Images | Commentary | Digital Scrapbook
Matthew Continetti:
“…So far this year the Democrats have floundered in a pit of racism, sexual assault, and anti-Semitism. They’ve embraced policies akin to infanticide, and announced plans to expropriate wealth, pay reparations for slavery, eliminate private health insurance within two years, and rebuild or retrofit every building in the United States before the world ends from climate change twelve years from now. Throughout it all, they’ve received a pass from the know-nothing media. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Sanders have all made the claim that Omar has done nothing but criticize the policies of Bibi Netanyahu. That’s a bald-faced lie, a falsehood not one of the hundreds upon hundreds of reporters covering the Democratic field has scrutinized. These are the very people who have spent the past three years sermonizing on the importance of truth in politics, and they are doing Bernie’s work for him. Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution insists that the Democratic party continues to be center-left. But the election returns and publi- opinion data that support her thesis become much less important when the party’s biggest stars make a hard-left turn. The Democrats seem ripe for a takeover by Bernie and his pals, or at least for a blistering and incendiary battle for control similar to what the GOP experienced last time around…”
Robert Stacy McCain:
“…So, Democrats can’t condemn anti-Semitism because, without anti-Semitism, they’d lose “the younger, far-left wing of the party” — the Jew-haters who support Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
In case I haven’t reminded you lately, some of my cousins are Jewish Democrats. They despise Donald Trump, but I wonder: How long will they be able to maintain their anti-Trump stance if Pelosi fails to suppress the Jew-haters in her coalition? You can go back as far as the 1960s and see how this poisonous weed has grown on the Left.
Anti-Israel politics functioned as a proxy for anti-Semitism among “Black Power” radicals, and anti-Semitism was a proxy for anti-white racism. In 1996, I interviewed a former activist for SNCC who bemoaned how “Stokely Carmichael and that crowd ran the white people out of the movement” circa 1966. That tendency flourished again in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and, while it seemed to fade during the Obama years, it continued growing with the BDS movement on college campuses. Now, with Trump in the White House and Democrats controlling the House, Pelosi finds herself yoked to this radicalism and it will be difficult, if not impossible, for her to disentangle herself from the anti-Israel/anti-white sentiment that flourishes among “the younger, far-left wing of the party.”…”
JOHN HINDERAKER:
“…Today marked a turning point of sorts. The House of Representatives voted 407-23 in favor of the Democrats’ revised, anodyne resolution condemning all forms of bigotry. As Scott has noted, Nancy Pelosi retreated to this meaningless resolution because many House Democrats weighed in to support Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitism. Faced with a rebellion in the ranks, Pelosi backed down. She now denies that the resolution had anything to do with Omar.
That is quite a change from the long-ago days (less than a month ago, actually) when Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer issued a statement saying, among other things, “Congresswoman Omar’s use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters is deeply offensive.” The Democratic Party leadership’s climbdown is complete: today, as predicted, Omar voted for the resolution that began life as a censure of her anti-Semitism…
…I think we have crossed a Rubicon of sorts. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and the Congressional Black Caucus–which supported Omar unanimously, as best one can tell from news reports–are in the driver’s seat. Anti-Semitism is now accepted by the Democratic Party.
Never mind lame attempts to change the subject like the multiple tweets from presidential candidates to the effect that it is not anti-Semitic to criticize the policies of the government of Israel. Of course not, but that is not what Omar did, and not what she got into trouble for doing. She has criticized, rather, American supporters of Israel who she says were bought off by “Benjamins” and are loyal to a foreign power. And she has tried to bring about the destruction of Israel, an important American ally, by supporting the BDS movement, which seeks Israel’s obliteration.
The Democratic Party is not the first to embrace anti-Semitism. A number of European parties did so in the early decades of the 20th century. The political calculus is straightforward: there are only a few Jews, a slow-growing (if growing at all) demographic, while there are lots of anti-Semites, especially among our fast-growing Islamic population. That is, of course, Omar’s base.
We witnessed today the birth of a new Democratic Party. And so far, I haven’t seen a single Democratic officeholder complain about it…”
David Harsanyi:
“…This week, the Democratic Party was unable to pass a watered-down, platitudinous resolution condemning anti-Semitism, due to “fierce backlash” from presidential candidates, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), and the now-powerful progressive base. Rather than censuring Rep. Ilhan Omar, the intellectually frivolous, Hamas-supporting freshman representative from Minnesota, she was rewarded and inoculated from party criticism.
More consequently, the Democrats deemed Protocols of Zion-style attacks a legitimate form of debate. That’s because Omar, despite what you hear, has repeatedly attacked Jews, not only Israel supporters, and certainly not only specific Israeli policies…”
JOHN PODHORETZ:
“…The struggle is over. At its highest levels, the Democratic Party is defending or excusing its newly minted superstar freshman anti-Semite.
Over the past week, the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives has been trying to find a way to deal with a third set of remarks by Rep. Ilhan Omar that expressed anti-Semitic sentiments—words that followed a clearly disingenuous apology she had offered for earlier anti-Semitic remarks. A resolution to condemn Omar by name was floated at first only to be supplanted by a resolution to condemn anti-Semitism, then a resolution to condemn anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, then a resolution denouncing all hate.
And then, suddenly, everything was all right. Because according to the Speaker of the House, the House Majority Leader, the House Whip, the Senate Minority Leader, and at least three Democratic presidential candidates, Ilhan Omar is not an anti-Semite—and, in the view of some, people are saying so dishonestly for the purpose of shutting down debate on legitimate matters.
Speaker Pelosi said Omar’s words were not “intentionally anti-Semitic.”
Majority Leader Hoyer: “I don’t think she’s anti-Semitic.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—who has spent his career oleaginously assuring Jewish audiences his true purpose is to serve as a “shomer,” a guardian at the gates of Jerusalem, protecting and defending his people—said Omar had been “wrong and hurtful,” but then immediately sought to equalize her repeated offenses against his people with a poster someone hung up in the West Virginia statehouse—”and those who tried to connect 9/11 to all Muslims in West Virginia were wrong as well.”
He’s a shomer like I’m Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. He’s Josephus, not Joseph.
More horrifying were the words of House Whip James Clyburn, who suggested—as my friend Seth Mandel says—that families of Holocaust survivors should check their white privilege in the face of Omar’s history as a Somali refugee: “There are people who tell me, ‘Well, my parents are Holocaust survivors.’ ‘My parents did this.’ It’s more personal with her.” Yes, more personal than the Holocaust. Thanks so much, Third Ranking Official in the House of Representatives.
Presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders said that the attacks on Omar were intended to make it impossible to have serious discussion of Israel and the Palestinians. Fellow candidate Kamala Harris suggested that Omar was the real victim here: “I am concerned that the spotlight being put on Congresswoman Omar may put her at risk….I also believe there is a difference between criticism of policy or political leaders, and anti-Semitism.”
Let’s be clear here. Nobody baited Ilhan Omar into saying Jews were hypnotizing the world, or that Jews were controlling American politics with their money, or that Jews were engaged in a conspiracy to force her to apologize for her words. She said these things herself, on her own, without prompting. They have nothing to do with “policy,” or with her pain as a Somali refugee, or anything else. They have to do with her idea that evil Jews are manipulating reality. This is as anti-Semitic as anti-Semitism gets…”
Neo:
“…I don’t think Democrats much care if they lose the Jewish vote, because the number of Jews in the US is small and highly concentrated in places that are and will remain Democratic enclaves even without the Jewish vote. Plus, many Jews today are secular and have replaced any allegiance to Judaism with an allegiance to leftism, so perhaps this won’t even alienate them. I also believe that most of the Jewish donors to the Democratic Party are probably more of that latter frame of mind, and therefore perhaps the calculation is that the party can afford that, too—although I would imagine some of the leaders of the party (Pelosi and Schumer) are none too happy about the possibility of the loss of support…”
Victor Davis Hanson:
“…Fifty years ago, the United States was facing crises and unrest on multiple fronts. Some predicted that internal chaos and revolution would unravel the nation.
The 1969 Vietnam War protests on the UC Berkeley campus turned so violent that National Guard helicopters indiscriminately sprayed tear gas on student demonstrators. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of major cities as part of the “Moratorium to the End the War in Vietnam.” In Washington, D.C., about a half-million protesters marched to the White House.
Native American demonstrators took over the former federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and stayed there for 19 months, declaring it their own sovereign space.
In November 1969, the American public was exposed to grotesque photos of the My Lai Massacre, which had occurred the year before. The nation was stunned that American troops in Vietnam had shot innocent women and children. My Lai heated up the already hot national debate over whether the Vietnam War was either moral or winnable.
Meanwhile, the trial of the so-called Chicago Seven, involving the supposed organizers of the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, roiled the nation. The courtroom drama involving radical defendants such as Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin descended into a national circus, as the battle between leftists and the establishment went from the streets to the courtroom.
It was also the year of the Woodstock music festival. More than 400,000 thrill-seekers showed up on a small farm in the Catskill Mountains in August 1969 to celebrate three days of “peace and music.” Footage of free love and free drugs at Woodstock shocked half the country but resonated with the other half, which viewed the festival as much-needed liberation for an uptight nation.
Newly inaugurated President Richard Nixon characterized the national divide as the “silent majority” of traditional Americans fighting back against radical changes in culture and politics.
Under the strain of constant protests, the cultural and moral fabric of the country seemed to be tearing apart. Alternative lifestyle choices sometimes led to violence or death.
When a West Coast version of Woodstock was tried a few months later in Altamont, Calif., the concert ended up an orgy of murder, drug overdoses, random violence and destruction of property.
In July of 1969, liberal icon Teddy Kennedy ran his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Mass., and his young passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, was left to drown. Sen. Kennedy did not report the accident to authorities until 10 hours later.
The next month, members of hippie psychopath Charles Manson’s “family” butchered seven innocents in Los Angeles, among them actress Sharon Tate. The Manson family apparently had hoped that the sensationalized murders would ignite some sort of racial civil war, thereby unraveling the United States.
Yet a wounded United States did not just survive 1969, but reached new heights of scientific, technological and cultural achievement.
For the first time in history, a national economy produced more than $1 trillion worth of goods and services in a single year, as American nominal GDP for 1969 exceeded that level.
America also put the first humans on the moon in 1969 — and did it twice the same year, with the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 lunar missions.
Boeing’s 747 jumbo jet made its first successful test flight in 1969. The 400-passenger airliner was so well designed and ahead of its time that it continues in service today, a half-century after its rollout. It took some 35 years for a European company to introduce a competitor to the 747, the Airbus A380. Yet the latter jet has been something of a white elephant. Many airlines have stopped using the A380, and Airbus has announced that it will stop producing the jets in 2021.
American computer scientists first used a precursor to the internet in 1969, when computers at UCLA and Stanford managed to share an electronic network, known as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).
Fifty years later, what are the lessons of the chaotic year 1969 for our similarly schizophrenic age of polarization, civil disunity, and unprecedented wealth and scientific advancement?
America is such a huge and diverse country, and so abundantly endowed with natural and human resources, that it is capable of achieving unprecedented scientific, economic and technological breakthroughs even as its social fabric is tearing apart.
Or, put another way, while the media highlights crime, protests, grievances and civil disorder, a majority of Americans still go to work unbothered each day.
And in a rare society with a free market, constitutional government and individual freedom, people continue to do amazing things even amid the utter chaos around them…”
JOHN HINDERAKER:
“…As Scott has noted, the Democratic Party is tied up in knots over Ilhan Omar’s overt anti-Semitism and reactions to it, both inside and outside the party. This is not due to bungling on the part of the Democrats’ House leadership, as some have suggested. Rather, the problem is inherent. It goes to the essence of the modern Democratic Party.
It is fundamental to the Democrats’ worldview and reason for being that all hate comes from the right. They constantly tout themselves as the party of inclusion, tolerance and love. They never tire of talking about, for example, Charlottesville, even though the violence there was caused at least as much by the far-left Antifa as by a handful of ragtag white supremacists. But of course, they never mention James Hodgkinson.
More importantly, our politics today are suffused with hate, to a degree not seen within my lifetime. Above all, hate for President Trump. Also, hate for conservatives. Hate for Republicans. Hate for all those who fail to toe the latest, ever-shifting intersectional line. Everyone who pays attention to Twitter, to Facebook, to cable news, or to current events generally knows this is true. And yet the Democrats cannot admit that they, and the Left, are the overwhelming source of hatred in today’s world.
But Ilhan Omar posed a problem. Her hate was different because it was directed toward a group that mostly supports Democrats. Think about it: what she said about Jews was far milder than what Democrats say about President Trump and his supporters every day. They constantly call Trump a traitor. It was also milder than what many liberals say about white people on MSNBC, without drawing a peep from the Democrats’ leadership. If Omar had trained her fire on the right, or groups associated with the right, like whites or rural Americans, no Democrat would have minded.
Ilhan Omar hates like a Democrat, and she openly expresses that hate like a Democrat. The problem is that she hates people who mostly support the Democratic Party. Not only that, by openly expressing her bigotry she has exposed an important rift among the Democrats. Like the Labour Party in Great Britain, the Democratic Party has become a haven for anti-Semites. (Actually, it has been that for a long time: see, for example, Crown Heights and “Hymietown.”) Today, the fact that many Democrats don’t like Jews is becoming harder to conceal. Omar has made it harder still.
I thought the House Democrats’ original resolution condemning anti-Semitism, without naming Ilhan Omar, was anodyne. I thought she probably could vote for it. But that resolution, which referred only to anti-Semitism, was withdrawn by leadership, reportedly because of an outpouring of support for Omar within the party. That support didn’t come from people who doubted that she is an anti-Semite–she has made that blindingly clear, repeatedly!–but rather from people who share her particular bigotry.
So the Democrats are in a tight spot. Leadership has had to back off, and is in the process of substituting a resolution that toes the party line by nattering on about Islamophobia and so on. A resolution that refers to everything, and therefore nothing. A resolution that tries to preserve the fig leaf of a party that is opposed to hate. Even as its members express the vilest, most hateful, most bigoted views that America has seen in its modern history…”
MARK STEYN:
“…As Laura Rosen Cohen likes to say, everyone meets at Jew-Hate Junction: excitable young Mohammedans, secular polytechnic Euro-lefties, anti-globalist conspiracy theorists… It’s getting pretty crowded over there.
I’m very bored by the smooth taqqiya Muslims who profess to dig the interfaith outreach. On balance, I prefer the likes of Ms [Ilhan] Omar, who just can’t help herself. She’ll back down a little when Nancy Pelosi orders her to, but forty-eight hours later comes roaring Tweeting back …and dares the Democrats to call her on it.
The House Leadership just backed down. Like Corbyn in London, it can no longer even insist on its anti-Semitic bona fides without weaseling and equivocating. That’s very telling — and, unlike puppet grotesques in a medieval Lenten parade, it’s not the last throes of the past but a glimpse of the future…”
Steve Hayward:
“…As someone pointed out in the aftermath of Jussie Smollett hoax, the demand for racism now exceeds the supply, so we have to resort to made-up racism to satisfy the demand for leftists to feel outraged and indignant…”
Gail Heriot:
“…Virginia Governor Northam is being asked (by Al Gore among others) to stop “environmental racism.” I don’t know anything about the particular cases being brought to Northam’s attention. But with “environmental racism” things are not always as they seem on the surface.
A few years ago, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights decide focus its attention on the supposed fact that coal ash landfills and ponds are disproportionately located near African Americans.. The report it issued gave our Chairman the perfect opportunity to make an emotional statement decrying “environmental racism” and even blaming it for the cancers in his family. There was just one problem: The Commission’s empirical study (massively downplayed in the report itself) showed that, if anything, coal ash landfills and ponds may be disproportionately located near whites. Facts didn’t matter…”