For Today’s Hard Left, Those Who Condemn Anti-Semitism Are the Enemy https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2019/03/for-todays-hard-left-those-who-condemn-anti-semitism-are-the-enemy/

March 21, 2019 | James Kirchick
About the author: James Kirchick is the assistant editor of The New Republic and a Phillips Foundation journalism fellow.

Attending a memorial at New York University for the victims of the New Zealand mosque massacre, Chelsea Clinton was accosted by two students who made clear to her that her “rhetoric” had caused the bloody attack in Christchurch. The pair later wrote an article explaining their rationale: Clinton had gently criticized Representative Ilhan Omar for her anti-Semitic remarks; Omar is a Muslim; therefore, Clinton “stoked hatred” of Muslims. Since the man who slaughtered Muslims at prayer was motivated by anti-Muslim animus—their syllogism concludes—Clinton was clearly responsible. To James Kirchick, this tortured logic is also symptomatic of an emerging leftist attitude toward Jews:

For a growing number of progressives, anti-Semitism has become an ideological obligation as central to their political identity as the universal basic income, the Green New Deal, a 70-percent marginal tax rate, and free higher education. These progressives, of course, cannot openly say this. Anti-Semitism is bad. Some of their best friends are Jews. The Holocaust happened. So they need to redefine anti-Semitism out of existence, while redistributing the valuable cultural capital of Jewish historical suffering to more deserving groups. Thus, [they have begun to speak] of “white Jews.” . . .

“White Jews” is, . . . first and foremost, an epithet—an attempt to make “Jews” synonymous with “white supremacy.” This move is especially invidious, since Jews—“white” or not—are themselves the primary victims of theories of racial supremacy, and anti-Semitism is central to white-supremacist ideology. . . .

But the larger point of marking Jews as “white” is to render them politically unassimilable into the left’s virtuous coalition of the oppressed, which includes plenty of third-worldist groups and alignments that are rooted in a political discourse in which conspiratorial anti-Semitism is normal. The solution that progressives have apparently alighted on is not to educate their allies out of bigotry and ignorance but to trim “Jewishness” of any traits that might set off wild, conspiratorial fulminations by the people they wish to position as innocent victims.

Notice how it is only Jews who are endowed with a racial descriptor; no one on the left is busy fingering “white Muslims.” This assault on reason and history puts Jews, or “white Jews,” in their place as inherently oppressive and vile, while [donating] their valuable history of oppression to its “true” inheritors—namely progressives and their handpicked allies.

Those handpicked allies are Muslim foes of Israel eager to find common cause with the hard left.

Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/282106/how-dare-chelsea-clinton-defend-the-jews