The level of anti-Semitism that is tolerated, so long as it comes from black leftists, is truly astonishing.
According to the media, if anti-Semitism comes from a white fan or a white non-fan of Donald Trump, then anti-Semitism is a true deep scourge. On the other hand, if it comes from Hamas, Hezbollah, or any of the radical Middle Eastern Muslim groups who seek to destroy the state of Israel and wipe Jews off the planet, that’s a political question.
And if it comes from prominent black people, then it’s not a problem at all. The media just ignore it completely. The fact that Barack Obama’s anti-Semitism was overlooked for years is an amazing indicator of just how tolerant the Left is about anti-Semitism when it comes from members of the black community.
David Samuels writes in Tablet Magazine:
There is a fascinating passage in Rising Star, David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama’s early years, in which the historian examines Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father of his breakup with his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager.
In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism. As readers, we know that the stakes of this decision would become more than simply personal: The Black American man that Obama wills into being in this scene would go on to marry a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson and, after a meteoric rise, win election as the first Black president of the United States.
Yet what Garrow documented, after tracking down and interviewing Sheila Miyoshi Jager, was an explosive fight over a very different subject. In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.
At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.
In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.
It was not Obama’s blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn anti-Semitism. That is not a shock. Remember: Barack Obama sat in Jeremiah Wright’s church for 20 years. Is it any shock that he would not condemn anti-Semitism in his younger days?
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Now here’s the latest example of black leftist anti-Semitism that is being ignored: Cardi B gets away with the most outrageous Jewish stereotyping available.
Cardi B tweeted a picture of two Hasidic Jews in full Hasidic garb, probably in Brooklyn. One is wearing a shtreimel, a kind of furry round hat. The other was wearing a black hat and a bekesha, a long black jacket.
And Cardi B tweeted, “Remember … ”
She was apparently referring to a line in her Shakespearean song “Bickenhead,” in which she says:
Now, I said luxury apartments
I’m young and I’m heartless
There’s a b**** there in my vision, that b**** is a target
Lawyer is a Jew, he gon’ chew up all the charges
Don’t matter if you f*** with me, I get money regardless
“Lawyer is a Jew” is the line. Jews are disproportionately lawyers, doctors, accountants. There are many different industries in which Jews represent a disproportionate share of members of the industry.
What is actually stereotypical and anti-Semitic is the implication that a picture of two very Hasidic Jews is somehow representative of Cardi B’s Jewish lawyers.
Here’s the point: We actually have pictures of her Jewish lawyers that show they look like secular reform Jews, nothing like religious Jews at all. The idea that all Jews are the same is a hell of a stereotype. If someone said “rappers” and then posted a picture of Barack Obama and Eric Holder, they would be called racist. Cardi B, however, says this kind of stuff routinely and guess what? No problem whatsoever.
This is true throughout rap culture. It is posted routinely by people ranging from Ice Cube to Cardi B, and everybody just goes, “Hey, whatever. Is that really a big deal?”
It sure as hell would be if we were talking about another race attacking members of any other race.