The Democratic Party’s New Apologists for Anti-Semitism

During the recent controversy surrounding Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, several Democratic politicians defended her by claiming she is not anti-Semitic but simply ignorant. Thus Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “I don’t think our colleague is anti-Semitic. I think she has a different experience in the use of words.” Christine Rosen comments:

In other words, [Pelosi and others are claiming that], like a misguided toddler who didn’t know any better, Omar should be excused for trafficking in age-old, hateful anti-Semitic stereotypes. It’s an especially ironic narrative for staunch feminists like Pelosi, given how patronizing and sexist the same remarks would have sounded coming from a man (or from any Republican). Omar’s supporters are arguing that Omar is too inept to understand what she is saying—and yet they still granted her a position on the powerful Foreign Affairs Committee? . . .

Omar traffics in well-known anti-Semitic tropes, and she knows they are anti-Semitic. We know she does because she has already had several “listening and learning” sessions with Jewish leaders from her congressional district and national organizations about precisely those stereotypes. Many of those leaders expressed surprise that Democrats were treating Omar’s most recent expression of anti-Semitism as if it had been a minor gaffe by a political ingénue rather than as part of a pattern of prejudice from a grown woman who knows exactly what she is signaling when she says these things. Everyone else seems to know what she’s saying— after all, the former KKK grand wizard David Duke tweeted his praise for Omar, calling her “the most important member of the U.S. Congress.”

In addition to treating Omar like a child, the Democratic narrative insists we recognize that she is also a victim—in fact, more of one than the people she is attacking because she is Muslim and is supposedly challenging the foreign-policy status quo with regard to Israel. It is true that Omar has been the target of anti-Muslim bigotry, most recently from the scurrilous lips of the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro. But she is the creator of the controversies that surround her, not the target. . . .

Omar has [thus] emerged from repeated controversies unrepentant and more powerful than before (and retaining her seat on the House Foreign Affairs committee).

Read more at Commentary

More about: Anti-Semitism, Democrats, Feminism, Nancy Pelosi, Politics & Current Affairs

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society