politics to go

Dems trust anti-Semities over a respected Jew

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Wake up and smell the cholent! The blind loyalty of American Jews continues to give the Democrats freedom to maltreat the Jewish community without fear of losing Jewish votes.

A senior policy adviser to Democratic Senator Patty Murray said her office in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) does “not care about anti-Semitism,” according to two people who attended the meeting. The comment was in reference to anti-Semitic slanders against a presidential nominee.

The HELP committee was evaluating the nomination of Ken Marcus for the position assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education. Marcus also served in the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights during the administration of George W. Bush. During his tenure, Marcus issued a guidance which stated that the Office for Civil Rights would protect the rights of ethnic groups that also share a religious faith, stating that they were both a religion and people. This policy has been applied to protect Jewish, Muslim, and Sikh students.

Since his nomination by President Trump, Marcus has been subject to an aggressive slander campaign by leading anti-Israel groups seeking to kill his nomination because he has worked to combat the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement on college campuses and is the founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, an organization that among other things, fights anti-Israel slanders.

The BDS movement has one purpose: to delegitimize Israel and to deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination. The State Department has declared that denying that the Jews have the right to have their own state is a form of anti-Semitism.

According to a report in the Washington Free Beacon, during a meeting on Nov. 28 with Sarah N. Stern, a former colleague of Marcus and president of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a senior adviser to Murray on the HELP committee told Stern the committee: “We don’t care about anti-Semitism in this office. We care about transgenders, we care about blacks, we care about Hispanics, we care about gays, we care about lesbians, we care about the disabled.”

Stern’s aide Jennifer Dekel confirmed the comments and said she was taking notes during the meeting. Eli Zupnick, a spokesman for Sen. Murray, questioned the accuracy of the remarks attributed to the senior adviser, saying, “This is not an accurate quote and certainly doesn’t reflect the position of the office.” The senior adviser did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The campaign against Marcus is being spearheaded by numerous anti-Israel groups, including the Arab American Institute, led by James Zogby. Zogby’s referred to Israelis as Nazis and described members of Congress as “Israel Firsters,” an anti-Semitic charge that implies dual loyalty to the Jewish state.

“Zogby has two goals: to make Arab Americans more powerful than Jewish Americans and to be their preeminent leader,” Yehudit Barsky, a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy, wrote in a profile about Zogby’s anti-Israel attitudes.

Another of the groups slandering Marcus is the National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has members who have openly celebrated murderers of Jews; and Palestine Legal, which has defended professors who have posted anti-Semitic comments online. SJP is an extremist organization that maintains affiliations with Arab and Islamic terror groups, is overtly anti-Semitic, incites hatred and violence against Jewish students, and rejects the existence of the state of Israel in any borders. Jewish students on campuses across the United States have been victimized by anti-Semitic vandalism, verbal attacks, and outright violence at the hands of SJP members.

Under Marcus the Brandeis Center sent several letters to universities “decrying racism against Muslims and African-Americans on their campuses,” according to Sarah Stern.

For instance, in November 2015 he wrote to the president of San Diego University denouncing an attack against a Muslim student, saying, “While our organization primarily addresses the rights of Jewish college students, we support the right of all students to be free from invidious discrimination.” Marcus condemned the incident, in which a female Muslim student was grabbed by her headscarf and called a terrorist, as a “hate crime.”

“We are appalled by this act of hate, and we urge you to take immediate action by condemning this incident and announcing that hate crimes of any kind will not be tolerated at SDSU,” Marcus wrote.

“Does this sound like the sentiment of a racist or an Islamophobe?” Stern asked. “Yet while I was recently talking about Marcus with a senior policy adviser to the Democratic ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, the adviser interrupted me with the response, ‘We do not care about anti-Semitism in this office’,” she said.

Instead of refuting the hatred, Senator Murraym, who is the ranking member of the HELP committee, has been quiet. Palestine Legal praised Murray for “grilling” Marcus during his confirmation hearing.

Last week, Marcus’ nomination was approved by the committee in a straight party vote (12 to 11). Every very Democrat on the committee voted for the BDS group position.

To some extent, the anti-Jewish attitudes of Murray’s staffer and much of the Democratic Party are influenced by their voters. Progressives have become the most important voting bloc in the Democratic Party and they tend to be anti-Israel (just check the last two DNC Platforms) and many are also anti-Semites. That progressive power is why Keith Ellison is so popular in the party, why Jews like Jerrold Nadler and Adam Schiff ran to support Obama’s love affair with the Iranians, why people like New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Governor Andrew Cuomo have been supportive of anti-Semites like Linda Sarsour.

It’s not only the anti-Semitism of the progressives, it’s also the blind loyalty of the majority of Jews to the Democratic Party. If Jews will blindly vote Democratic no matter how the Democrats act, why should the party care about Jews and Jewish issues.