Throw the Anti-American Left Under the Bus

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

 

You’re likely to hear a lot about the polls showing that Americans are growing impatient with Israel. Democrats and their media allies seem to have concluded that this sentiment will grow along a straight-line trajectory until a majority have become intractably hostile toward Israel’s defensive war against Hamas. But straight-line trajectories are inherently fallacious. They take no account of exogenous events, such as, for example, Iran’s brazen, multilayered missile and drone attack on Israeli population centers. Indeed, even before that attack, Democratic and media elites had already internalized a misreading of this war and voters’ perceptions of it.

 

For example, a Pew Research Center poll from late March showed that, while the public is growing weary of watching Israel zealously prosecute its right to self-defense, those same voters also understand that Israel’s casus belli is just while Hamas’s is not. That survey found that only 15 percent of respondents believe that Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are “not at all” or “not too” valid. By contrast, 49 percent of respondents don’t believe that Hamas’s aims or cause are valid. Although 34 percent said Israel’s conduct on the ground in Gaza is “completely” or “somewhat” unacceptable, the October 7 massacre that begat this war was seen as an “acceptable” response to Israel’s actions by precisely 4 percent of American adults. Nearly three-quarters of the Americans surveyed rejected the notion that the barbarity unleashed on 10/7 was a legitimate response to the conditions that prevailed in the Gaza Strip.

 

This dichotomy is something on which America’s center-left elites should reflect amid their ongoing efforts to coddle and mollify what can only be described as a pro-terrorism constituency. That description will surely rankle Israel’s critics, but what else are you supposed to call a protest movement that burns the American flag while flying Hezbollah’s banner high? How else should we regard demonstrators who adorn themselves with keffiyehs and “Hamas-style headbands”? Terrorist groups such as Hamas kill Americans. What are we to conclude about the intentions of those who praise and mimic them?

 

Do the demonstrators who block major thoroughfares, bridges, and airports, thereby frustrating attempts to address medical emergencies and even risking the prospect of a disaster on a flight takeoff, only want to be heard by their elected officials? Or are their intentions far darker than that? Are we to believe that, when these malcontents chant “Death to America,” what they really mean is that Congress and the president should recalibrate America’s posture toward Israel to strike a finer balance between human-rights concerns and the West’s security priorities in the Middle East? Of course not. When they chant “Death to America,” they mean “Death to America.”

 

Whose constituency is this? To its credit, the Biden campaign has distanced itself, albeit gingerly, from the antics of the anti-American left. But it remains beholden to a theory of the 2024 campaign that ensures it can only back away so much lest it sacrifice the crucial State of Michigan and, with it, the White House. His party, meanwhile, plays host to federal elected officials who bend over backward to popularize the slogans that reliably precede the murder of Jews. When it placates this wholly unsympathetic and objectively marginal constituency, does the Democratic Party expect the rest of us not to notice?

 

It’s simply not good enough for Biden and his fellow Democrats to gently chide the anti-American left and move on. Throw them under the bus. Pick one — any will do, as this is a target-rich environment — and make an example of him or her. Democrats are clearly afraid of how America’s restive students would react to that sort of banal majoritarianism. Whatever backlash that effort engenders among the young, indolent, and miseducated — however violent and disruptive it may be — will not come back on the Democrats who were bold enough to express their affection for the United States.

 

Indeed, such an outcome might even redound to Democrats’ benefit, even if it risks furthering the sense that the party’s governing style invites the chaos and lawlessness that Biden’s presidency was supposed to remedy. This anti-American cohort has made it its intention to physically attack the symbols of Democratic governance. It’s high time the president and his allies summon the courage to defend themselves. In doing so, they might convince their dispirited supporters that the president’s party is not a spent force bereft of self-confidence and a healthy sense of patriotism. The alternative is to allow the provocateurs and agitators in America’s streets to set the terms of the debate and dictate the tempo of events. To allow that to continue is politically suicidal.