Home The Democratic Party and Jewish Anti-Semitism
Home The Democratic Party and Jewish Anti-Semitism

The Democratic Party and Jewish Anti-Semitism

There's a thin line between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism. That's true of Muslims and the left, but it's also true specifically of the Jewish left, whose hatred for Israel manifests itself in a general contempt for Jewish religion, culture and tradition.

Gilbert in the West Bank
Take the Jewbags case of Danielle Gilbert, a staffer for Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz who had been appointed the DNC's Jewish outreach liaison. In a social media mishap, Gilbert posed along with her friends in a photo that she captioned "JEWBAGS" and that a friend of hers captioned as "Jew cash money team." This is the sort of incident that the hip crowd that thinks Heeb is a great name for a magazine and Jewcan Sam is hilarious will laugh off. But it's hardly the most offensive thing about Gilbert from a Jewish perspective. It's just a symptom of the problem.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has long been associated with J-Street, the Anti-Israel group, which has repeatedly worked to undermine Israel's fight against terrorism through a campaign of deception. When a delegation from J Street arrived at Schultz's office last year, they were received by Danielle Gilbert who posed with them for a photo. That wasn't the limit of Gilbert's involvement with J Street.

Danielle Gilbert's twitter feed suggests that she attended the J Street conference and she retweeted a call from the Anti-Israel group to freeze "settlements". Gilbert's own Anti-Israel background isn't casual. She attended the London School of Economics and Political Science and while there was part of the  Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism.

Even before going to Yale, Gilbert had volunteered at Givat Haviva, a leftist group dedicated to Muslim pro-terrorist activism. Givat Haviva had a presence at the J-Street conference and has its roots in Kibbutz Artzi, which was far enough to the left that it identified closely with the Soviet Union and its leader eulogized Stalin who had engaged in the mass murder of Jews. The roots of Givat Haviva lie with Artzi's Arab Department whose goal was a one state solution.

Ilan Pappe founded and ran the Academic Institute for Peace in Givat Haviva. Pappe is a former member of Hadash, the Arab-Israeli Communist party, who supports the destruction of Israel via a One State Solution. An article on the Givat Haviva website features a photo of Danielle Gilbert with one of her friends, who writes about his support for the One State Solution.

Through Givat Haviva, Gilbert conducted interviews with the residents of the Muslim Bartaa village which straddles the Green Line and has become a cause celebre for the Anti-Israel left. Since then she has been a Jeremiah Fellow at Jews United for Justice, another left-wing group, which also participated in the J Street conference, and whose board members intersect with a number of Anti-Israel groups.

Gilbert with J Street members
In 2008, Gilbert wrote, "We cannot see Mumbai's events as anything less than the gruesome epitome of systematic terror. However, such a tragedy rightly makes us question our unequal treatment of minority cultures within larger communities," shifting easily to calling the brutal murder of the Holtzberg family and countless Indians by Muslims a "tragedy" that serves to call attention to Muslim suffering.

For Jews there is far more to be offended by in that than in Gilbert's use of a Jewish slur. There is also far more to be offended by in the fact that the DNC chose to elevate a woman aligned with J Street and that she then elevated someone like Danielle Gilbert to conduct outreach to the people they no doubt fondly think of as the "Jewbags".

If you want to understand why Obama thought he could treat Jews with such contempt, you have to remember that he thought Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was a normative figure and Schultz thought that Gilbert was a normative figure. In that echo chamber, a radical group like J Street seems mainstream and Gilbert's behavior seems equally mainstream.

Gilbert's politics and contempt for the Jewish people make her completely unsuitable to act as any kind of liaison to the Jewish community. And yet Danielle Gilbert is not extraordinary. There are plenty of Jewish boys and girls in D.C. with the same privileged background, the same formal trips to Israel giving way uglier detours, foreign policy fellowships and eventually a place in a left-wing think tank or in more mainstream politics. These are the people who show up to listen to J Street panels, break bread with members of the Muslim Brotherhood and denounce Israel. They are as banal as they are despicable.

In the last four years the Democratic Party has hardly bothered hiding its contempt for ordinary Americans. The same is true for the Jewish left which is hardly masking its contempt for the Jewish people anymore. This is not a new phenomenon, it dates back to the late 19th century, and the venom with which the Jewish left assailed the Jewish people eventually ended in the Gulags. Those who survived earned the privilege of participating in the Soviet Union's campaign to smear Israel.

The Post-Jewish left mirrors the Post-American left in its disdain for its roots and its radical and destructive identity. Its promotion of a counter-Jewish identity based on ridiculing Jewishness and hostility to Israel is once again splitting the Jewish community into two camps. By elevating Schultz, Gilbert and J-Street, the left is asserting its power to define what being Jewish means. The backlash to them is a reminder that the left does not have the power that it thinks it does.

Jewish Anti-Semitism is a very real phenomenon, but it's not self-hatred, no more so than Bill Ayers' desire to destroy America is self-hatred. The essence of the left is the rejection of the past in a perpetual war for a better future. The very nature of Jewish identity is built on a continuity of tradition and the nature of the left is to fly its progressive colors by showing contempt for tradition. There can be no balance between the two because to choose the one is to reject the other.

The more the Democratic Party moves in tune with the left, the more it mirrors the bigotry of European leftist parties toward Jews and Israel. This is an inescapable process and the further left the party goes, the more Anti-Semitic it will become. It will still have plenty of Jewish members, but that means very little. The Communist Party had quite a few Jewish members. So did Mussolini's National Fascist Party. Had Jews been allowed to join the Nazi Party, it would have had them too.

"Jewbags"
To join the left is to fragment your existing identity, whether it is Jewish or Christian, American or Australian, and adopt a new form of identity. The further the extreme, the greater the fragmentation becomes. Push harder and you go from Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to Peter Beinart to Gilad Atzmon. It's a slippery slope greased with lies and self-deceptions that ends at the bottom of a charnel pit, a gulag, a death camp or a terrorist training camp.

The truly committed progressive sooner or later realizes that for the sake of the consistency of his new identity, he must kill that part of himself which is Jewish. He may kill it with tantrums of hate, with long essays questioning the nature of Jewish identity, with J-Street conferences or Jewbag jokes. The details of every suicide are unique and also uninteresting, and the conclusion is a leftist mind in a Jewish body.

Like every other form of Anti-Semitism, Jewish Anti-Semitism should be defied and exposed for what it is. It should not be tolerated or allowed to become normative. Instead it should be exposed foe what it is, the bigotry of those who have chosen the left and chosen to hate.

Comments

  1. Anonymous3/4/12

    Mr. Greenfield,

    It is time for a return of the Maccabees. Perhaps it is too late but I believe we have not continued our blood line for three thousand or so years for nothing. I believe there is a rhyme and reason for Torah believing Jews to be here.

    Perhaps you- are right....they are not self hating Jews. The good thing is that I hate them.

    You do fine work sir.

    PeaceAtAllCosts

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous3/4/12

    Daniel

    Your blog is exceptionally bringht and pointed.
    I so look forward to your mind in display.
    Keep up the good work.

    Don
    @Chingasso

    ReplyDelete
  3. Even the proud frum Jews in the Groggers (the band who did the Jewcan Sam video) aren't good enough for you?

    ReplyDelete
  4. gonzomocha4/4/12

    it seems that young Jews from highly priveleged/indulged societies in america/uk etc....have completely lost their moral compass

    and you are so right when you say that jews (lower case for lower jews) would have happily joined the nazi party....if they were only allowed too....afterall many of these german jews considered themselves german first a jews second....with horrendous results

    for many of these jews (again lower case for lower jews) Israel/Zionism is the ultimate embarassment and inconvenience...and gets in the way of what they and their acolytes consider a 'jew'

    these people deserve the contempt and disdain of every true JEW

    ReplyDelete
  5. It sickens me to no end to see my own people carrying on in this way. It is incredibly sad to know that they have no flippin clue that Moshiach is coming so soon and that they are paving the way for their own destruction.
    They must be in such denial not to see the beauty of the Jew over thousands of years.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Passer by4/4/12

    "The more the Democratic Party moves in tune with the left, the more it mirrors the bigotry of European leftist parties toward Jews and Israel. This is an inescapable process and the further left the party goes, the more Anti-Semitic it will become."

    Yep, i see it this way too. Its also about demographics. Expect American George Galloways, Ken Livingstones, and Ilmar Reepalus.

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  7. Anonymous4/4/12

    Thank you... great article! Simple answer after all: liberalism is a mental disorder!

    Call me nequelquepart

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  8. "...The Communist Party had quite a few Jewish members. So did Mussolini's National Fascist Party. Had Jews been allowed to join the Nazi Party, it would have had them too...."

    As a German, I would never have dared saying that and I thank You, Sultan Knisch, for articulating it in your erudite yet take-no-prisoners kind of way. Because on seeing quite a few Jewish women (or who CLAIM Jewish heritage) being stridently active among the BDS thugs and the lets-kill-the-Jews-flotillas, I was thinking exactly this.

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  9. Anonymous4/4/12

    Your work is astonishing in its clarity and insight. Your prose is beautiful. I am a huge new fan.

    Thank you for writing.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Anonymous4/4/12

    We always had them, then it was Pablo Christiani, today is Danielle Gilbert, or Gilad Atzmon. We call them "erev rav".

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  11. Anonymous4/4/12

    "In 2008, Gilbert wrote, "We cannot see Mumbai's events as anything less than the gruesome epitome of systematic terror. However, such a tragedy rightly makes us question our unequal treatment of minority cultures within larger communities," shifting easily to calling the brutal murder of the Holtzberg family and countless Indians by Muslims a "tragedy" that serves to call attention to Muslim suffering. "

    1. How in the world can she turn Pakistan's state sponsored terrorism against its neighboring country as an indicator of unequal minority not in Pakistan, but in that neighboring country attacked by Pakistan?

    2. Why does the far left never ask Muslims to question our unequal treatment of minority cultures within larger communities? Here are how Pakistan's minority cultures treated, ""In Pakistan there is justice only for Muslims, justice is denied Hindus. Kill me here, now, in court. But do not send me back to the Darul-Aman [Koranic school] ... kill me". This is the desperate, heartbreaking outburst of Rinkel Kumari, a Hindu girl aged 19, who has entrusted her heartfelt appeal to the judges of the Supreme Court in Islamabad. Her story is similar to that of many other young women and girls belonging to religious minorities - Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Ahmadis - kidnapped by extremist groups or individuals, most of the time lords or local mafia, which convert them by force and then marry them . And that is what the girl said on 26 March, before the judges of the capital's court...." http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Hindu-girl-tells-Supreme-Court-she-would-rather-die-than-convert-to-Islam-24358.html

    3. Indian Muslims have gotten more than equal treatment which is how they ended up partitioning India and getting not one but two countries for Indian Muslims, Pakistan and Bangladesh, plus Indian Muslims still could live in India. It is Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains of India were given unequal and lesser treatment.

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  12. Gilbert was backing up the perversions of Fareed Zakaria. You can see the background in Glick's article

    http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2008/12/the-jihadistmulticultural-alli.php?pf=yes

    which Gilbert attacked

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  13. Anonymous4/4/12

    "Zakaria and Nussbaum bravely support equality for the Muslim minority, pointing out past and current injustice bestowed upon this religious group in the subcontinent." Danielle Gilbert

    Centuries of brutal imperialistic Islamic jihad, millions of Indians murdered and enslaved because they were polytheistic infidels and taught by Islam to Muslims to be inferior, thousands of temples (of all Indic religions, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist) destroyed, horrific partition of India so that Indian Muslims could end up with two countries to call their own on top of India as home, and it is past and current injustices faced by the Muslim community in the Indian Subcontinent that Fareed, Nussbaum and Gilbert care about? When will these leftists ever care about the past and current injustice faced by Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs from Muslims in the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) stretching back centuries of Islamic imperialism? When will those 3 speak up against the 60 years of literal religious cleansing and genocide of Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain minorities in was became Pakistan and Bangladesh,and continued persecution and discrimination today?

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  14. Anonymous4/4/12

    These fools are the Judenrat of 2012.

    "Jewish-led institutions to carry out anti-Jewish policies."

    When the time comes, they should get the same treatment the Judenrat deserved during WW2.

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  15. The leftists care about Muslims not their victims. They see the Muslims as a revolutionary force.

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  16. Daniel replied: "The leftists care about Muslims not their victims. They see the Muslims as a revolutionary force."

    And when Islam "dominates," as it keeps boasting it will, then it will be the secular leftists who will become the victims, too. But long-range consequences are not the forte of the Left, and never has been.

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  17. Anonymous4/4/12

    Gilad Atzmon (yemach shemo) is not the bottom of the leftist slippery slope. That place is occupied by Azzam al-Amriki, AKA Adam Gadahn.

    ReplyDelete
  18. "Self-hating Jews" - sad but true

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  19. Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog said...
    "The leftists care about Muslims not their victims. They see the Muslims as a revolutionary force."


    Allow me to be cynical here and go further:

    some leftists mean to "use" the Muslims to do the dirty work they would really like to do on the Jews. You should hear the local left media here talk about the horrible horrible tragedie in Toulouse - one old leftie called it yesterday (on TV) "that accident in Toulouse". And it's all about the poor misunderstood Islamic child-murderer. I have even heard leftists criticise the Jewish victims for having buried their murdered children in Israel.

    I am really getting so angry that I wish they would get everything they deserve right now, except that we all will get it too.

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  20. Anonymous9/4/12

    One of the agonizing things that I have read is how Jews of the Holocaust era questioned how their fellow Jews could serve the Nazis as Kapos in the camps. While I seek to make no analogy as to the contents of this article, I do find the psychology of very liberal American Jews compelling. Their sense of Judaism is both ignorant of Torah Judaism on " Tikkun Olam", and so devoid of Judaism as to be a kind of Unitarian-ism. Witness the bat mitzvah projects focused on say, Peruvian orphans, rather than poor Jews in the USA. When observed the black-hatted folks cause them undue embarassment among their non-Jewish friends. " Why, I am not one of them", they feel they must prove. It would be helpful if the media crowd, you know who you are, would just cnvert en mass to Lutherianism, stop discussing Jews and Israel based on your attenuated bar mitzvah experiences, and let the rest of us do the cleanup work on the mess that you have created. Because you ain't no Jews.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Anonymous30/1/13

    It`s a grave fact: Jewish anti-semitism is the mainstream of the Western diasphora,particularily the American one.As always it has the form of "these rotten Zionists,this Russian mafia" and so on.In reality they don`t want to be the Jews and hate us for it.
    Ben

    ReplyDelete

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