How the Fetishization of Victimhood Encourages Anti-Semitism

Reflecting on the relationship between recent instances of violent anti-Semitism in the U.S. and the current political culture, Abe Greenwald comments:

[Today], the country is seized by the politics of victimhood, and there’s nothing that self-pitying “victims” find easier than blaming Jews for their misery. The names given to the bogeymen of today’s populism are all historical code words for Jews. On the populist right, this means the elite, the globalists, and the media. On the populist left, it’s Wall Street, the wealthy, and the 1 percent. If that’s not enough, the left has also decided that Jews—a minority who make up 2.2 percent of the American population—are “hyper white” and, in Marxist terms, actually part of the power structure that keeps minorities down.

What’s more, . . . some of the left’s leading populists have gone out of their way to steer their followers toward blaming the Jews. The stand-out figures here are the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar and the Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. Their public record of blaming Jewish money for corrupting American politics is so well known that it needs no rehearsing here. And it’s either been ignored or defended by the larger left. If you called either of them out on their anti-Semitism, you were charged with racism and misogyny. Democratic leaders were so petrified of Omar that they couldn’t even pass a House resolution condemning her blatant anti-Semitic remarks.

But the problem on the left goes beyond Omar and Tlaib. . . . It stretches to the identitarian populism of most of the 2020 Democratic candidates for president, to the liberal garment-rending over the defeat of the anti-Semitic Jeremy Corbyn, to the intersectional gobbledygook that divides college campuses by ethnicity, to the Women’s March activists who embrace Louis Farrakhan, and down to the community level, where, for example, the NAACP’s Passaic, NJ branch posts Facebook rants blaming tainted water supplies on the Jews.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Anti-Semitism, Democrats, Ilhan Omar, Louis Farrakhan, Rashida Tlaib, U.S. Politics

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF