On Wednesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” host Andrew Klavan discussed how the Left is either ignoring or trying to rationalize the anti-Semitism coming from the fresh faces of the Democrat Party, including Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar. Transcript and video below.
Listen to Chuck Todd here, you can see the argument played out [that both the left and right are to blame for anti-Semitism in America] and what’s so wrong with it.
Chuck Todd: Omar opened the door for Republicans to point fingers and say ‘aha! The left has a problem with anti-Semitism!’ And you know what? It does. But unless you want to forget the chants of “Jews will not replace us’”by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, unless you want to forget President Trump saying there were good people on both sides of that debate, unless you want to forget the synagogue slaughter in Pittsburgh last year, unless you want to forget all of that you have to acknowledge that the right has a problem with anti-Semitism too. Both sides are doing a lot of finger-pointing and there’s a lot to point to, that’s sad. Anti-Semitism is on the rise on the left, it’s on the rise on the right, it’s on the rise in Europe and a lot of other places. So, let’s not pretend it’s on the rise in just the other political party.
Left and right are not political parties, they are political positions. And it is true on the far-left and on the far-right, or as they now call it the Alt-Right, which I think is more fair because it’s an alternative to actual American conservatism, it’s not American conservatism. But let’s just divide the world into left and right. On the far left and on the far right there is anti-Semitism.
Listen to who he compares, this is a congresswoman! This is a woman in the halls of American power, and so are all these other people, Farrakhan lovers hanging out with them. He’s comparing them to the guys with tiki-torches marching in the streets, these white supremacist garbage heads. He’s comparing a congresswoman to the guy who shot up a synagogue. Really? That’s the right and the left? Our right-wing anti-Semites are the outsiders of the outsiders of the outsiders, the furthest away from the people in power. Is there any relationship between Mitch McConnell and the guy who shot up that synagogue? No, of course, there’s not. And their guys are in Congress! Their guys are arguing there. Their guys are at The New York Times writing front-page stories about whether the Jews are too powerful. That’s a ridiculous comparison.
He throws in that canard about Trump saying there are good people on both sides — Trump was obviously talking about the statue controversy. It was a stupid, tone-deaf comment, but it was not anti-Semitic and it was not supporting white supremacy, that is just crap. If it were supporting it, somebody would have asked him, “Do you mean that?” But nobody has ever asked him does he mean it, because that’s not obviously what he was talking about. It is ridiculous, and they’re doing it to run interference for a Democrat Party and a left-wing philosophy that has become by nature infested with anti-Semitism.
Bari Weiss is a writer, and she’s constantly under fire because she’s not woke enough, but she’s been writing a lot about this and she and her dad Lou Weiss attended the synagogue that got shot up, so they had a big effect on her. Bari was on “The View” and she was saying the same thing, it’s on the right and on the left, but she did talk about the way it slips under the guise of progressive policy politics:
Bari Weiss: When you see people marching with tiki-torches or hear the Pittsburgh killer writing on social media “all Jews must die,” that’s very obviously eliminationist. The problem with anti-Semitism from the far-left is that it often times is smuggled into the mainstream under the guise of progressive values. So it says about itself, “I’m just standing up for the downtrodden Palestinians,” which they are, “I am just standing up for justice, I’m standing against racism.” And so that kind of language is a siren song, including to Jews, 75 percent of whom vote for Democrats, and so that’s the problem with it. That it’s not as easy to spot oftentimes because it says ‘we’re just about criticizing Israel… Nancy Pelosi shut it down very aggressively with Ilhan Omar. The problem is that she still has a spot on the congressional Foreign Affairs Committee, and that’s a real question.
See, I would go even further. I would I think as the party moves left it moves into anti-Semitism land. Whenever you’re against freedom, whenever you’re against the human person as when you want to leave babies to die if they escape your abortion, whenever you’re against the dignity and freedom of the individual you are going to ultimately be against the Jews. It’s this anti-Semitism, it is the devil’s flag pole, when you see it waving you know who’s living there. It is on the left and on the right, but right now it’s the Democrat Party that represents the furthest extreme of its own philosophy. Michael Goodwin writing in the New York Post says:
It’s no coincidence that the Democratic Party is increasingly both the anti-Israel party and home to a growing number of anti-Semites. To be clear, the two things are not always the same, but something is going on when both are defining elements of a political organization. One obvious truth is the Dems have failed to deal with anti-Semitism forthrightly, and now are confronted by a metastasizing cancer in their ranks. Another development was Obama’s effort to lure Iran in from the pariah state, cold, despite its vow to eliminate Israel.
This is part of Leftism because Leftism is anti-western, it is anti-freedom, it is anti-individual, it is anti-all the things that come into our culture through the God of the Jews.