MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-06-08 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] BLM - but not Jewish ones - Caroline Glick
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(June 7, 2020 / JNS) Scattered among the thousands of cellphone videos
depicting looting and destruction in the streets of Americas greatest
cities are clips of a different sort. In these short videos, we see
throngs of white people on their knees, bowing before black people and
asking for forgiveness for their white privilege and the structural
racism in the deplorable, irredeemable United States of America.
Earlier this week, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee former
Vice President Joe Biden symbolically embraced these genuflecting
denunciations of white privilege as the official position of the
Democratic Party. Biden had himself photographed on bended knee with
a group of African Americans standing behind him during a visit to a
church in Wilmington, Delaware.
These videos point to a socio-political phenomenon that sparked the
riots throughout the country following George Floyds brutal death at
the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. They also make clear the
reason that the liberal media in the United States continues to back
the protests despite the fact that from the outset they have involved
wide-scale violence, destruction and looting.
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Contrary to the narrative being pushed by the media and Americas
elites, the riots are not a consequence of increased police brutality
towards African Americans. As Heather McDonald documented this week
in The Wall Street Journal, over the past several years, police
violence against black people has decreased significantly.
The violence we are seeing is a result of the steep radicalization of
progressive white Americans. Biden gave voice to this radicalization
last summer when, during a campaign appearance in Iowa he said, We
choose truth over facts.
Last year, political scientist Zach Goldberg published an article in
Tablet online magazine where he presented statistical data
demonstrating the depth and breadth of the radicalization of white
progressives over the past 10 years. Goldberg revealed that between
2010-2019, white progressives became the only demographic group in
U.S. history to prioritize the interests of other groups over its own
interests. White progressives prioritize the advancement of the
interests of minorities and immigrants over their own and over those
of American society as a whole. Moreover, as Goldberg showed, white
progressive positions on race and immigration are more extreme than
the positions black, Latino and Asian progressives hold on these
issues.
Goldberg argues that the massive increase in internet usage by white
progressives over the past decade is responsible for the
radicalization. Online platforms have created an information bubble
that has created a warped presentation of reality to those inside the
bubble. In this warped reality, race relations are far worse than
they are in reality. Hence, those who inhabit this bubble prefer
truth as presented in the bubble to facts.
Goldberg is undoubtedly correct that the more time people spend
inside their internet bubble the more removed they become from
objective reality. But the internet isnt the only source of the
radicalization. The Obama presidency was also a factor.
When Barack Obama won the presidential race in 2008, many Americans
believed his victory was proof the United States had overcome its
racist past. Obama however, did not support this view. Throughout his
tenure in office, Obama used the power of his position to resonate
and legitimize positions on race that until then had been relegated
to the leftist margins of American politics.
Obama cultivated the view that far from being a post-racial society,
America is inherently racist and that American racism is
structuralthat is, it was baked in and impossible to overcome. In so
doing, Obama gave credence to the false claim at the heart of the
riots: that black Americans are under continuous, existential threat
from the state as a whole and from law enforcement bodies first and
foremost. Calls by Hollywood celebrities and Obama administration
alumni to defund the police take this view to its logical endpoint.
A third cause of the radicalization of white progressives is the
higher education system. The more radicalized campuses are, the more
radicalized graduates become.
The radicalization of white progressive politics has been given its
most dramatic expression in the refusal of progressive mayors and
governors to act forthrightly to end the violence in their streets.
Instead, we had the likes of New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio (whose
daughter was arrested for participating in the mayhem) stand with
those burning his city.
In a letter to police sergeants in the New York Police Department, Ed
Mullen, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, gave
expression to the distress of New York police officers. I know we are
losing our city, Mullen wrote.
We have no leadership, no direction, and no plan. I know that you are
being held back and used as pawns, he continued.
He then asked the sergeants to hold the line.
Remember, he added, you work for a higher authority.
For American Jews, the violent riots constitute a challenge on
several levels. First, there is the challenge of squaring their
political identity with their Jewish identity. As the 2014 Pew survey
of American Jews showed, around half of American Jews identify as
progressives. As progressives, many American Jews share the views of
their non-Jewish progressive counterparts regarding the need to
prioritize the interests of minority communities over their own
interests.
But the Jews progressive desire to work on behalf of those
demonstrating for African Americans places their political identity
on a collision course with their Jewish identity. Black Lives Matter,
the radical group leading the demonstrations, is an anti-Semitic
organization. BLM was formed in 2014 as a merger of activists from
the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam, the anti-Semitic Black Panthers and
Dream Catchers. In 2016, BLM published a platform that has since been
removed from its website. The platform accused Israel of committing
genocide and referred to the Jewish state as an apartheid state.
The platform accused Israel and its supporters of pushing the United
States into wars in the Middle East. The platform also officially
joined BLM with the anti-Semitic BDS campaign to boycott, divest and
sanction Israel. BDS campaign leader Omar Barghouti acknowledged this
week that the goal of the BDS campaign is to destroy Israel. BDS
campaigns on U.S. campuses are characterized by bigotry and
discrimination directed against Jewish students.
BLMs platforms publication was greeted with wall-to-wall
condemnations by Jewish organizations from across the political
spectrum. But today, Jewish progressive are hard-pressed to turn
their backs on the group, despite its anti-Semitism. As white
progressives, they believe they must fight Americas structural racism
even at the cost of empowering social forces that reject their civil
rights as Jews. As Jews, they feel that their rights should be
protected. One progressive Jew tried to square the circle writing in
the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Today Jews need to support Black
Lives Matter; tomorrow we can talk about Israel.
As white progressives radicalized over the past decade, radical
Jewish progressives built a formidable Jewish organizational
framework whose mission is to advance the progressive revolution.
They have worked to recast Judaism itself as the apotheosis of
progressive revolutionary ideals. under the banner of tikkun olam.
Last week Tablet published a 20,000-word essay titled Bend the Jews,
on Bend the Arc, the flagship organization spawned by those efforts.
Bend the Arc first rose to the attention of the general public in
2018 in the wake of the massacre of worshippers at the Tree of Life
Synagogue in Pittsburgh. The organization quickly put out a statement
blaming President Donald Trump for the massacre. When Trump came to
the congregations to pay his respects, Bend the Arc organized
demonstrations against him.
Bend the Arc may not have members, but it has an annual budget of
tens of millions of dollars. $28 million of its budget comes from
three non-Jewish foundations that have no other foothold in Jewish
organizational life. On the other hand, one of the funders, the
Rockefeller Foundation, is well known for its generous support for
radical anti-Israel and BDS groups.
To achieve its goal of reshaping the worldviews of American Jews,
among other things, Bend the Arc trains Conservative, Reform and
Reconstructionist rabbinical students. It also pays the salaries of
associate rabbis in various communities. With many synagogues long
steeped in financial crisis due to dwindling membership, Bend the
Arcs ability to pay rabbis makes its involvement with synagogue
hiring an attractive option for many communities. This is doubly true
for synagogues whose members are progressive.
As progressive politics paralyze Jews from acting against
anti-Semites in their political camp, levels of anti-Semitic
sentiment among white progressives are rising. As Goldberg reported,
as white progressives became radicalized on issues related to
minorities and immigration, they also turned against Israel. Today
white progressives are hostile to Israel. And Goldberg argued that
while they express support for Jews, their sympathy toward and
concern for Jews has become more conditional.
What is it conditioned on? On Jews not being opposed by blacks or
other minorities that are considered by white progressives to be less
privileged than Jews are.
On the burning streets of America today, leftist Jew-hatred is on
clear display. Although New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio has prevented
New York police from taking firm action against looters and
arsonists, he did instruct them to use all necessary force to prevent
ultra-Orthodox Jewish children from going to school. Earlier this
week, police in Brooklyn chased a group of Hassidic children and
their mothers off a playground in Williamsburg.
Even worse, synagogues have been vandalized in New York and Los
Angeles. According to Yeshiva World News, 75 percent of Jewish-owned
stores in an Orthodox enclave of Beverly Hills were looted last
weekend. Graffiti in Los Angeles made clear that the businesses and
neighborhoods were targeted deliberately because they are Jewish.
Between BLMs establishment in 2014 and the publication of its
platform in 2016, anti-Israel activists went to great lengths to
create an utterly false conceptual linkage between the Palestinians
and African Americans. Today, anti-Israel activists in the United
States have stepped up their efforts to capitalize on the riots.
Anti-Israel activists in Bethlehem painted a picture of George Floyd
wearing a khaffiyeh and draped in a Palestinian flag on the
separation barrier. Photos of the picture are being heavily promoted
on social media.
Democrats believe the riots will wreck President Trumps reelection
hopes. Polls this week indicate that at least in the short term, the
unrest is hurting Trumps chances of being reelected. Then again, its
possible the chaos in the streets will strengthen public support for
President Trump, who voters may view as the last bulwark separating
them from national destruction.
Whether Trump wins or loses in November, the radicalization of white
progressives at the heart of the mayhem represents the greatest short
and long-term threat to social cohesion in America. It also
represents the greatest threat to the communal future of American
Jewry, to relations between the American Jewish community and the
rest of the Jewish world, and to US-Israel relations.
Caroline Glick is an award-winning columnist and author of The
Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.
This article first appeared in Israel Hayom.
Republish this article in your newspaper or website
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TOPICS: GEORGE FLOYD AMERICAN JEWRY RACISM RIOTS
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