Losing the anti-Semite card

[Valin]

Financial Post : Lawrence Solomon

Jul 20, 2012

 

Earlier this week at a Pennsylvania rally sponsored by Jewish Americans for Obama and headlined by Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the 1,000 Jews in attendance in a synagogue auditorium heard one speaker portray the Republican Party as theocratic anti-Semites who didn’t believe in the separation of church and state; another Democrat described his experiences with anti-Semites in Arizona.

 

The message — that Republicans and their ilk are anti-Semites — is a familiar one. Jews have long believed that right-wingers tend to be anti-Semites, whether they identify as Nazis, members of the Ku Klux Klan, John Birchers, conservatives, evangelicals, or Republicans. At the height of the Tea Party movement, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi characterized the protesters as Nazis, saying “You be the judge. They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on health care.” On an earlier Bill Maher show, New York’s Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer joked that most anti-Semites vote Republican.

 

But today, many Jews are no longer laughing along. The anti-Semite card that Democrats have played so deftly over the years — the single-biggest reason Jews provide Democrats with more than 50% of their campaign funding — looks phony to many Jews. When Schultz got up to speak in praise of Obama, the normally sedate Jewish audience heckled her, leaving her visibly rattled.

 

The upset many Jews feel today is mostly directed toward Obama, whom they see as tolerant of anti-Semites such as Louis Farrakhan, tolerant of anti-Semitic organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and intolerant, even hostile, to Israel. But Democrats on the whole need beware — more than a presidential election is at stake.

 

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As Jews are reassessing their support for Obama and other Democratic candidates, they are also beginning to warm to Republicans. Much of the credit here belongs to Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, who made it unacceptable for evangelicals to be anti-Semitic. Evangelicals and the American right are now unabashedly in the Jewish and Israeli corner, leading many Jews to end their reflexive opposition to anything labelled right-wing.

 

(Snip)