By piter2121 @Adobe Stock
Democrats Have a Problem
Last week, the House passed “overwhelmingly” a resolution condemning Hamas for its attack on Israel 7 October. New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer denounced the 15 Democrats who didn’t vote for the measure on social media. Gottheimer called them “despicable and do not speak for the party.”
Progressive Democrats Are the Democrat’s Future?
“Josh Gottheimer is only half right,” writes Daniel Henninger in the WSJ. “The party of Franklin D. Roosevelt has an anti-Semitism problem.”
This week progressive activist groups released a “Gaza 2024 statement” asserting they won’t vote for Joe Biden “if he does not end U.S. support for Israel’s brutal war in Gaza.” The announcement offers background on “Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza.”
In an open letter this week, 100 Columbia professors called the Hamas massacre “a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power.”
Muslim America Key to the Party’s Voting Coalition
Because the Democrats now consider Muslim Americans an important part of the party’s voting coalition, meetings were held this week at the White House with Muslim leaders. Mr. Biden in his national address last month spoke at length against “Islamophobia.” Anti-Israel protesters paraded in front of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house in San Francisco last Saturday evening.
An Abstraction
The Hamas massacre of some 1,400 Israelis on Oct. 7 is described in media reports as the worst attack on Jews “since the Holocaust.”
The Holocaust, a central event of World War II, is the greatest calamity in the history of the Jews. But that phrase, “since the Holocaust,” manifestly has no meaning or resonance for many recently educated Americans. It is an abstraction.
Any person with even a modicum of knowledge does not need a summary of what happened to Jews on 7 October or during Germany’s Nazi party under Adolf Hitler, maintains Mr. Henninger.
The Nazis collected and sent Jews to 23 main concentration camps in Europe. Extermination camps included Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec. Some six million Jews were murdered, often in gas chambers, burned and dumped into mass pits.
One reason the U.S.’s Greatest Generation is called the greatest is that it includes thousands of American GIs who helped liberate the concentration camps. Despite the war, the experience of seeing the camps and the scale and evidence of a systemized killing of Jews was an unspeakable horror. As their relatives know, many of these soldiers would never talk about what they saw.
Remember back when you were a schoolchild? It was a time when American schoolchildren had a functioning knowledge of the Holocaust and the WWII camps. “No longer,” warns Mr. Henninger.
Universities’ hiring and enabling of activist left-wing professors—proponents of the anti-Israel movement called Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions—has affected a generation of students.
A Quinnipiac poll found 51% of Democrats younger than 35 don’t support sending military aid to Israel after Hamas’s attack.
On balance, the Biden administration’s support for Israel has been firm because its representatives understand the direct line between the 1930s and Oct. 7.
The goal of Hamas and Iran is the completion of the Final Solution. In Iran, its leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sits placidly pondering the completion of the final solution.
FBI Director Christopher Wray testified Tuesday that Islamic State “urged its followers to target Jewish communities in the United States and Europe.”
Democratic progressives are pushing the party onto a bubble with many voters. Most Democrats, despite litmus-test issues like gender identity, systemic racism, and defunding the police, still vote the party line. “But maybe not now.”
The Hamas person-by-person slaughter is an event on a scale beyond any standard political issue. The question is whether the embrace by so much of the party’s emerging rank and file of anti-Semitism—a euphemism for active Jew hatred—will finally push Democrats over the line with voters, not least the historically reliable Jewish vote.
Best case, writes Mr. Henninger, “President Biden would explicitly and publicly drive a stake through the heart of the anti-Jewish sentiment taking over his party.”
Cynics will reply that the anyone-but-Trump factor will overcome even this but don’t count on it. Rationally, many large Jewish donors already are pulling the plug on giving to anti-Semitic fermentation tanks such as Harvard, Columbia, and Penn.
The party of FDR could be next.
