Prelude to a pogrom
Very recently filmmaker Ami Horowitz documented how Portland State University students reacted when being asked to pledge money to purchase explosives to bomb Israeli schools, hospitals and synagogues. Far from recoiling in shock and horror or immediately placing calls to Homeland Security, the students reacted in a different way: They happily signed on, many of the open-minded academicians punctuating their support for the idea with fist-bumps and high-fives.
The film ran on nationwide television on Fox a few weeks ago, and for those who wish to dismiss this as hardly indicative of what left-leaning leaders think, the “Get the Jew!” emails exposed on Wikileaks a few days ago directed at Bernie Sanders, and the “Free Palestine!” placards displayed throughout the delegations at the Democratic National Convention should cause any American — Jewish or Gentile — to be extremely concerned. Jewish-American leaders had nothing to say about it, but strangely that’s really not out of the ordinary. Neither they nor anyone else speaks of a truly shameful betrayal that has been perpetrated against Jews for many years now by their supposed political allies in the United States.
Perhaps, though, now that the acrimony and rhetoric has reached such a level that liberal progressives can now openly congratulate people who say in public they wish to murder Israeli civilians, Jews in America will finally have had enough.
Very few segments of the American electorate have supported the progressive agenda with as much fervor and reliability as Jewish-Americans — the close alliance going back for at least a century. While Jews have steadfastly maintained all the admirable qualities that are and have been the hallmarks of their culture for millennia — hard work, patriotism, religious piety, intense focus on family — the political leaders they support have installed planks in a platform that scream just the opposite. Liberal progressives worry not about jobs, but about providing doles for idleness. They struggle to remove even the allusion to God from our money, monuments and public life. Patriotism is maudlin nonsense for quite a few on the Left, who have made a tradition of apologizing ad nauseum, in any and every venue throughout the world, for everything and anything for which our nation stands.
And as far as family is concerned, only recently has the very phrase “starting a family” actually been placed on their proscribed list of verboten words. It’s plain that along with all this, many of them would also like to see the nation of Israel wiped from the face of the Earth. The question then is quite germane: What are Jewish-Americans doing in the company of such people?
One can certainly cast historical scorn on Cossacks who conducted pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe, Spanish monarchs who expelled them en masse, or even go back as far as Roman proconsuls who demolished their holy places and cast an entire people into Diaspora. These enemies, however, plainly identified themselves. They never showed the Jewish people anything other than the frowns that preceded their attacks. The supposed liberals, on the other hand, the free-thinkers, the leftist progressives, have been warmly smiling at their Jewish comrades, clasping their arms around their shoulders before every election.
Now, however, these elements aren’t even bothering with trying to maintain the previous façade properly, so certain are they that Jews in America will meekly follow them wherever it is that the political insanity leads. And speaking of insanity, as concerns the hard-working, scholastic, honest, tax-paying, law-abiding salt of the Earth that is the Jewish-American community and its inexplicable affiliation with those who strive mightily to put an end to those attributes, Euripides warned best: Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.
David Nabhan, who lives in Pittsburgh, is a science and science fiction writer. He can be reached at davidwrites200@aol.com.
comments