foundation whose own funding of
anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activities are legendary.
The rise of
what some have called a new anti-Semitism was not simply an activist
phenomenon. Nor is it especially clear that there is an authentic
grassroots leftist movement that can be separated from the billionaire
donors and foundations who finance the groups that fund it. Much as
Soviet front groups couldn’t be properly detached from the Old Left, the
foundations that serve a similar role can’t be detached from the New
Left. Tracing the money is difficult enough, but determining when the
foundations fund ideas or originate them can be all but impossible.
What is clearer is that leftist anti-Semitism is a top-down, not a bottom-up, phenomenon.
American
Jews have tried to convince themselves that individual incidents, first
on campuses and then in the streets, violence and vandalism under the
guise of political correctness, did not make a pattern. They have gone
on trying to ignore these “random events” while refusing to connect the
dots, and trying to silence those who were connecting the dots for them.
And when they finally do connect the dots, they’re eager to blame Israel, not the anti-Semites.
But
the Left was purging Jews before there was a modern State of Israel on
the grounds that they were reactionaries, bourgeois, cosmopolitans, or
any number of similar accusations.
Zionism is just the latest politically correct excuse for hating Jews. And it’s not the only one.
The
National Council of Jewish Women,
much like the anti-Israel activists of the Religious Action Center of
the Reform movement, might wonder why they were targeted. If they had
any sense of history, including that of their own, they would know that
the whole point of purity tests is to reduce the base to mindless
radicalism by convincing them to embrace what they once knew to be
wrong. That includes convincing people to hate others and to hate
themselves.
Each purity test passed destroys the morals,
principles, and basic decency of human beings. It’s how normal people
turn into the howling mobs we read about in history books or watch in
historical newsreels. “What kind of people could do that?” we wonder.
The answer is all around us.
Compelling
people who used to be Democrats, then liberals, then progressives, and
finally dogmatic leftists to jump through one more hoop makes them more
willing to do anything.
And if there’s anything that history
teaches about the Left, from Stalin to Mao, from Che to Pol Pot, from
Kim Jong-Il to Mengistu there will come a time when ordinary people will
indeed be expected to do “anything”, whether it’s to kill or to be
killed in the name of the revolution.
Anti-Semitism is just one
more stop on the extremist expressway. Like critical race theory and
much of the rest of identity politics, it divides people into those who
deserve to be beaten and those who deserve to do the beating to distract
everyone from the fact that the leftist ideology of victims and
oppressors is really about creating plenty more of both as grist for its
political mill.
The Sunrise Movement claims that the planet is
on the verge of destruction and Black Lives Matter insists that the
greatest threat to black people are police officers, both are absurd
lies, but like anti-Semitism they’re really weaponized distractions for a
massive power grab.
Meanwhile the same American Jewish
establishment that was convinced that the answer to anti-Semitism was
social justice can’t help but double down on it even as it is becoming
inescapably obvious that social justice isn’t the answer to
anti-Semitism: it is anti-Semitism.
Organizations like NCJW or
RAC embrace the extreme margins of the Left and are baffled when the
anti-Semitism from those margins not only intensifies, but burns hotter
than ever. The purity tests intensify with each concession: each
willingness to embrace Sarsour, Omar, and whatever leftist social
justice bigot follows on their heels only leads to worse hatred.
The leftist anti-Semitism that began on college campuses is defining a leftist America.
Tags:
Anti-Semitism,
Antisemitism,
Left,
recent
About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
If you notice no one in the Trump administration seems to be panicking. No hysterics and emotionally ineffective hyperventilating, so, I’m of the opinion Trump and Co. knew this was going to happen, perhaps hoping it would happen, setting the judiciary up for a Constitutional confrontation. The federal judiciary has been a loose cannon since the 1803 Marbury v. Madison ruling, and now it’s almost completely out of control, and to the point the general public is seeing them for who and what they are, and the public doesn’t like it, many fearing the courts threaten the existence of the Republic.
The Constitution says the Congress determines the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary, not the judiciary
This is the opportunity to push Congress to exercise their Constitutional authority to start restricting the federal judiciary’s activist judges, and more importantly pass a Constitutional Amendment that does two things. Ends lifetime appointments, and do what the founders failed to do…. define the role of the judiciary, and with consequences for failing to stay within the boundaries of those definitions. And any Constitutional Amendment that fixes this should include a provision that all federal judges must be natural born citizens.
As I stated, the only court the Constitution creates is the Supreme Court, and when you read about how this came about it almost seems like it was an after thought to most of them. Clearly lacking insight and vision.
The idea behind lifetime appointments was to ensure their independence and not be impacted by politics. That has been an abject failure almost from the beginning, and in the last 100 years it’s been a dismal failure, one that’s been tolerated by the Congress.
When the founders put this in the Constitution those who opposed it warned the very things we’re seeing right now was going to happen, and they were right, as people will always be people, and people need boundaries to hold them in check.
The federal judiciary after the Supreme Courts Marbury v. Madison decision in 1803 has morphed into an almost entirely political institution that just occasionally rules harmoniously with the Constitution.
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There's a nautical phrase, "may you have follows seas", which means may the waves move in the same direction as the ship, and I'm of the opinion that's what will be happening in the federal judiciary. Not for all, because some are blatantly corrupt and incompetent ideologues, and we can't replace them without their consent. That needs to be changed.Everyone on the left is relying on the courts to ignore the Constitution to stop Trump’s “restoration to normality”, and this is the hill conservatives need to die on by challenging the myth of judicial supremacy, and better yet....again pass a Constitutional Amendment to fix the founder’s greatest Constitutional error; lifetime appointments for the federal judiciary.
The Constitution says the supreme commander of America's military is the President of the United States. The judiciary thinks they are!
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DOGE has exposed amazing levels of waste, and the corruption by the Administrative State is so bad,it makes the 19th century’s patronage system look good. In spite of that the federal judiciary says none of that matters.