Has the Progressive Left Embraced Anti-Semitism?

The progressive left has an anti-Semitism problem. The name of the problem: Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan. Yet again, Farrakhan has spewed his usual anti-Semitic vitriol. But now, it turns out that numerous members of the Congressional Black Caucus have happily associated with the Anti-Semite in Chief. Also, leaders of the Women’s March have happily appeared in public with him, exposing the fact that this supposedly progressive movement is infested with anti-Semitism. 

Of course, anyone with a barely functioning brain would have seen the anti-Semitism in a Palestinian activist like Linda Sarsour or in a Tamika Mallory. He would easily have noted that the elevation of Louis Farrakhan complements the Obama presidency, itself led by a man who spent twenty years at the feet of hate minister and notable anti-Semite Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Throughout the Obama presidency the Democratic Party’s anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli base kept quiet. Farrakhan and Wright went quiet. Obama’s old friend, Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi shut up. Now, given that they no longer have to cover for Barack Hussein, they are crawling back out of the woodwork.

Even Obama’s consigliere, Valerie Jarrett has removed her mask and declared the anti-Semitic Farrakhan to be no worse than the Koch brothers. You can see the kind of mentality that went into the Obama Iran nuclear deal, the most anti-Israeli action that any American president has ever taken.

Anti-Semitism was the hidden face of the Obama presidency. Keep in mind that the Congressional Black Caucus made a point of boycotting a speech that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu delivered to Congress. And that Obama himself treated Netanyahu with contempt.

Now, the progressive left owns anti-Semitism. And yet, in refusing to repudiate Louis Farrakhan they are saying that black Americans should not be held to the same moral standards as other Americans.

Victor Davis Hanson explained:

In the old days, anti-Semitism was more the domain of white rednecks railing against supposedly sneaky, rich, Eastern bankers and New York traders. Today it is the “intersectional” collection of black extremists, Palestinian nationalists, and radical feminists. They apparently feel immune from charges of anti-Semitism, on the premise that minorities cannot themselves be bigots and that leftists can loathe and single out Israel for inordinate venom, but not be anti-Semitic.

And also,

In sum, the octogenarian Farrakhan is now a mainstream identity-politics activist and an apparently integral part of the new Democratic party’s “inclusion” agenda. Why else would Representative Jim Clyburn (the third-ranking Democrat in the House) have shared a stage with him? Or why would DNC vice chairman Keith Ellison (former Nation of Islam member) shrug off his relationship to Farrakhan with the assertion, “I am telling you, no one cares.” And if one looks to the Democratic hierarchy, he’s apparently right.

We have the mind-numbing assertion that a political party whose reason for being is to fight bigotry aligning itself with one of America’s worst bigots. You should not expect intellectual consistency or intellectual honesty from such a group.

In truth, they are living in a fictional world where they are fighting for the Revolution that will overthrow the patriarchal capitalistic order. In that world, though not in the real world, Palestinians belong to the new proletariat that is fighting oppression… by Jews. That the Palestinians and the Iranian mullahs are the direct descendants of the Third Reich seems not to bother them. Within their fictional universe the real Hitler is Donald Trump.

People who think this way belong to our intelligentsia. Among them New Yorker writer, Masha Gessen. People think the world of Gessen. They pronounce her name with reverence. Why they do so is completely beyond me.

Consider her highly unimpressive recent piece about Farrakhan and the left. For Gessen Trump is Hitler, and the progressive left is the French Resistance. As you might have noticed these people do not live in the real world. Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945 and the French Resistance ceased to exist at that point. Pretending that you are living out someone else’s history does not make you a serious thinker. It makes you a serial fabulist:

When you are staring clear, unadulterated evil in the face—and a state that routinely practices political murder is certainly clear, unadulterated evil—your options crystallize. Politics begins to permeate everything, obliterating the division between public and private, but also imbuing action and speech with exhilarating meaning. Hannah Arendt wrote about this state of being in “Between Past and Future,” describing the private citizens who had become members of the French Resistance: “He who joined the Resistance found himself. . . . He ceased to be in quest of himself, without mastery, in naked unsatisfaction. . . . He who no longer suspected himself on insincerity, of being a carping suspicious actor of life . . . could afford to go naked. In this nakedness, stripped of all masks . . . they had been visited, for the first time in their lives, by an apparition of freedom.” Arendt might have been writing about Mallory, other Women’s March leaders, and many of the activists who have emerged since the election of Donald Trump. Their sense of purpose is palpable. But in the case of Mallory, it seems that what she thought of as a private, basically familial association with Farrakhan has taken on public, explicitly political meaning.

Which unadulterated evil would that be? It wouldn’t be Iran. It wouldn’t be Islamist terrorism. It wouldn’t be anti-Semites like Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright. No, it’s Donald Trump. And apparently the vision of Trump so completely blinded Malika Mallory that she could not understand that her personal familial association with Louis Farrakhan had taken on a political meaning.

Gessen’s last statement is pure idiocy. If you function as a political leader and associated with someone who has a political influence, your actions are political. Only a fool would think otherwise. And only a fool would attempt to defend an association with a notorious anti-Semite on those grounds. Do you, as an individual, enjoy personal familial associations with public figures you know to be anti-Semitic?

Gessen is correct, however, to see politics as cooperation, not warfare.

Politics is not a war; it is the coöperation of people with disparate views, needs, and interests. “The art of compromise,” distilled from Bismarck’s definition of politics as “the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next best,” is not the worst description.

She continues to compare Farrakhan with Vladimir Putin or perhaps the Stalinist Russian state. She implies that Farrakhan is minor league compared to Putin or Stalin:

But is compromise possible with a bigot? Can someone who won’t denounce a bigot be acceptable as the “next best”? Could one say that Mallory is just one of several leaders of an organization whose agenda speaks for itself, or is this bigotry by proxy so virulent that nothing but a purge can save the March now? In other words, is Farrakhan’s bigotry the same sort of unmitigated evil as, say, the murderous Russian state?

Gessen fears the consequences of aligning the Women’s March with Farrakhan. Otherwise, at least he’s not as bad as Stalin. More importantly, she wants to promote the war against Donald Trump, the new Satan:

The Women’s March, meanwhile, represents the hopes of millions of Americans who were mobilized by the election of Donald Trump. A giant, influential organization finds itself in the emotional state of a tiny resistance cell, holding on desperately against a hostile world. This is a symptom of a deep disease of American political life, the descent into positional warfare in which politics—the art of compromise—is no longer conceivable.

Anyway, when you have a devil, you also must have an angel. Gessen demonstrates her extreme cluelessness by saying that after Barack Obama did his best to make politics about cooperation,  Trump has turned it into partisan warfare.

In the eight years before Trump, even as Congress willfully descended into dysfunction and election campaigns turned into slugging matches fought with soundbites, President Barack Obama stubbornly stuck to the idiom of politics as coöperation. The Trump Presidency has trampled that political vestige. Now, when the Women’s March fights a Twitter war about Farrakhan, it seems that this is all there is.

Apparently, she does not understand that without the turmoil caused by Jeremiah Wright’s protégé we would not have had Donald Trump. Obama was polite and decorous, but refused to work with Republicans. He refused to cooperate with Republicans. His signature legislative triumphs, his stimulus bill and Obamacare, received zero Republican votes.

Politics cannot be about cooperation unless it stands on a foundation of unquestioned patriotism. When Obama talked down America, when he apologized for America, when he sided with America’s enemies and stood against America’s friends… he undermined national pride and love of country. He did it subtly, so that only conservatives noticed.

In hooking itself to the Obama agenda, the Democratic Party opened the door for a presidential candidate who sold out national pride. Most of his supporters did not like Trump’s demeanor, but they did love their country.