Jew hatred in America’s political discourse is blatant, brazen and disturbing and it doesn’t matter which end of the political spectrum you occupy. There are overt antisemites on the Republican right, and there’s undisguised antisemitism from the Democrat left.
Two events of this past week exemplified just how serious things are.
At the annual gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Texas senator and probable candidate for the 2028 GOP presidential nomination Ted Cruz, called out the unhinged and unrestrained antisemitic rhetoric from right-wing social media stars like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and the ubiquitous antisemite, Nick Fuentes.
Cruz ominously declared the GOP is not winning the fight against the Jew haters. He warned, “This is the beginning of a battle where our nation, our beliefs, our Constitution, the principles that built America, are under assault. We need to gird ourselves for battle and defeat this garbage.”
He also said to a Christian Broadcast Network interviewer, “In the last year and a half, I have seen more antisemitism on the right than at any point in my life. And it is dangerous and it risks consuming our party.”
This isn’t the first time Cruz has sounded the alarm over antisemitism. In November, he said antisemitism is “an existential crisis in our party.”
Yes, it is true the antisemites are chomping at the fringes (for now) of the Republican Party, but there is one important thing to consider about Jew hatred amongst the Republicans in contrast to the Democrats.
In the GOP, the Jew haters are being called out, by at least some GOP politicians with pull. The Democrat Jew haters have wormed their way into the mainstream of their party and all you’re hearing from their colleagues is, well, crickets.
If you want, you can rationalize the Jew and Israel hatred from the Democrat-Socialist mayor of New York City, along with the far left-wing representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (shall I go on?). They’re just a bunch of radicals who don’t represent the rest of their party. There are other Dems like Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who’ve been critical of Israel and of its prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but none have echoed what Vermont’s Bernie Sanders has bloviated about America’s march to war with Iran, until now.
It came from the Democrat US Senator from Connecticut, Chris Murphy.
Like Ted Cruz, Murphy gave an interview to a TV news outlet this past week as well. He was asked by MSNOW (formerly MSNBC), why he thinks the United States went to war with Iran. Murphy said in all seriousness, “The simplest explanation…is that Israel made us do it. That Netanyahu decided he wanted to attack and he convinced Trump to join him.”
As I said, that crap has already come from the mouth of Bernie Sanders and certainly could have come from mouths of Mamdani, Tlaib, Omar, AOC, or from the infected tongues of Carlson and Owens. But it came straight from the pie-hole of the US senator from Connecticut. The age-old antisemitic trope, that powerful Jews are the deceitful puppeteers pushing the United States of America into war, was openly spouted by Senator Murphy on a major US TV cable network.
If that isn’t scary enough for you, what’s even more scary, even more dishonest than what Murphy and his ilk publicly and unabashedly fabricate about Israel and the Jewish people, is that no Democrat of stature has had the balls to ball him out.
Senate Democrat leader Chuck Schumer? Haven’t heard a word from him. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries? Not even a peep. They are the silent enablers of their colleagues who traffic in antisemitic tropes. Their silence in the face of this evil, is itself evil.
Especially shameful is that the two of them represent New York and its large Jewish population in the halls of Congress. In truth, they are weaklings, more subservient to saving their own political skins than they are to speaking up for what is right, what is moral.
So, while I may not agree with all his positions, Ted Cruz deserves lavish loads of kudos for not cowering to Carlson’s Jew-hate fever he metes out to his social media minions. By the same token, heaps of dishonor should be dumped on the Dems for normalizing Senator Murphy’s hate speech by their silent acquiescence.
I exhort Jewish Americans to raise their voices against all those who have held their tongues, who won’t speak up for us, who refuse to stand with us, because as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” We must.