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I believe this article should be re-posted in view of Trump's decision regarding the Kurds. In other words, would you still support the bottom line of this op ed, assuming you favored it in the first place? (See 1 below.)
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No "quid pro quo?" You decide. (See 2 below.)
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A re-posting is in order. (See 3 below.)
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My wife laughs every time I tell her the law grinds slow but fine.
She believes nothing will ever happen when it comes to getting resolution for those who allegedly committed crimes etc.
Perhaps she will prove to be correct and if so then you can kiss this republic good
When the rule of law no longer means anything we are finished as a lawful and law abiding society. We will eventually be overcome by corruption and the decline in the nation's morals will set in and then , if that isn't bad enough, matters will worsen and believe me it can happen quickly.
In that respect Trump's 100% right. (See 4 below.)
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A trend portend? (See 5 below.)
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I have begin to read:O'Reilly's "The United States of Trump."
Just started and an easy, chatty read.
Trump grew up in a strict home, his father was busy, Trump needed discipline and thus, New York Military Academy became the solution.Trump was athletic, highly competitive and gained respect for his military teachers, their physical strength , no nonsense attitude and patriotism. He learned how to work the system and graduated as a disciplined Cadet Captain.
Trump adored his parents and was particularly close to his father, going to work for him as a bottom apprentice during his high school summers. O'Reilly has known Trump for over thirty years and his own family's history paralleled Trump's in many ways
To understand Trump you must understand his father, Fred. Fred was a residential low cost, on time builder. He was not a segregationist but a capitalist during a period when New York was a, residentially speaking, segregated city. At the dinner table race and politics were never discussed. However, Fred was an inveterate CBS/Cronkite listener and Trump followed in his father's foot steps in many ways . The family attended church but were not highly /ritualistically religious (Protestant.)
Trump attended Wharton, The Univ. of Penn, business school and upon graduation favored Manhattan over Fred's proclivity for New York Burroughs. Trump, too, became a by the slide rule/ tape measure, tight fisted builder.
Trump, like many of his contemporaries, grew up during the Viet Nam War period . He thought the war was not rational nor was a thought out end game evident. He, therefore, sought to avoid going and/or enlisting. Many accuse him of being a draft "avoider" and he is sensitive about the subject but O'Reilly considers him a genuine patriot and lover of this country but an impatient pragmatist. (See 6 below.)
Trump does not like long conversational responses He has a short attention span and is easily distracted. He is driven by his sense of pragmatism in much of his decision making and has little tolerance for mistaken ways so much of what he sees and has experienced that has occurred. (Think his recent Kurd decision which I have mixed feelings about - see below.)
This is as far as I have read but I am amazed at how my own life has paralleled Trump's in many ways.
My father was a brilliant lawyer, impatient, never really spent time with me and sent me to Georgia Military Academy to escape both the segregation years in Birmingham (which he fought and has been honored) and so I would not be a Portnoy. Unlike Trump,who had brothers and a sister, I was an only child. I was not as athletic as Trump but did get a letter in golf and was a very active in body building. In my own way, I too am competitive and also attended Wharton and after service (two branches) graduated from law school but never practiced. I always had a Walter Mitty Dream of becoming a partner in a Wall Street Firm, which I did after 7 years when my goal was ten, and found being a general partner of a wonderful ( Atlanta based NY Stock Exchange and largest in the South at that time,) firm was a key to the men's room, in my case.
I never became rich like Trump but I have lived an interesting life and seen and done more than I ever dreamed. I took up tennis late in life and wished I would have done so earlier.
I have a fabulous wife (second marriage) equally fabulous kids (5) and they have blessed us with fine, four son's in law and one daughter in law and offspring ( 8 grandchildren, one great grandchild and another on the way.)
I grew up in a modest middle class family and though my father was a passionate Zionist and also helped Israel get established ( and has been duly honored for that,) we were never ritualistically speaking, Jewish. I was bar mitvah'ed, can read Hebrew haltingly but know little about my religion's rules, laws etc.
I believe I am an impatient pragmatist,which has led me to being a conservative,and from there a cynic. I do not show my softer feelings, for which my wife is highly critical and that has impacted my relationship with my kids. I consider myself charitable, a respectful citizen and intolerant of the stupidity which I believe is driving the political, social and economic direction of this nation.
I am aware I have been privileged and believe education is the basic solution (with some personal luck) to many of our vast social problems and it infuriates me to witness the hypocrisy of the "do gooders" who talk the talk and care not a fig to walk the walk. and would rather tear down what we have with their inane ideas.
As those who read these memos know ,I am more tolerant of Trump's abrasive personality and approve of most of his policies (until the Kurd situation which I have mixed feelings about and have expressed them in previous memos) and thought Obama was a total fraud and we are now paying dearly for his corrupt policies.
I am not a racist and believe MLK, who I greatly admired, must be turning over in his grave as he should be.
I recently watched a NETFLIX movie about ALI as told by ten of his opponents and it re-enforced my view of what a great misunderstood person he was. I grew up during the Joe Lewis' years and deplored how he was abused and taken advantage of and,again, paid the price of segregation and a poor education. That said, I do not believe I owe black citizens reparations because I never was a slave owner and America has spent trillions on penitence for the sins of slavery, segregation and such and in the dumbest, most self destructive ways. However, when distant government touches most anything they screw it up (when all else fails lower your standards.)
In summation, I believe I understand and am more tolerant of Trump and deplore what is being doe to him and our nation because the radical chaos crowd have been allowed to take over the Democrat Party in the name of rectifying "do-goodism."
Since mankind will never be perfect,societies will never be perfect but America, because of our Constitution and through Capitalism, has done more good for the world than any nation on the face of earth. Consequently, it disgusts me to observe what is being perpetuated in the name of political righteousness and therefore, I believe Trump, with all his warts and faults, believes the same and will be known, eventually when history is written, to be the real change maker who was willing to touch the third rail and fight for the right causes.
For those who hate him, wish him nothing but evil look in the mirror and try, if you can, comprehend what you are doing to the flag, the nation, your fellow citizens and the world. If you do you might either mend your ways or, at the very least, vomit.
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Dick
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1)The Greatness of Donald Trump
By DOV FISCHER, THE SPECTATOR
His demeanor makes some of us wince. His language makes many of us uncomfortable. Presidents in democracies reflect something about the people who elect them. In some cases, as with the aptly named House of Representatives, people sometimes even vote to be reflected by an assortment of lowlifes. Ilhan Omar reflects her district, as does Rashida Tlaib, as does [O-] Cortez. Hillary lost because even Democrats were revulsed by the thought that she reflects them.
Trump, too, reflects his electorate: we who put him there. In balancing all that he comprises, we focused in November 2016 on greatness. Eight years of Obama — incompetence, weakness, economic malaise, societal decay — left us focused on restoring greatness. Thus, even Christian pastors, devout Catholic theologians, and Orthodox rabbis vigorously support Donald Trump. The free world’s last great hope is America, and she was in peril.
What about his language, some of his dishonorable private deeds, flaws in his character?
Yes, excellence of personal character is desirable. A Mike Huckabee, a Mike Pence might offer an interesting successor model in 2024 after the Democrats manage to impeach Trump into an impeccable second full term. Yet we will look back on Trump’s presidency wistfully decades hence as we today look back on the Ronald Reagan years. The man, whatever his flaws, has proven to be a great president of historic dimensions.
Those who complain about Trump’s character invariably are the same “deplorables” who voted for the lying, cheating, false-faced Hillary. They had no problem with an ethical deviant who had committed felonious spoliation of evidence, lied about her emails (yoga and wedding dresses?), lied about Benghazi (an incoherent YouTube video with few views?), lied about her very name (named for a guy who became famous only after she was born?), lied about her trips abroad (landing amid gunfire in Bosnia, when in fact she was greeted by schoolgirls presenting her flowers), lying about and defaming the women whom her husband sexually assaulted, even lying and joking in a fake Southern drawl (back when her husband was Arkansas governor) about successfully defending a guy who raped a 12-year-old girl. They likewise had no compunction voting for her better half despite his raping Juanita Broaddrick, assaulting Kathleen Willey, exposing himself to Paula Corbin Jones, manipulating a gullible Monica Lewinsky — later explaining, “because I could.”
John Kennedy in fact was an unabashed serial cheater in the White House. Lyndon Johnson was an egomaniacal narcissist who expected staff to have meetings with him while he sat on a toilet. Franklin Roosevelt was a racist and the incredibly intense Woodrow Wilson was perhaps the worst of all racists ever elected to high office. The Left has no problem with their characters or whether or not they were “presidential” — because they were leftist, “progressive” Democrats.
Even now, as the “deplorables” select their candidate to lose to Trump in 2020, do they weigh character?
Robert O’Rourke (“Man, I was born for this”) is a Scottish-Irish child of White Privilege, a hit-and-run driver who was part of a computer-hacking crowd, who masquerades as Beto the Hispanic, sort of a skateboarding Zorro.
Elizabeth Warren lied baldly for years about her lineage just to take advantage of the “affirmative action” rules that got her a job at Harvard at the expense of an authentic minority candidate. Native Americans should sioux her and without reservations. And more Elizabeth Warren biographical lies emerge every day.
Joe Biden, even if he were not a despicable crook who leveraged his vice presidency to get his son and himself personally wealthy overnight, already had staked out a long and extinguished reputation for pl
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, who now finally is finished as aorta be, endorsed Communist Russia and its bread lines that forced millions to stand for hours for a loaf of bread, and he himself probably would be home-ridden or dead now if he had his socialized medicine.
Kamala Harris slept her way shamelessly into public life as the very public consort of Willie Brown, even as Brown’s wife Blanche publicly told the media, “Listen, she may have him at the moment, but come inauguration day and he’s up there on the platform being sworn in, I’ll be the b***h holding the Bible.”
So that’s how important character is to the “deplorables.”
What makes Trump a man of historic greatness is that he wakes up every morning and continues doing his job with strength in the face of the worst character assassination imaginable, led by the Corrupt Journalist Corps. He still booms the economy. He still dares and stares down China on tariffs and trade. He still shows North Korea that he will not be hoodwinked as Bill Clinton and Obama were by promises devoid of results.
He stares down the Iranian Ayatollahs and tightens the vise, despite their bombastic threats and tactical efforts to get the weak-kneed, yellow-livered, gutless and cowardly Europeans to beg Trump to lay off. He stares down those Europeans, insisting mercilessly that they cough up the money those cheap and lazy skinflints never before would pay to support NATO.
So, unlike Obama and Arafat, no Nobel Prize for him. On Trump’s watch, Vladimir Putin no longer extends Russian hegemony into other countries. On his watch, Abu Mazen (Arafat’s henchman, Mahmoud Abbas) finally got cut off for allocating 7 percent of his annual budget — as much as $300 million, coming from monies sent by America and Europe — to support families of terrorists and to make convicted terrorists among the highest-income earners in “Palestine” under their “Pay to Slay” program.
Trump faces 24/7/365 lies, slander, and libel, and he just keeps going. He continues advancing novel approaches to solving the southern border mess that generations of Republicans, including Reagan, failed no less than did Democrats to address. With a porous border, deadly opioids have swamped us for years, brutal criminal animals like MS-13 have slithered in, and the most despicable of villains have smuggled in women and children for sex slavery. Yet, until Trump, no one took tough steps to secure the border. Then, faced with Obama judges in states of the federal appellate Ninth Circuit who routinely strike down his every lawful initiative, he has taken to filling not only two Supreme Court vacancies but also dozens of open federal appellate seats and even more federal district court benches with judges committed to the rule of law and the primacy of the Constitution.
Trump has done all this in the face of the most unbearable personal onslaught. He has had to deal with House Democrats trying to catch him on Russian collusion, Ukrainian collusion, taxes from decades earlier when he was a private citizen in the fields of casino and hotel construction and development. His lawyer, Michael Cohen, turned out to be a criminal who secretly taped clients like him. Trump gave Omarosa a chance to rehabilitate her reputation, and she betrayed that trust. He demonstrated personal loyalty by trying to repay Jeff Sessions for having been the first senator to endorse his presidential candidacy by naming him attorney general, and that loyalty backfired.
The service, brilliance, and true grit of William Barr demonstrates what that job entails in this unfortunate era of personal destruction, and Sen. Sessions was ill-suited for that role. Trump allowed Paul Ryan to gain his misplaced trust on how and when to push for funding a southern border wall. He initially deferred to Republican insiders by appointing Reince Priebus his chief of staff and Sean Spicer his spokesperson until he gained the experience to make better choices.
His first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, seemed to him uniquely suited to deal with Putin, but Mike Pompeo’s tenure as Tillerson’s successor shows the difference between the early mistake of a newcomer to the game and the lessons Trump has learned on the job.
Most of all, Trump has survived and remained unbowed. Kathy the CNN comedienne thought it would be a laugh to hold a bloodied decapitated head depicted like the president’s. Madonna spoke publicly about blowing up the White House. A public Shakespeare Festival in Manhattan staged a suggestive assassination. Yet he goes on, even stronger.
The Democrats try to tie up his entire administration with one bogus investigation after another, subpoenaing family, friends, and government officials trying to get work done. And yet he goes on.
He recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moves the American embassy there from Tel Aviv, recognizes Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, throws the PLO out of Washington, pulls the U.S. out of the phony UN “Human Rights Council,” pulls the U.S. out of the disastrous Iran Deal, pulls the U.S. out of the self-destructive “Paris Climate Accords,” stops the nonsensical Trans-Pacific Partnership, brings jobs back to America, secures the nation’s aluminum and steel industries, reduces unemployment to its lowest in 50 years at 3.5 percent and likewise reduces Black and Hispanic unemployment to their all-time lows.
He opened new vistas in hydraulic fracturing in Alaska and expanded energy production in other ways that transmogrified America into so great a net exporter of energy that our economy is not impacted when half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production is closed down. He fights Democrat initiatives to extend abortion into the ninth month and even their policies to make newly born babies “comfortable” while mother and doctor decide whether or not to kill the newborn.
Nothing breaks him. Not libel and not slander. Not accusations by the likes of John Brennan, who voted for communist Gus Hall to be president, that this most patriotic of Americans is a traitor. Not endless state initiatives to keep him off ballots. Not attacks on his wife, his daughter, even the public mocking of his youngest boy. He wakes up every day and does his job with determination and gusto. At press conferences with world leaders, as the Corrupt Journalist Corps strike at him with embarrassing questions while his foreign visitors look on awkwardly, he stands his ground. He does not give an inch. He hits back twice as hard as they do.
Most of us never have had a job in which the personal attacks, the daily venom, create a pervasive and severely toxic atmosphere. But some of us have. Some people in those situations are driven to suicide. Others sustain breakdowns or get so flummoxed daily that they make severe mistakes or burn out. Others are driven to resign. But Donald Trump feeds off it and responds by campaigning vigorously and energetically for reelection.
The great irony is that because he is such a lifelong dealmaker, odds are that, if the Democrats had treated him with a modicum of civility instead of “Resistance,” he would have made “deals” with them that would have infuriated the ideological conservatives among us who were sick and tired of one Bush betrayal after another. He might have appointed his sister to the U.S. Supreme Court. He might have made a deal with Planned Parenthood. But they would not let him. They announced The Resistance from day one, thinking that a bunch of political degenerates like Pelosi, Schumer, [O-] Cortez, Tlaib, Nadler, Omar, Schiff, and Maxine Waters could break him.
They underestimated what history will declare: that Donald Trump actually was one of our greatest presidents, one who achieved more during his two terms than did most who preceded him, including Ronald Reagan.
Rabbi Dov Fischer, Esq., a high-stakes litigation attorney of more than twenty-five years and an adjunct professor of law of more than fifteen years, is rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California. His legal career has included serving as Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, clerking for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and then litigating at three of America’s most prominent law firms: JonesDay, Akin Gump, and Baker & Hostetler. In his rabbinical career, Rabbi Fischer has served several terms on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America, is Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, has been Vice President of Zionist Organization of America, and has served on regional boards of the American Jewish Committee, B’nai Brith Hillel, and several others. His writings on contemporary political issues have appeared over the years in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Jerusalem Post, National Review, American Greatness, The Weekly Standard, and in Jewish media in American and in Israel. A winner of an American Jurisprudence Award in Professional Legal Ethics, Rabbi Fischer also is the author of two books, including General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine, which covered the Israeli General’s 1980s landmark libel suit.
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Did Adam Schiff Just Admit There Was No Quid Pro Quo?
By Matt Margolis
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., talks to reporters about the release by the White House of a transcript of a call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Voldymyr Zelenskiy, in which Trump is said to have pushed for Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his family, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and the Democrats are now launching a formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. Rep. Schiff characterized Trump's words saying, "this is how a mafia boss talks." (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Appearing on CBS's Face The Nation Sunday morning, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff essentially conceded that there was no quid pro quo between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by saying "there doesn't need to be a quid pro quo."
"We have discovered in short order not only the contents of that call, but also the preparatory work that went into the call. The effort to condition something the Ukrainian president deeply sought, and that was a meeting with the president to establish that this new president of Ukraine had a powerful patron in the president of the United States that was of vital importance to Ukraine, was being conditioned on digging up dirt on the Bidens," Schiff told to Margaret Brennan.
"So, you see that as the quid quo pro, not just the military aid," she replied.
"Well, first of all, there doesn't need to be a quid pro quo," Schiff told her. "But it is clear already, I think, from the text messages that this meeting that the Ukrainian president sought was being conditioned on their willingness to intervene in the U.S. election to help the president."
For weeks now, we've been told that the transcript was evidence of a quid pro quo, and now Adam Schiff is saying "there doesn't need to be a quid pro quo." Does anyone see this a huge concession on Schiff's part?
So, I guess Schiff has flip-flopped on whether there was a quid pro quo after all, and in true Democrat fashion is moving the goalposts to justify his party's witchhunt. Everything that's been happening with this impeachment inquiry is because of that phone call, how can anyone justify that this impeachment inquiry proceed when Schiff has conceded that the phone call is exculpatory?
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Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama's Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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Jews, African Americans and the Democrat Party The trap of blind loyalty. Kenneth Levin
By KENNETH LEVIN
In democracies, minority groups will often embrace one political party and cling to that attachment irrespective of changing political circumstances. This seems especially true of minorities that have experienced discrimination, marginalization, and other forms of abuse.
In America, the groups that have been most closely attached to the Democrat Party for virtually the last century are African Americans and Jews. Even consideration in the abstract of the wisdom of being predictably committed to one party would suggest likely more negative than positive consequences – for example, being taken for granted by that party while given up on and not pursued by the other – and experience has borne that out.
This would seem to be most obvious with regard to the African American experience. Consider, for example, the Democrats’ decades-long lock on control of most of America’s big cities, many with African American majorities, and the record of public education in those cities.
Little weighs as heavily on impoverished children’s potential for extricating themselves from their difficult circumstances and shaping a better future for themselves than the quality of the education they receive in their elementary and secondary schools. But the African American populations in our large urban centers have consistently been very poorly served by their schools and lag significantly behind national averages in command of basic skills.
Those in charge of the relevant cities point to lesser per student spending on their schools due to lesser tax subsidies as compared to the subsidies provided in other jurisdictions. Another argument is that the difficult family circumstances these cities’ impoverished children often face undercut the children’s ability to make full use of the educational opportunities available to them in their public schools.
Both factors are indeed at play in shaping the school experience of inner city children from low income families. But the history of charter schools over the past almost three decades undercuts claims that these factors render better educational outcomes out of reach. Charter schools are public schools that operate independently under public charter with greater autonomy but with increased performance expectations. They are open to students on the basis simply of application or, if oversubscribed, on the basis of lottery. The general history of such schools has been mixed but overall positive, and, as the Harvard School of Education reported in the summer of 2017, “…low income students, especially black and Hispanic, tend to benefit from charter schools most…” And, in inner cities, such schools are serving children with basically the same social disadvantages as their peers and are doing so with per capita budgets no greater than those of the public schools.
Not only have major cities failed to improve their schools, but their political leaders – like New York mayor Bill De Blasio, who shouted out at a campaign rally in July that he “hates” charter schools – have often worked to undercut and obstruct charter school alternatives for their constituents. They have done so even as tens of thousands of African American families, desperate for a better future for their children, have sought admission to charter schools. The politicians have taken this course to serve the interests of their backers such as teachers’ unions and others opposed to charter schools. They have chosen political expediency over the welfare of their cities’ children.
And yet one would be hard-pressed to find African American voters in these cities shifting their support away from the Democrat politicians who control their cities and their schools. Their attachment to the party is so ingrained that their cities’ politicians know they will pay no price for ignoring African American children’s interests in favor of, for example, those of union contributors.
One can come up with potential logical explanations for how the commitment to the Democrat Party, by both African Americans and American Jews, first evolved. Why it is so steadfastly embraced even when circumstances would suggest the wisdom of a more flexible approach to party preferences, an approach responsive to political changes, is the more germane question. Part of the answer is that groups that have been subjected to biased, abusive, marginalizing treatment are inclined to categorical thinking about what will make their situation better. That is, they tend to think in absolute terms about one set of choices being right and the other wrong. This inclination is driven largely by the wish to believe that making such sharp distinctions and choosing the “right” alternative will assure escape from past abuses. That wish, and the frame of mind it engenders, work against a more nuanced response to political developments.
The potency of this dynamic among American Jews, and its role in the American Jewish embrace of the Democrat Party, have been elucidated by polls of American Jews regarding anti-Semitism in America. Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and co-author Earl Raab, writing in the 1990’s, noted that such polls showed the overwhelming majority of American Jews believing anti-Semitism to be more rife among American conservatives than liberals, even though actual surveys of American opinion regarding Jews have not supported this assumption. The false belief, largely reflecting a wish that reality could be so simply defined, figures in American Jews’ allegiance to the Democrats, their routinely voting for Democrat candidates in numbers exceeding seventy percent.
The cost to Jews for this blind allegiance was illustrated in the Democrat leadership’s response when anti-Semitic tropes were spewed by a newly elected Democrat congresswoman, Ilhan Omar. Rather than forthrightly condemn her for her anti-Semitic comments, the Party leadership, eager to appease a Progressive wing more than tolerant of anti-Jewish voices, sponsored a meaningless condemnation of all sorts of bigotry. Its refusal to offer a simple, straightforward rebuke of the congresswoman’s anti-Semitism reflected a bowing to the sensibilities of that Progressive wing over those of their Jewish loyalists and an expectation that the cost of not appeasing the former would be greater than the cost of betraying the latter. And they were no doubt right in their calculations.
A similar calculation was reflected in the Party’s response to Israel’s decision not to allow Omar and another newly elected congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, to enter the country. Senate minority leader Steny Hoyer, who had just returned from leading a delegation of other newly elected Democrats to Israel and assuring that nation of Democrat support, condemned Israel’s action as “outrageous.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi similarly condemned it. They suggested it was somehow an unprecedented move by a democratic ally. But the United States has repeatedly blocked figures from other democracies from entering the country, including an Israeli member of the Knesset. And, aside from anti-Semitic statements, Omar and Tlaib have endorsed the anti-Semitic BDS (boycott, divest and sanction) movement whose goal, as articulated by its founder and many of its leaders, is Israel’s annihilation. Tlaib has also advocated Israel’s destruction more directly. Is Israel really obliged to admit people who openly declare they want to see the nation destroyed?
Both Hoyer and Pelosi have been strong supporters of Israel and neither can be construed as in any way anti-Jewish. Both are well aware of the history of Israel and the falsehoods in Omar and Tlaib’s glosses on that history. That they would come to the defense of the congresswomen and not support Israel in its right to deny them entry reflected a political calculation. It reflected once again the conviction that it was politically more important to propitiate the anti-Israel circles in the so-called Progressive wing of the Party than to worry about the Jews; that confronting the former would have more negative consequences for the Party than disregarding the latter. And, again, they were no doubt right in this calculation. There has been and will be no counter-push from Jews making the point that the Party cannot automatically assume Jewish allegiance no matter what action it takes against Jewish interests. While such push back might not change the Party’s ultimate course, it would at least force some deeper reflection, some consideration of possible cost, before Jewish interests were ignored. But no such Jewish response will likely occur.
The two episodes above may seem of limited weight when compared to, say, the issue of schools in the nation’s major cities and the Party’s betrayal of African American children. But the episodes are reflective of a much broader problem.
The American institution most associated with anti-Semitism today is American academia. On the nation’s campuses, dominated by the Left, faculties have widely joined in the bigoted demonization of Israel and its American supporters, have backed the BDS movement and have penalized Jewish students and others who seek to defend Israel. College and university administrators, while typically resisting cooperation in boycotts, have also typically done little to counter campus anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bigotry. The actors in this institutional anti-Semitism are overwhelmingly Democrat supporters, and the Party, once more prioritizing propitiating supporters over challenging anti-Semitism in its midst, has been essentially silent on the bigotry of the campuses. And once more there has been very little American Jewish push back.
The ethos of the campuses, and the lack of Democrat response, is a threat to American Jews in other ways as well. Basic American principles, principles that have figured prominently in making the Jewish experience in America so much more benign overall than the Jewish experience elsewhere, have in recent years come under attack. That attack has been primarily from the Left, starting again largely on the campuses. What is more fundamental to American Jewish well-being than the First Amendment and freedom of speech, or than the principal embodied in Martin Luther King’s vision of a more fully realized adherence to judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin? Yet both are under incessant attack in the leftist-dominated academy, where a supposed “right” to protection from distressing ideas trumps freedom of speech and where group identity trumps individual identity. (Martin Luther King would likely be harassed and pushed off campuses today for his ideas just as pro-Israel speakers are.) And this illiberal ideology is spreading from our colleges and universities to other bastions of the Left. Yet the Democrat Party has responded virtually not at all to this challenge to basic freedoms and basic principles coming overwhelmingly from its supporters. And Jews have done essentially nothing to call the Party to account.
There is little evidence to suggest that the great majority of either African Americans or Jews is prepared to reassess its longstanding blind loyalty to the Democrat Party. The ongoing refusal to do so in the face of inimical Democrat policies will likely exact an ever-increasing price from both groups.
Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.”
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