Antisemitic electioneering always works

I have been surprised over the last few days by the number of Jewish Democrats who appear to be shocked by the victory of antisemitic senatorial candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic Party primary. I am surprised not because, while I can certainly understand why they would be horrified, I cannot comprehend how they could have been shocked.

After all, this is the direction the Democrats have been going in for more than two decades.

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The road to Jew-hatred began with the now-forgotten eruption of antisemitism on the left in 2000 when the Second Intifada broke out in Israel. This trend snowballed after the 2008 economic crisis with the rise of the hate group the Democratic Socialists of America and the electoral victories of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Arianna Presley (D-Mass.), who formed what they called “The Squad” in the U.S. House of Representatives. Others later followed suit.

It has culminated, for now, in the New York City mayoral victory of Zohran Mamdani and his recent speech inciting violence against Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, by extension, the American Jewish community.

At the same time and at every point, the ostensibly “moderate” Democratic establishment has surrendered to the antisemites without a fight. El-Sayed’s victory and the establishment’s subsequent genuflection before him are merely another step in the conquest and colonialization of the party by Jew-hatred, and not even necessarily the most significant. No one should be shocked by it.

Indeed, the most significant step in this process of barbarization has nothing to do with any particular election. It is a larger and more ominous phenomenon, because it is unprecedented in American history and constitutes an existential threat to the American Jewish community itself.

It is simply that one of America’s two major parties has realized something that politicians have known since the dawn of modern democracy: Antisemitic electioneering always works. From Karl Leuger to Adolf Hitler, it always has and always will. There are innumerable votes and large amounts of money to be gained by hating the Jews, and thus, whether sincere or cynical, antisemitism has been a fixture of many democratic societies and mass movements.

The one great exception was the United States. For the most part, antisemitism was never a factor in U.S. politics. This was not because unscrupulous politicians were unaware of its effectiveness. It was because—largely due to America’s dedication to religious freedom—there was an informal consensus that running against the Jews was verboten in America. There was a taboo on antisemitic politics that held firm for most of American history, with only a handful of political figures, like Charles Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh, who never stood for election, engaging in it.

That taboo has now been violated in the most flagrant manner by the Democratic Party. In effect, the taboo no longer exists. It took a split-second to exterminate it, and it was done with malice aforethought.

Driven by a vicious hatred of Israel that inevitably extended to all Jews, a fetid alliance between progressives and radical Muslims understood that, in order to break Israel, they would have to break the Jews. Thus, they went to war with the American Jewish community, which they see as the bulwark of Israel’s support in the United States.

This process was galvanized by a culture marinated in antisemitism and anti-Zionism, imported from the Muslim world and merged with Soviet Cold War propaganda. These two factors have led to the shattering of the old consensus against antisemitic politics and the emergence of the first antisemitic mass movement in American history.

It would be a mistake to see this as simply a cynical political move. The members of this movement are true believers. They are genuine genocidal racists who want to annihilate Israel and, at best, marginalize and ghettoize the American Jewish community. The only cynics are the establishment Democrats—some of them, like Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Jewish themselves—who have realized that the votes are with the antisemites, as they always are, and decided to bend the knee.

This combination of sincere racism and cynical opportunism bodes decidedly ill for American Jewry because it is clear what these people want: the presidency. Should this occur, if an antisemitic president is elected, then American Jews will have only two options—total submission or flight to Israel.

None of this, however, has to happen. Indeed, American Jews ought to obey a simple imperative: Don’t let it happen.

There is, I believe, only one way to prevent it: American Jews must forgo their idealism and, at long last, deal with politics as it is. They must adopt a realpolitik approach based solely on their own interests and no one else’s.

This means that American Jews must seek out allies wherever they are, even among constituencies, politicians and movements they have previously shunned or overlooked—working-class Americans, Hindu Americans, Asian Americans and evangelical Christians being the most obvious but hardly the only examples.

They must forgo illusions of “allyship” that have already been shattered. They must attack their enemies with maximum retaliation, seeking not just to neutralize but to demolish them politically, socially and culturally. They must be prepared to use any and all legal means necessary to disempower and marginalize their enemies before their enemies do the same to them.

For better or worse, this means that American Jews must abandon their most treasured delusion: that politics is some species of morality. The truth is that politics has little morality. It is often a dirty business, and even when it is not, it is the art of the possible, naturally requiring compromises that some may find dubious.

This is unpleasant to contemplate, but Jews no longer have the luxury of thinking otherwise. The existence of their community is at stake, so they must play the game according to the rules their enemies have established. If they do not, they will have forgone the highest of all moral principles: the right to life and limb and, with it, freedom.

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