Old joke: Walking down a street, a rabbi is accosted by an anti-Semite who tells him “The Jews are to blame for all of our problems.” The rabbi replies, “You’re absolutely right. It’s all the fault of the Jews – and the redheads.” Puzzled, the anti-Semite asks, “Why the redheads”? The rabbi responds, “Why the Jews”?
But for the left, anti-Semitism makes perfect sense – almost as much sense as socialized medicine. Except for Islam (with which it’s increasingly allied), the left has a near-monopoly on organized anti-Semitism.
Last month, that geriatric Jew-hater Jimmy Carter was in Gaza condemning the “devastation” wrought by Israel’s military incursion to stop Hamas rocket attacks. “The citizens of Gaza are treated more like animals than people,” the man who put the ayatollahs in charge of Iran intoned.
At the American International School in Gaza, damaged by Israeli bombs, Carter told citizens of Hamas-istan, “I have to hold back the tears when I see the deliberate destruction that has been wrecked against your people.” That Hamas deliberately located a missile battery near the school is irrelevant to our pathetic ex-president.
The author of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid – who’s become the most prominent Western apologist for the Hitlerites of Hamas (“first of all, Hamas has to be accepted by the international community") – Carter has never shed a tear for the Israelis killed by Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza or those murdered or wounded by Palestinian suicide bombers over the past decade.
Next stop on Jimmy’s trail of tears – the S.S. cemetery in Bitburg, where he’ll weep for the devastation wrecked against the German people, who were treated like animals by the Allies in World War II.
For Carter, the political is also personal. In a 2006 story in the Jewish Forward, Carter was quoted telling senior aides prior to the 1980 election “If I get back in, I’m going to (expletive deleted) the Jews.”
James von Brunn, another octogenarian anti-Semite, is charged with the murder of a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum on June 10.
The left was quick to blame everyone from Rush Limbaugh to FOX News for the crime. But a perusal of the alleged shooter’s website reveals that he not only hates Jews, but also Christianity (which he considers a “Jewish hoax”) and capitalism. Von Brunn wrote, “Socialism represents the future of the West.”
Von Brunn sounds a lot like Obama’s former pastor and spiritual mentor – the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In a note he was carrying at the time of his arrest, von Brunn wrote that “Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do.”
At about the same time, Wright complained to a reporter that “them Jews” had denied him access to his disciple.
“Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me …. He’s got to do what politicians do. And the Jewish vote, the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) vote that’s controlling him…that’s talking this craziness on Israel because they’re Zionists, they will not let him talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is. Ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza (I thought it was apartheid. Maybe it’s both.) – the ethnic cleansing of the Zionists is a sin and a crime against humanity.” The Zionists are in good company. As Rev. Michael Pfleger (another Obama bud) put it in a sermon at Wright’s church, “America is the great sin against God.” “God damn America!” the Rev. Jeremiah responds.
Wright later apologized for his “them Jews” comment, claiming he meant to say “the Zionists” not “the Jews.” Usually, anti-Semites say “Zionists” when they mean “Jews.” and not the reverse.
Obama does a full-waist bow to the King of Saudi Arabia, denies the Jewish people’s historic ties to the land of Israel, equates Palestinian “suffering” to the Holocaust, believes it’s his mission to fight “Islamophobia” and has a Middle East-team that could have been assembled by Carter. Sure, Obama is controlled by the Jews – the way he’s controlled by the National Rifle Association.
Wright isn’t the only member of the Democrats’ blame-the-Jews club. A May poll by two Stanford University professors showed a third of Democratic voters buying into one of the oldest anti-Semitic myths – world domination by Jewish bankers
The survey asked respondents if “the Jews” were responsible for the current financial crisis.
Of self-identified Democrats, 32 percent blame Jews “a moderate amount” to “a great deal” for our economic woes, versus 18.4 percent of Republicans. In other words, almost twice as many Democrats as Republicans believe sinister Jews are responsible for the collapse of the financial house of cards constructed by Congressional Democrats on a foundation of sub-prime mortgages.
Ah, the Democrats, so tolerant, so minority friendly – except for Jews.
Pat Oliphant agrees with Wright that “them Jews” are engaged in a genocidal campaign against hapless Palestinians.
Called the most influential editorial cartoonist in the world by the New York Times, in March, Oliphant produced a masterpiece worthy of Der Sturmer, depicting a sword-wielding giant goose-stepping as he wheels a fanged Star of David toward tiny, huddled figures of a woman and child labeled Gaza.
The Magen Dovid is the international symbol of Jewry. (The Nazis forced Jews in occupied Europe to wear it on arm bands.) Oliphant’s message was unmistakable: “Them Jews” (the same who are to some degree responsible for the financial crisis, according to almost a third of the Democratic Party) are engaged in apartheid, ethnic-cleansing and genocide in Gaza. When he contemplates the cruelty of it all, Jimmy Carter has to fight to hold back the tears.
Oliphant is a party-line leftist who loathes both America and Christianity. In a 1993 cartoon, he had a frightened elephant labeled GOP being dragged by rodents into a building with an electric Cross that read “Religious Right.”
Oliphant chose interesting imagery for conservative Christians. Nazi propaganda films often juxtaposed scenes of Jews at prayer with rats swarming out of a sewer. If the left doesn’t keep reminding us of how tolerant it is, we’re apt to forget.
On January 30, armed thugs invaded a Caracas synagogue, occupied the building for three hours, desecrated the Torah scrolls and scrawled graffiti like, “We don’t want Jews here,” and “Jews get out.”
Before the rise of Hugo Chavez, anti-Semitism was unknown in Venezuela, a nation with a Jewish population of 15,000. Now, it’s almost a daily occurrence. Abraham Levy Ben Shimol, president of Venezuela's Jewish community, says: “You probably hear of many anti-Semitic incidents, but where we live, the anti-Semitism is sanctioned: it comes from the president (Chavez), through the government and into the media.”
In his 2005 Christmas Eve speech, Chavez charged: “The world has wealth for all, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ…have taken over all the wealth of the world.” (Emphasis added.)
When a state prosecutor and Chavez ally was killed in a car-bombing in 2004, the president sent Venezuelan security forces to raid a private Jewish school in Caracas. Agents with sub-machineguns terrorized students, while a weapons search was conducted. You can’t be too careful when dealing with adolescent Christ-killers.
Chavez (who calls himself a lifelong Maoist) is enabled by prominent Democrats. A 2006 commentary by Ed Laskey in The American Thinker (“Democrats and the Anti-Semitism of Hugo Chavez”) notes the Congressional fan club of the Latin Goebbels includes John Conyers, Jr. (D. MI), William Delahunt and Ed Markey (both D-MA).
The People’s Republic of Bay State is a bastion of Hugo-ism. Former Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III (whose granddad, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., thought Hitler was misunderstood), current head of the Citizens Energy Corporation, gets cheap oil from Chavez.
This allows Kennedy to play Lord Bountiful to low-income households and build political capital while paying himself a six-figure salary. In return, Kennedy does PR for the Caracas regime. His cheap-oil commercials all note that the heating oil comes from “our friends in Venezuela” – i.e. Chavez.
On January 8, at an anti-Israel demonstration in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, organized by the leftist group ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), a lady in a hijab shouted at Jewish counter-demonstrators “Go back to the oven” (in reference to the Holocaust), and “You need a big oven, that’s what you need.”
Instead of condemning hijab-lady, Emmanuel Lopez, ANSWER’s Florida coordinator, assured us that the “vast majority of demonstrators,” do not want to cremate Jews. In an effort to be even-handed, Lopez went on to call the Jews who were told to “go back to the oven,” barbaric, racist, Zionist terrorists.” (Lopez: “Zionism in general is a barbaric racist movement that really is the cause of the situation in the entire Middle East.”)
The anti-war movement tolerates anti-Semitism, when it isn’t openly embracing it.
A Hamas flag flew from the speakers’ podium at ANSWER’s 2002 National March for Palestine, Against War and Racism. Either ANSWER is so clueless that it doesn’t know Hamas is virulently anti-Semitic or it doesn’t care. (A character on a Hamas kids show, broadcast on Al-Aqsa TV, urges children to “Wipe out the Jews.”)
Even the Jewish left acknowledges this reality. In 2007, the San Francisco ADL held a conference (Finding Our Voice), described by the Jewish Telegraph Agency as “aimed at empowering Jewish progressives to respond to anti-Semitism of the left” – a project destined to be as successful as Ayatollahs for Fair Elections.
Here are seven reasons for leftist anti-Semitism:
- Jew-hatred has deep historic roots in the movement. Karl Marx, who came from a Jewish family that converted to Christianity, was a raving anti-Semite. “What is the Jew’s foundation in our world? Material necessity, private advantage,” Marx wrote. Also: “What is the object of the Jew’s worship? Usury. What is his worldly god? Money.” Marx’s hatred of Jews went beyond the class struggle. He described Polish Jews as “the smarmiest of races,” called his opponent, Ferdinand Lassalle, a “Jewish Nig---” and disclosed that the Ramsgate section of London was “full of Jews and fleas.”
- The left is anti-capitalism – Accurate or not, there’s a longstanding identification of Jews with capitalism – going back at least to the Rothschilds. This is bolstered by Jewish success in business and the professions. Judaism and later Christianity, validated private property honestly acquired and material progress. Islam doesn’t share this perspective, which is why wealth in the Muslim world is acquired (from oil), not earned. This also explains leftist compatibility with Islam.
- The left is obsessed with equality – The left finds the idea of a “chosen people” (in reality, chosen to advance certain values) wholly repugnant. In Israel, the Jews succeeded where others of the region have failed since ancient times. For the left, this can’t be due to unique talents or God’s plan, but exploitation – another charge against the Jews from the Romans to the Bolsheviks to the Nazis. On the same basis, the left has decided that American preeminence in the post-war world must be due not to our talents, entrepreneurship or democracy, but to exploitation.
- The left loves conspiracy theories – Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, the Kennedy assassination nuts, energy prices set by oil companies, foreign policy run behind the scenes by industrialists – the left insists that dark and sinister forces manipulate world events, making them susceptible to the longest-running conspiracy theory of all: the International Jewish Conspiracy, which blames “the Jews,” for wars, depressions, economic downturns and the common cold. The distance isn’t that great between multinational corporations running the world and “international Jewry” dominating world events.
- The left equates Jews with Israel – With all of the tyranny in the world – especially in the neighborhood Israel inhabits – the left has made the region’s one democracy (the only nation to give away territory acquired in wars forced on it), the unique focus of its ire. In 2006-2007, the neo-Marxists who run the UN General Assembly couldn’t find time to comment on Darfur, but condemned Israel on 22 separate occasions. There was a time when the left insisted you could be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. Increasingly, neo-Marxists are forced to conclude that because “them Jews” support Israel (along with most Americans and evangelical Christians) there must be something inherently wrong with members of the tribe. Thus anti-Israel morphs easily to anti-Jew.
- Solidarity with the Muslim world – It seems counter-intuitive, but the self-avowed secularists of the left embrace Islamacist theocrats, who find the former’s social positions appalling. Muslims fit neatly into the left’s division of humanity into exploited and exploiters, imperialists and subjugated peoples. Israel is seen as an extension of European imperialism, the continuation of centuries of Western domination. In solidarity with their allies in the Moslem world, the left is at the very least willing to tolerate the anti-Semitism of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority, Syria and Iran (all viewed as revolutionary movements or regimes), but increasingly prone to indulge in the age-old evil itself.
- The left is at war with God – From its inception during the French Revolution, the left has seen religion as the primary impediment to the realization of its utopian dreams. Christianity is indicted as the principal support for capitalism, the “patriarchal family,” misogyny and homophobia. Without Judaism, there would be no Christianity – and, by extension, no America, a reality which hasn’t escaped leftist totalitarians, from Marx and Lenin to Hitler and Hugo Chavez. Der Fuhrer (who also blamed the Jews for “inventing” Christianity) believed that if he killed enough Jews, he would ultimately kill the God of Israel.
This article originally appeared on GrassTopsUSA.com and is reproduced here with the author's permission.