On Tuesday, appearing on national television with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Rhode Island Democratic Rep. David Cicilline ripped Republicans for their supposed support of Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and denied that the Democratic Party has an anti-Semitism problem.
“I see no evidence whatsoever in the Democratic caucus or in the Democratic Party of anti-Semitism at all,” he said. When questioned about the obvious earlier in the interview, he replied that Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar had apologized “almost immediately” and offered a generic disapproval of anti-Semitism of his own.
“We’re the party that is speaking out against hate and division and bigotry and racism, and anti-Semitism. We don’t get the same from our Republican colleagues, sadly. And Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the most recent and I think most despicable examples of that,” he said.
While deflecting from his party’s coddling of its own bigots, Cicilline hit Republicans for supposedly failing to condemn Greene’s weird comparison of mask guidelines to conditions in Nazi Germany, adding that they didn’t “immediately call upon her to apologize” because “she is welcome in their caucus.”
This is garbage, of course, particularly that last part. On behalf of Republicans in the lower chamber of Congress, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy issued a condemnation of Greene’s idiotic comments.
She has already been stripped of her committee assignments for past foolishness. Nobody of consequence in the party takes her seriously on policy. She is nothing more than a provocateur, shunned by party leadership and waiting to be primaried by a Republican who can be taken seriously.
It’s a different story in the Democratic Party, not that they realize it.
As Cicilline concluded: “The strongest voices that have condemned acts of anti-Semitism and this rise in anti-Semitic violence have been members of the Democratic caucus.”
That would be news to people living in reality, where the Democratic Party routinely makes room for the most anti-Semitic people in politics — chief among them the habitually offending Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
Dating back to 2012, Omar has tweeted that “Israel has hypnotized the world” and suggested that Republican support for Jews was “all about the Benjamins,” according to Vox. She also pushed dual-loyalty slander against Jews in the United States, intimating that their support for Israel was questionable “allegiance to a foreign country.”
In 2019, Tlaib suggested that the Palestinians had lost their land, lives, dignity, and existence in order to “create a safe haven for Jews,” CNN reported at the time. In 2019, a reporter noticed a map in her office with Israel labeled “Palestine.” She openly supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which, according to BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti, is aimed at the destruction of the state of Israel.
Between the two of them, there has been enough anti-Semitic commentary to fill an edition of “Der Stürmer.”
But when the party is forced to condemn the anti-Semitism within its ranks, the public gets broad condemnations of hatred and bigotry in all forms.
The anti-Semites aren’t stripped of their committee assignments. (Omar actually sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.) Party leadership doesn’t support their primary challengers. They maintain their influence over party policy discussions.
As if that weren’t enough, the party platform on U.S.-Israeli relations is being shifted to the farther left by its fresh, young thought leaders who just so happen to dabble in anti-Semitic libel on occasion.
This would be the reason that Democrats — and their establishment media allies — spent the past two weeks doing yeomen’s work on behalf of Palestinian terrorist organizations in the fight against Israel.
It is, in fact, a telltale sign of anti-Semitism when you pretend there is a moral equivalence between terrorists who shoot rockets at civilians from school buildings and an Israeli military targeting terrorist outposts in defense of its citizens.
But there is a reason for all this.
Leftists have installed a particular aspect of human relations as the foundation for their politics. This would be intergroup conflict, or tribalism.
Fundamentally, this can be understood as two social groups in conflict with each other. One is more powerful than the other. From an ideological standpoint, the more powerful group must be oppressing the less powerful group.
Therefore, in moral terms, the more powerful group is evil and the less powerful group is good.
Marxism is this intergroup conflict, only described in economic terms. Critical race theory is this same dynamic as described in racial semantics.
The leftist position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is merely another iteration of their penchant for tribalism, which happens to be fundamentally anti-Western. This is why anti-Semitism in the Republican Party — or even ridiculous comments comparing mask guidelines to Nazi Germany — is rooted out in haste.
In the proper Western tradition, Republicans make their home at the individual level of analysis. They don’t see their members in terms of the collective cause they’re supporting but as individuals who behave morally or immorally — and they focus on values, not group power dynamics.
That is why Greene was condemned by Republican leadership and why she will likely suffer a serious primary challenge, which may see her go the way of Steve King and Roy Moore.
Ultimately, here’s the simple truth of the matter: Not all Democrats are anti-Semites, but all the cherished anti-Semites in American politics are Democrats.
So long as they view the world in terms of intergroup conflict and individuals as members of collectives, Democrats will oppose the existence of Israel at worst and, at best, will pressure it to make existentially threatening concessions to terrorists.
As long as this is the case, there will continue to be plenty of anti-Semitism among Democrats.
