Your Turn, Democrats

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, October 24, 2023

 

The polls indicating that the vast majority of Americans support Israel in its war against Hamas are cold comfort. It’s hard to take solace in the sanity of the majority when American streets are alive with disruptive, menacing, often violent demonstrations by the Hamas-supporting minority.

 

“Long live intifada,” chanted the demonstrators who marched through the streets of Manhattan on Monday night. “There is only one solution,” they droned ominously as they filed past the lighted windows of New York City’s residential walkups, through which citizens of America’s most Jewish city peered with a sense of foreboding. The New York Times describes a scene of mutual hostility and a sense of apprehension amid “antisemitic and anti-Islamic attacks” in the city, but the over 100 arrests of the roughly 1,000 pro-Hamas demonstrators betray the lopsidedness of the current threat.

 

In Teaneck, N.J. — another American locale that is home to a disproportionately large Jewish population — Orthodox worshippers endured heckling from a crowd of menacing onlookers carrying Palestinian flags and chanting “Allahu Akbar” as they prayed.

 

In Chicago, a number of demonstrators were arrested after blockading one of the city’s largest thoroughfares on Monday in an effort to compel Israel to consent to the slaughter of its people without reprisal and to convince the Biden administration to cut off all aid to the Jewish state. “What we are witnessing right now is atrocity, is violence,” one protester said exclusively of Israel’s response to the brutalization and mass slaughter of its people.

 

A pro-Israel demonstration in Skokie, Ill., descended into chaos when 200 “pro-Palestinian protesters” set upon the event. One of the Israel supporters in the crowd gave chase to a woman who tried to deface the Israeli flag on his car, but he was surrounded by counter-protesters and liberated himself only after he produced a pistol and fired a round off into the air. Another Israel supporter preemptively fired pepper spray into the crowd as the situation devolved.

 

Innocent passersby were accosted by anti-Israel activists in Minneapolis, some of whom were filmed attacking and damaging the vehicles of locals who had the misfortune to accidentally drive into the swarm. Some heard gunshots at that rally as well, but the noise is most likely attributable to backfire from the ATVs, draped with oversize Hamas flags, which demonstrators drove as they paraded down the streets.

 

These are times that call for plain language, though that mandate is far more discomfiting to Democrats today than it was in 2017, when the antisemitic sentiments on display in America’s streets were attributable to the torch-bearing Trump supporters who paraded through the University of Virginia’s campus. Today, the anti-Jewish slogans escape from the mouths of Americans who make their political home on the left. These Americans take succor from like-minded Democratic elected officials, however marginal they may be within the Democratic coalition. They may think of themselves as outside the traditional Democratic coalition — just as the Right’s race-conscious nationalists perceived themselves to be on a mission to mainstream their fringe ideology. But that is no excuse for inaction. In 2017, it was incumbent on Republicans of conscience to anathematize the noxious elements orbiting their periphery. Democrats are now confronted with the same challenge.

 

The situation Democrats face is not perfectly analogous. Joe Biden and his administration have given no comfort to the elements in their party who share the toxic outlook bubbling up from the streets. But while the president’s effort to keep these elements at arm’s length is a salutary departure from Donald Trump’s approach, that does not absolve Democrats of their moral duty to condemn the marchers and separate themselves from the protesters’ views.

 

Many who maintain only a hazy recollection of the Trump years subscribe to the myth that elected Republicans never broke with Trump — especially when he provided psychological comfort to America’s troglodytic bigots. That is a revisionist history.

 

Many of the Republican Party’s leading lights and household names unequivocally condemned Trump for wrestling publicly with himself over how forcefully he should distance himself from the racist demonstrators who descended on UVA — a group whose protests culminated in violence in Charlottesville. Those same voices were joined by more Republicans in denouncing the head of their party when Trump reportedly advocated curtailing the in-migration of “people from ‘sh**hole countries.’” Many — perhaps most — of those Republicans who stuck their necks out to reprimand Trump are now gone from the political scene. They paid for their dissent with their careers. But that record didn’t stay the hands of the Republican senators, governors, and former Trump administration officials who castigated the president for sitting down to a meal with Kanye West and notorious antisemitic YouTuber Nick Fuentes.

 

Democrats must take stock of the challenge the pro-Hamas faction on the frontier of their coalition now represents. Casting this lot off into the wilderness cannot be a passive activity. It won’t be done though inference, by declining to name names and citing no infringing activities in particular. Democrats had the opportunity to throttle the rising antisemitic sentiments in their coalition in their infancy when Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib made it easy. Their routine contraventions of basic standards of decency were condemnable, and they should have been condemned. But a revolt within the party over the discomfort associated with censuring its own scuttled the enterprise, leaving Democrats to endorse a flaccid document that condemned hate in all its forms — not the very specific hate that took one discrete form.

 

That act of cowardice ensured that the Democrats’ task would be even more difficult the next time they were confronted with the antisemitism in their ranks. If Democrats pass on the opportunity again, the threat will only grow, and the challenge will seem even less surmountable down the road. But there can be no more ignoring this menace. Calling out anti-Jewish hate that manifests today in support for a barbarian horde that massacres women and children is an absolute imperative. It may be difficult. It may irritate the activists in the streets and the ideologues who populate cable-news sets. It may come at the cost of a few political careers. But the time has come for Democrats of good conscience to stand up and be counted. That, or float passively along with the mobs who plague America’s streets.

 

Israel’s inevitable and just invasion of Gaza with the aim of neutralizing once and for all the gang responsible for the worst act of violence against Jews since the Holocaust is coming. When it comes, the unrest on America’s streets will only get worse, and there is no ambiguity about who its prosecutors will be. The time for Democrats to pull the support structure out from underneath the pro-Hamas Left is now. Tomorrow will be too late.