Roger Simon Calls Out Liberal Jews

Roger Simon has a few words of warning for Jewish liberals. It’s time to wake up, he writes, time to be “woke” to the threat to Jews. After all, he opens his essay, Jews in Germany in the early decades of this century never took Hitler’s anti-Semitism seriously. They did not think that it targeted them... because they were so virtuous.

He writes:

Back in Berlin of the 1920s and well into the 30s, many, if not most, Jewish liberals of that time and place thought it could never happen to them.  They were good Germans after all, culturally advanced members of a sophisticated society much like today's Manhattan.

Now, you might be thinking, today’s liberal Jews have something that German Jews did not have. They have the state of Israel… whether to defend Jewish interests or to provide a homeland.

Fair enough, and yet, how many supposedly liberal Jews, like Peter Bainart and Michelle Goldberg are yearning for the day when Israel will surrender to terrorism, thus will take a definitive step down the road to dissolution? 

As has often been noted—perhaps not often enough—anti-Semitism today is coming from the radical left and from Islamic terrorists. One might say that the radical left enables Islamists… because, following the lead of Barack Obama, they have declared war against Islamophobia. When it comes to Islamist terrorism they cower in the corner, sucking on their thumbs.

Simon continues:

Now we are living in another world of rising anti-Semitism, which some, for their own convenience or perhaps a misbegotten nostalgia, like to ascribe equally or even disproportionally to the right, when it is clear the new anti-Semitism, from our college campuses to the streets of Paris, is coming largely from Islamic terrorists and their sympathizers augmented and multiplied by the left.  It is further enhanced by social and ethnic groups enraged--with the encouragement of the Democratic Party--by identity politics. In the world of intersectionality, someone must be the low man or woman on the totem pole of blame and evil.

Two Congresswomen have rendered anti-Semitism acceptable in liberal precincts. Of course, they support Hamas, as did Rev. Jeremiah Wright:

The proverbial canary in the coal mine is now infiltrating the US Congress in the person of two congresswomen (plus their substantial supporters) who were likely inculcated at an early age, as were too many Muslim children, with the belief that Jews only (pace Darwin) were the descendants of pigs and apes and should be wiped from the Earth.  If again you think this excessive, read their texts or, better yet, the Hamas charter which urges the killing of something called "Jewish trees" (NOTE: not Israeli trees).

Simon declares that, faced with a rising tide of anti-Semitism, liberal Jews are acting like sheep. Most Jews will understand the reference. Of course, they wholeheartedly supported Barack Obama. They voted him into office. If they did not understand that they were legitimizing anti-Semitism by handing the White House to Jeremiah Wright’s protégé, they weren’t thinking. If they did not care that Wright happily associated with Louis Farrakhan, they were blinding themselves to reality. Perhaps they thought that their superior virtue would shield them from the barbarians at the gates.

Simon says:

Meanwhile the word "woke" is being bandied about in our culture as the sine qua non for our youth.   But those espousing it, including many Jews, are anything but.  They are sheep.  Liberal Jews (okay, I'll leave off the scare quotes) are part of this sheep herd, motivated by the aforementioned group-think and fear of ostracization as much as by increasingly old fashioned conceptions of social justice dating back to the IWW….

The time has come for at least some of these Jewish liberals to break out of their mouldy mold. Even a few would make a big difference. No doubt this will be the subject on many minds at the coming annual meeting of that organization reviled by Ilhan Omar--AIPAC--later this month.  It will be interesting to see what transpires.  Maybe some people will finally become truly woke.