Op-Ed: Will the Left Ever Face its Contribution to anti-Semitic Hate Crimes?

By Esther Malkah Corove

     The Left is still blaming former President Donald Trump for “stirring up hate and anti-Semitism.”

     Will the Democrat Party ever face its own contribution to anti-Semitic hate crimes?

     After two weeks in which pro-Palestinian supporters attacked several Jews in anti-Semitic hate crimes in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio visited Boro Park, dramatically increased the police presence in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, and invested $3 million in a hate crime coalition to stand in solidarity against hate.

     However, when it comes to pointing the finger at the source of the seemingly endless rage that is directed at Jews, Mayor de Blasio and others on the Left continue to blame Trump, despite his near silence since Jan. 20, when Joe Biden was inaugurated as president and Trump left for Mar-a-Lago.

     Despite numerous social media sites’ banning and suspending Trump, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which tracks incidents of anti-Jewish violence and bias, reported a 75% increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the US during 11 the days in which Hamas launched 4,000 rockets on Israeli civilians.

     Although the ADL counted 127 anti-Semitic incidents in the two weeks before Hamas started to bomb Israel, that number jumped to 222 in the two weeks in which Israel was defending itself from ceaseless bombing and pogroms, such as in Lod.

     In the week that started on May 7, as the outbreak of violence began, the ADL analyzed Twitter to find more than 17,000 tweets that used variations of the phrase, “Hitler was right.” 

    Oren Segal, the vice-president of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, recently noted that worldwide surges on attacks on Jews tend to occur throughout Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, as they did as recently as the summer of 2014, before Donald Trump came into office.

     On Thursday, before introducing his hate crime coalition, the Mayor de Blasio said, “We've had hate crimes, unfortunately, for a long time in this city, in this country.

     “But what we've seen in the last few years is different. We saw white supremacy and nationalism aided and abetted directly from the White House during the presidency of Donald Trump.

     “We saw forces of hate unleashed. Let's not kid ourselves, it doesn't matter what your political views are, something changed, and it became permissible for too many people to express hatred and division openly.”

    While Trump actually expressed support for Israel during this latest uptick in violence, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (D-NY) Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn) increased the volume of their misuse and abuse of words, such as “apartheid,” and “occupation.” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) tweeted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which is a phrase that has long been associated with calls to wipe out any existence of Israel, which seems to get translated by anti-Semites as an encouragemen to “Kill all Jews,” as we have, unfortunately, heard many times in the last few weeks.

   With painfully few voices in the media defending Israel’s right to defend itself, Democrats are listening to what their elected leaders are saying. 

   By a 52% to 48% margin, for instance, Democrats think Israel is more responsible for the violence in the Mideast than Hamas, according to a poll taken by the Harvard Center for Political Studies.

    Instead of issuing a statement that calls for elected officials to engage in more civil discourse regarding Israel, as BoroPark24 asked Mayor de Blasio to do last week, the mayor felt it would be “more positive” to focus on his support for a two-state solution, which of course has been offered to and rejected by the Palestinians since 1948, and most recently by President Bill Clinton in the Oslo Accords in 1993, which Yasser Arafat, the former chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, famously refused.

     “I have talked a lot about the efforts to undermine Israel with the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement, which I fundamentally oppose [because it] undercuts the possibilities of peace,” said the mayor, somewhat changing the subject of toning down anti-Israel rhetoric.

       “What I would say to all progressives is, ‘Remember your history, remember the history of anti-Semitism, remember why it's so important to have a homeland for people who've been oppressed for millennia.

     “And the understanding that anti-Semitism is way too strong in this world. And must be confronted.’”

    Other elected officials, some of them Jewish, remain utterly silent as Jews worldwide are under physical attack, as did Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who previously has called himself the “Shomer Israel.”

    “It’s time for ‘progressives’ to start condemning anti-Semitism and violent attacks on Jewish people with the same intention and vigor demonstrated in other areas of activism,” Jewish Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) tweeted Monday. “The silence has been deafening.”

Opinions are of the author alone and DO NOT represent the opinions of boropark24.com.