The last time that Israel had a prime minister from the Labor Party was over 20 years ago. Most military recruits were not even born or were in diapers the last time a member of the leftist socialist movement that had ruled the country in a virtually unbroken life of succession for a generation from Ben-Gurion to Rabin last headed the country.

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The news is even worse now, with Labor, which once dominated the Knesset legislature, receiving only four seats in last week's election, making it the smallest party, below the Muslim Brotherhood's Ra'am and the Arab Communist Hadash-Ta'al, not to mention the Jewish religious parties and the parties of Middle Eastern and Russian immigrants.

The last time this happened, Caroline Glick's Latma, with hilarious cruelty, mocked the Labor Party for having more letters in its name than Knesset seats. "Hello, I would like to request a taxi for the entire Labor Party." "Don't bury us, there aren't enough of us for a minyan."

As badly as Labor did, Meretz performed even worse, failing to meet the legislative threshold. For the first time in a generation, the radical leftist party won't even make it into the Knesset.

The parties of the Jewish Left, if you can even call them that, are down to four out of 120 seats.

The Israeli Left has become unelectable, so it disguises itself as a rotating series of fake centrist parties, the latest of which is Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid Party, whose function is to trick Israelis who would never vote for Labor or Meretz into voting for the Left. And Yesh Atid picked up 24 Knesset seats.

Yair Lapid, a television celebrity and the son of a famous father, is Israel's Justin Trudeau, a convenient front for the same old guard to run things while he mugs for the camera. He's one of a line of retired generals and public figures fronting fake third parties who hold office only long enough for the public to realize that they didn't vote for Labor but got it anyway.

The electoral decline and fall of the Israeli Left was caused by two national revelations. The first was that Netanyahu's free-market economic policies, while not perfect, worked far better than Labor's socialist monopolies, and the second was that Labor's signature policy, cutting a deal with the PLO, was a murderous failure that threatened Israeli lives and the country on an unprecedented scale.

But the paradox of the Israeli Left is that it has virtually no electoral power, yet nearly unlimited political power. There may not have been a Labor prime minister since 2001, but the Left still controls the machinery of officialdom, from local bureaucrats to Supreme Court justices. Even while the media declares that the latest right-wing bogeyman is a "threat to democracy," it is the civil servants, the prosecutors, judges, brass and administrators who actually run most things.

And who are the real threats to democracy. There's a reason Democrats often describe the Israeli Supreme Court, with its unlimited power of judicial review and ability to override government decisions on everything from the macro to the micro, from where people can live to who should receive the Israeli Prize, as their model.

Beyond the upper echelons of the judiciary, prosecutors openly collaborate with the media and leftist activists to indict, prosecute and remove conservative, patriotic and Zionist elected officials. It was a bunch of these groundless prosecutions that forced Netanyahu out of office. To understand the Kafkaesque absurdity of the prosecutorial campaign against Netanyahu, it's enough to mention that his wife was investigated over recycling bottle deposits.

To make sense of what's going on though, you have to understand Israeli demographics.

While immigration moves the United States leftward, it moves Israel rightward. The conservative Likud's base of support comes from the Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants who fled Muslim rule. The Russian immigrants, French and even Americans who move to Israel are not universally conservative, but tend to want governments that will protect them from Islamic terrorists.

The media is howling over the newfound influence of Itamar Ben-Gvir, described as "far-right," a "hateful extremist" and a "supremacist." The Biden administration and Democrats have warned that they will have nothing to do with him and that Israel will alienate the United States.

What they don't mention is that he's the son of Iraqi Jewish immigrants.

Israel's Left derives the majority of its support from the upper class elites of Tel Aviv, who were part of the old socialist establishment. Israel's right leans heavily on the Middle Eastern and Russian immigrants whom they treated like dirt. They want a strong country and a weak bureaucracy. The old establishment Left wants a strong bureaucracy and a weak country.

Talk to members of that old establishment and you find that they are a small, incestuous group. Israel is a small country, but in those circles, everyone really does know everyone else—they went to school with them, served in the army with them, or lived next door to them. They feel that their country, with its cafes and kibbutzim, red flags and membership in an international socialist order, and the more intangible cultural elements, was stolen from them by these disgusting new arrivals.

They complain about the language, the manners, the religion, the superstition and the ugliness of the Haredim, the Middle Eastern and Russian Jews. Give them a few drinks and the rhetoric can turn truly ugly, with stories of beating the religious and mistreating immigrants. It was in this vein that Yigal Tumarkin, an artist and co-founder of the anti-war Peace Now,  wrote, "when I see Orthodox Jews, I understand the Nazis," and "my true contribution would be if I grabbed a submachine gun, instead of a pen and pencil, and killed them."

Tumarkin spoke for quite a few members of the old establishment who still have their cafes, but feel like they lost their country. Though they can't win elections (for long), they control the machinery of power. And paradoxically they see themselves as underdogs still fighting the "right" and the influx of immigrants who don't know their place and have ruined everything.

In a small country, their hateful views are no secret. It's why they can't win elections.

Israel's politics are a struggle between an emerging multicultural conservative majority and a supremacist European leftist minority holding on to power. It's a mirror image of how American liberals see our politics, and yet when given a choice, they side with the Israeli European minority.

In this struggle, the media, both theirs and ours, depicts coalitions of Middle Eastern Jewish refugees, Russian immigrants and Orthodox Jews as if they were all interchangeable "right-wing extremists," while painting a leftist fringe that consists of upper class elites who all know each other and look like each other as the liberal tolerant heroes of tomorrow.

That reveals as much about our media and political elites as it does about the Israeli Left.

Democrats and the media never actually ask why Israelis seem to insist on electing so many conservatives and so few lefties, or why Netanyahu broke Ben-Gurion's record for the longest consecutive term in office. Instead, we're told that Israelis are supremacists and bigots. It's a convenient projection by the real supremacists and bigots who are smearing Israel.

Why did the Israeli right win while the Left lost? For reasons the media won't discuss. Decades of Islamic terror, failed socialist politics, corrupt monopolies, an abusive bureaucracy and outright bigotry and discrimination of the ugliest kind somehow never come up in these conversations, even though the majority of Israelis are painfully acquainted with all of them.

The Left lost badly in Israel. Our Left is terrified that they're about to lose just as badly here.

Featured on JNS.org, this article was first published by FrontPage Magazine.

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The post The fall of the Israeli Left appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Eighty-one years after the Mufti of Jerusalem visited Hitler and asked him to kill all the Jews, Mahmoud Abbas, his current successor as leader of the Palestinian cause, arrived in Berlin.

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At a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Abbas refused to apologize for the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes and falsely claimed that Israel had carried out "50 holocausts" against Arab Muslims.

Scholz, Merkel's successor, said nothing at the joint press conference, but later tepidly condemned the remarks. "I am disgusted by the outrageous remarks made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas," he tweeted. Why should he be? This is who Abbas is.

After an Arab Muslim recently opened fire at a bus stop and shot a number of Israelis and American tourists, including a pregnant woman who was hit in the stomach, Abbas's Fatah celebrated the attack, posting on Facebook, "Praise to the rifle muzzles."

In 1929, years before Hitler took power, the Hebron massacre by the Muslim settler population brutally killed the local Jewish men, women and children, mutilated their bodies and scattered limbs and organs. Every year, the Palestinian Authority honors three of the killers as "martyrs." One of the PA's martyrs, Muhammad Jamjoum, confessed to murdering five Jews. Another, Ataa al-Zir, murdered three innocent people back when Hitler could only dream of killing Jews.

The Palestinian cause is the modern standard bearer of the Nazis. The terrorist group whose representative was invited to Berlin has killed more Jews than anyone since the Nazis. And has spent more time lying about it than any ordinary Holocaust denier in Germany.

Abbas earned his doctorate for his Holocaust denial thesis from the USSR's Patrice Lumumba University, created to train third-world assets for a Communist war on free nations. The KGB reportedly recruited the "Palestinian" terrorist leader, gave him the code name "mole" and put him to work under the man who now serves as Putin's special representative in the region.

When Abbas wasn't working for the Communists, he was being inspired by the Nazis. Edy Cohen, an Israeli researcher who wrote a book on Hitler's Mufti, warned that Abbas's Holocaust denial thesis was "inspired by and based on the work of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust." Abbas and Eichmann had both made killing Jews and lying about it their life's work.

Thirty-one years after the visit by Hitler's Mufti, Abbas and the Palestinians made their grand bid to replace the Nazis with the Munich Massacre of Israeli Jewish athletes.

The Munich Olympics were meant to show off the new Germany. And they did. German authorities had refused to provide security because it would clash with the country's image makeover, and so the Muslim terrorists were able to freely operate in the Olympic Village.

The unarmed Israeli coaches and athletes fought the eight armed Muslim terrorists for their lives. Some were killed outright, one was castrated, while others were taken hostage. Germany rejected Israeli pleas to allow them to send a hostage rescue team. Shortly after the massacre was over, it began secret negotiations with the terrorists to cut a deal to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization.

After the massacre, the bodies of deceased terrorists were sent back and buried with full honors. Those terrorists who were arrested were shortly afterward released. The Olympics initially refused to even postpone the games and made no reference to the massacre. It took over 40 years for the Olympics to officially commemorate the dead athletes and coaches.

Abbas was one of the senior officials who planned the massacre and provided the money to carry it out. Scholz decided to hold a joint press conference with a Holocaust denier responsible for the worst post-Holocaust massacre of Jews on German soil. Was he really surprised or disgusted? And will there be any consequences?

As Stephen M. Flatow, an American father whose daughter Alisa was brutally murdered in a bus bombing in Israel, wrote in a recent editorial, "Germany sent the Palestinian Arabs $199 million last year."

"Let's not lose sight of the incredible hypocrisy of governments that shed crocodile tears over the Munich massacre, and then send hundreds of millions of dollars to a man who helped perpetrate it," he writes.

The German representative in Ramallah repeatedly boasts of all the money flowing from Berlin. None of that money will stop. No diplomatic relations will be cut.

In the past few months, Abbas has met with President Joe Biden, France's Emmanuel Macron and Romania's Klaus Iohannis – the Islamic terrorist leader was decorated with the "Star of Romania."

The only country to turn down a visit by Abbas was the Saudi kingdom.

When Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, often accused of antisemitism by the Left, visited Israel in 2018, he "broke protocol" by not scheduling a visit with Abbas. That was a rare exception to the world leaders who have hugged and shaken hands with the terrorist boss.

Biden, Putin and Xi Jinping have all paid tribute to Abbas and to the notion that Israel's existence on its own land represents some sort of "occupation," when the only occupation is the one carried on by the Arab Muslim colonists who terrorize Israel's indigenous Jewish population.

Despite clamoring about the occupation, Abbas promised Xi Jinping to stand with China in its occupation of Hong Kong and the repression of fellow Muslims in Xinjiang. He endorsed Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Not surprising for a dictator who was last elected in 2005.

Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, an imaginary place that never existed and still doesn't, claims to represent an equally imaginary Palestinian people. Whom does he actually represent? A poll of the Arab Muslim settlers living in the terrorist-occupied territories in Israel earlier this year revealed that 73% want Abbas to resign and that he would lose any election. So there isn't going to be an election and the big lie of "Palestine" will keep on going.

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Abbas is a terrorist who doesn't represent anyone except his armed minions and state sponsors. A "Palestinian" state is as historically legitimate as Islamic State, and its leader is as legitimately in office as was Adolf Hitler. The only thing that the murderous leadership of a fictional terror state have ever given the world is international terrorism.

Despite these indisputable facts, Scholz chose to welcome Abbas. And the rest of the world's leaders will go on welcoming the Holocaust denier and former KGB agent the way that Berlin once welcomed Hitler's Mufti. What was once the ugliness of the Nazi regime has become the multinational human rights consensus of the international community.

The Mufti of Jerusalem and Mahmoud Abbas have a simple message. Hitler invited the Mufti of Jerusalem because he agreed with his call to kill the Jews. World leaders continue to invite Abbas over because they agree with his message.

It would be undiplomatic of them to say so. They invite him to say it for them instead.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

The post A mass murderer of Jews goes to Berlin appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

The stabbing of author Salman Rushdie by a Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim from New Jersey may be the culmination of efforts by Iran to imitate Al Qaeda and Islamic State by building its own online terror network to carry out attacks inside the United States. The latest reports indicate that Hadi Matar, Rushdie's attacker, had been in touch with     members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

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The recent indictment of a member of the IRGC regime terror network for soliciting the assassination of former National Security Advisor John Bolton provided a window into how Iran has targeted former Trump administration members.

The IRGC operative struck up a relationship with an Iranian-American on social media by initially offering $10,000 for photos of Bolton. This is a familiar form of espionage tradecraft, in which a foreign spy solicits an American to perform a seemingly harmless and legal act, often involving photography, such as taking photos of individuals or cars, that is then revealed to be espionage committed at the behest of a foreign power. The patsy is then told that he has a choice between committing more serious crimes or being turned in to the FBI as a spy.

The Russians and the Chinese routinely operated this way (which also helps account for the large number of Chinese spies in America, as their citizens coming to this country are compelled to sign papers agreeing to cooperate with their intelligence services that becomes a source of leverage and blackmail), and it now appears that Iran has picked up the same trick.

The IRGC operative promised that Iran would pay $250,000 for hitting Bolton with a car. Indicating that the Iranians had already had their own surveillance operation that they did not want to compromise, the IRGC claimed that Bolton often took walks alone in the park.

The indictment and the Rushdie stabbing cast light on some mysterious incidents, including an Iranian woman from Berkeley who catfished an American on a dating site, met up with him at a Henderson, Nevada hotel room, and then stabbed him in the neck as "revenge against US troops for the killing of Qassem Soleimani." The death of the IRGC terror leader has been the pretext for assorted terror plots against military personnel and Trump administration members.

The media dismissed the March stabbing as oddball behavior. Media accounts suggested that the woman was mentally ill. But Henderson is close to Nellis Air Force Base, which hosts the MQ-9 Reaper: the same drone model that was used to take out Soleimani. The attack appeared to be a systematic effort to target a US Air Force drone pilot, lure him to a hotel room, blindfold him and then kill him. It was a terror plan that only looks ridiculous because it failed.

This is certainly not the first time that Iran has tried to pay for assassinations in the United States. A decade ago, IRGC operatives planned to kill the Saudi ambassador with a bomb at Cafe Milano, a prestigious DC restaurant patronized by senators, by employing an Iranian used car salesman from Texas in a plot that was arranged through meetings in Mexico.

A decade later, the internet eliminates any need for international travel. Iran's terror operatives can solicit Shi'ite Muslims in this country to commit terror attacks for them with no risk.

At least to the IRGC.

The failure of Al Qaeda terror plots after 9/11 amid the invasion of Afghanistan led the terror group to abandon its founding premise of serving as "The Base" and to crowdsource terrorism through the internet. Myspace was created a few months before the invasion of Iraq. A year later, Facebook emerged. Terror 2.0 took longer to arrive than Web 2.0, but it was close.

The vast majority of Al Qaeda and ISIS terror attacks no longer required the expensive and dangerous travel and training arrangements that had undone so many previous operations. Most of the crowdsourced terror attacks failed when jihadists contacted ISIS and Al Qaeda only to connect with the FBI – but a few, in Boston, San Bernardino, New York and Orlando, succeeded spectacularly. The same crowdsourcing momentum that had made Uber and Airbnb into billion dollar companies also made jihad risk-free and cheap for terrorist organizations. The perpetrators were dubbed "lone wolves," but are really the Uber drivers of the jihad.

Iran has been slow to get into the game. Shi'ite Muslims are a minority and the IRGC has relied on subsidiary terror groups like Hezbollah, the PMU's in Iraq, or for that matter Sunni Islamists like Al Qaeda and Hamas, to do its dirty work. America, unlike Europe, still doesn't have extensive terror networks beyond those of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. And Hezbollah utilizes its networks as a money train for smuggling drugs and cigarettes. The Lebanese Shi'ite jihadist network may be conducting some of the surveillance, but it doesn't want to threaten its cash flow from America that also buys it some independence from Iran.

Online crowdsourcing frees Iran from the need to risk the more profitable terror networks. There is evidence that the Islamic terror state is soliciting Iranians and Shi'ite Muslims in the United States over social media to do its dirty work while offering them sizable sums of money. It's unknown whether the Rushdie attack came off this way, but the perpetrator's social media was filled with Iranian jihadist propaganda. That would have made him a likely recruitment target.

If Iran is working to duplicate its own version of the Al Qaeda and ISIS online training and recruitment system, the threat to Americans could be much more serious than the stabbing of one dissident writer in New York or a man catfished in Nevada. The Islamic regime's ideal scenario for nuclear weapons would be to detonate them with plausible deniability.

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Iranian operatives have carried out direct assassinations of political dissidents in Europe, but have been cautious about putting boots on the ground inside the United States. Despite our weakness and their bluster, Iran still fears and respects us more than Europe. As America gets weaker and our society becomes more fractured, that may not last. For now, Tehran would prefer to carry out attacks by cultivating disposable foreign assets. And once such a capability exists and has been sufficiently tested, it could be used for mass casualty terrorist attacks.

Even nuclear ones.

The Biden administration is rushing to cut a deal with Iran that will legitimize its nuclear weapons program even as the IRGC continues to plot terror attacks in the United States. Obama's "breakthrough" proposal to detach a nuclear deal from terrorism left us negotiating in bad faith with a regime that made no secret of its determination to kill Americans.

Crowdsourcing jihad creates further distance between the state sponsors and funders of terrorism, the perpetrators and their victims. The Pulse massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings were traceable to individuals, and then only distantly to the Islamic terror groups providing information and training, and hardly at all to the governments behind them.

Iran would like to replicate this model, knowing that America's morale is much weaker than its military and intel capabilities, and that if there is enough plausible deniability, we will do nothing about even the worst kinds of attacks, like September 11. Just ask Qatar and the Saudis.

The gradual uptick in Iran-linked domestic terrorism is a warning that Iran's efforts to create its own cadre of Shi'ite "lone wolves" over the internet may be working. And that worse may come.

Featured on JNS.org, this article was first published by FrontPage Magazine.

The post Iran building its own online ISIS in America    appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

"Good evening to the thousands of you who are joining us from around the country," Doug Emhoff, the Hollywood lawyer serving as Kamala's husband, intoned.

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The sign-language interpreter on the small box next to him spread her arms in what was either an attempt to sign Passover or a gesture of disbelief and contempt.

The "People's Seder" was about to begin, with its apostrophe in the right place and heart in the wrong one.

As the Biden White House rushes to enable Iran's nuclear program and the modern-day pharaonic mullahs plotting, like the original, to wipe out the Jews, it put on a "People's Seder" to distract American Jews from its complicity in the latest acts of terror from Iran to Israel.

The People's Seder sounds like a Berkeley commune. A day before the eve of Passover, the administration's second virtual seder served no function except to give Emhoff something to do. Perhaps knowing that, Emhoff claimed, with a mostly straight face, that he had traveled the country hearing from people "how much last year's virtual seder had meant to them."

Emhoff made no mention of the over a dozen Israelis recently killed in terror attacks. Neither, seemingly, did so many of the speakers who rambled on about the importance of "empathy."

Empathy applies to everyone except the Israeli Jews mourning their dead.

Passover, to Emhoff, proved to be about Ukraine, about the pandemic and "protecting democracy." Maybe Emhoff can tell us which democratic process elected Moses.

Then a particularly haggard Biden, looking awkwardly at things off camera, boasted that this was the "first time in three years that families sit around the seder table."

That might be true in Washington, but it certainly isn't true in America.

Biden then declared that during Passover, his hearts were "with the people of Ukraine."

The camera cut to the White House's bewildered Jewish liaison.

Passover, so far, was about Ukraine.

The previous seder, featuring an anti-Israel activist, was apparently so popular that Emhoff decided to recycle his shtick about "gelatinous gefilte fish" from last year. Then he declared that "ever since I was a kid, I have been inspired by the story of Exodus."

Indeed, who could forget the time Moses went back to Egypt, married Pharaoh's sister and settled down to the business of assisting in the genocide of the Jews.

Emhoff's presentation was followed by a long list of speakers eager to delve into Passover as a metaphor and uninterested in it as a substantial reality.

There was Andrew Rehfeld, the first "non-rabbinic" head of the Reform Movement's Hebrew Union College seminary, who had defended BDS supporters against claims of antisemitism.

"Some students have been attracted to the BDS movement because of their love of Israel, and their repugnance of what they see as its unjust treatment of Palestinians," Rehfeld had argued. "BDS is not the answer. But that does not mean that their concerns are without merit."

Rehfeld appeared with a large placard behind him declaring, "Another Jew for LGBTQ Equality."

The non-rabbinic head of a movement that denies the existence of the God of the Torah made no mention of the Creator of the universe, but spoke about "bullying" and "civil society."

That was followed by J Street's Deborah Lipstadt, who talked about Ukraine, and Jeopardy host Mayim Bialik who… also talked about Ukraine. An ignorant viewer might have concluded that in the Bible, the Jews had left Ukraine, rather than Egypt.

After a brief interjection by an Orthodox rabbi who actually had a seder plate on display, next up was Afroculinaria's Michael W. Twitty, a black, gay social justice chef who had previously accused Israel of racism and who explained that in his seder molasses "represented the transatlantic slave trade."

Dayenu!

The People's Seder was dedicated to philosophical abstractions that erased Jews and negated the fundamental truths of the Passover story. Attaching "The People's" to something is a negation. That's why the various democratic people's republics were anything but and why the People's Seder isn't a seder, or at least not a Jewish one, but a People's Republic of Seder.

Less than two minutes into his virtual farce, Emhoff had declared that "even though the Exodus tells the story of a particular people, its message is universal." To secularists, everything about Judaism is universal, and nothing is particular or relevant to the actual Jews.

It would also be dangerous to focus on the particular people currently being killed once again in their own country because Emhoff's wife's boss chooses to stand with Islamic terrorism.

After the People's Seder was done, Ambassador Tom Nides, who had been caught praising a BDS group and boasting of trying to keep Jews out of Jerusalem, issued a press release in English, Arabic and Hebrew (in that order) which urged "Jews, Muslims and Christians" (also in that order) to avoid "actions that further escalate tensions" during "this sacred holiday period."

That would include concluding the seder with the traditional call, "Next Year in Jerusalem," signifying a return to a city that Biden and Nides deny is Jewish and want to keep Jews out of.

Nides, Emhoff and other administration enablers of Jewish descent erase Jews from Passover and Jerusalem, and replace the real people and their history with social justice abstractions.

Part of the problem is that Emhoff, like your average leftist of Jewish ancestry, knows as much about Judaism as I do about dating Kamala. And cares just as little. Stripping Judaism of its particularism appears liberating to someone like Emhoff because it also frees him of what he and his family see as a limitation on their identities and their potential social aspirations.

The People's Seder is not a Jewish people's seder, because that's the last thing Emhoff wants.

To lefties of Jewish descent, liberation means the ability to be less Jewish. That is at odds with the message of Passover and of Judaism, which is that liberation comes from being more Jewish. The Jews who had tried to fit into Pharaoh's tyranny had become slaves, while the slaves who defied an empire by conducting a seder that mocked Egyptian beliefs were set free.

Universalism is enslaving while particularism is liberating.

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The Passover seder's message, with its careful recreation of the particular experiences, sensory, emotional and intellectual, of Egyptian slavery and liberation, is a painstaking exercise in particularism. The People's Seder, like virtually all lefty religious practices, is an equally painstaking exercise in rejecting the particular for the universal, by turning the events into metaphors that can be glibly made to mean anything as long as it's unrelated to the Jews.

It's all very well to turn the story of Passover into a metaphor, but Moses didn't arrive to talk to Pharaoh about abstractions like empathy and emotional growth, but with a simple message:

"Let my people go."

The People's Seder claims to be about liberation, but actually enslaves. It rejects "the four languages of liberation," whose four steps – "I will take you out," "I will save you," "I will redeem you" and "I will take you" – develop it as relationship between God and the Jewish people, to universalize it into hollow self-help empowerment in which there is no relationship with God.

Instead, there is a relationship with the leftist deity of government that would have been all too familiar to Pharaoh.

Worship of government isn't liberation, it's slavery.

 Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

The post White House seder makes a mockery of Passover and Jews appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

When three Jewish teens were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 2013, Israel fought back, Jews mourned and New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel rushed to claim that Hamas was not responsible.

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"There is a Hamas official in the story saying they are not Hamas," she insisted on Twitter.

It was a low point in a career of smearing Israel with lies and hate, but not unusual.

Frenkel had previously accused Israel of using white phosphorus, falsely claimed that there had been a blast at an Iranian nuclear facility, wrongly described an Israeli ban on Gaza construction materials, and concluded her coverage of the brutal murder of a rabbi and his family in India with a quote suggesting that "the attitudes of the Chabad, which gives the sense of an elite club for Jews alone, is part of what provoked the terrorists to target them for the attack."

This is the sort of ugly, hateful behavior the Anti-Defamation League should be condemning, not celebrating.

After a career of spreading disinformation against the Jewish state, Frenkel got a job covering "disinformation" for NYT. And she'll be taking part in a conversation on the spread of "disinformation" at the opening session of the ADL's "Never Is Now" summit.

The virtual event will also feature Frenkel's fellow New York Times activist Kara Swisher, who has her own history of anti-Israel tweets, including a link to a column in the paper defending BDS, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and with the rest of the antisemitic "Squad" and arguing that it's possible to "oppose Jewish ethno-nationalism without being a bigot."

Vice President Kamala Harris and "Lost" actor Daniel Dae Kim will also be speaking at the event, as will activists associated with anti-Israel hate groups like J Street and the Israel Policy Forum. Not a single pro-Israel group will be represented at the event.

This is how the ADL claims to be fighting antisemitism.

While the ADL has not seen fit to invite any pro-Israel activists, it did find a place for Amy Spitalnick, the former press secretary for J Street, who had worked on Anthony Weiner's mayoral campaign and then went on to serve as a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Earlier this year, Spitalnick appeared at a virtual J Street event alongside Peter Beinart, who supports BDS and recently wrote a New York Times op-ed headlined, "I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State." Spitalnick, who currently claims to be fighting Nazis, defended the antisemitic play "Seven Jewish Children," which even The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg described as "anti-Jewish agitprop" and a Guardian op-ed compared to a medieval blood libel.

Before Spitalnick had reinvented herself as a Nazi-fighter, she was defending material that has been compared to Nazi propaganda and depicts Jews as the new Nazis.

And that's the sort of thing that the ADL decided is a good fit for Never is Now.

In addition to Spitalnick, Oren Jacobson, the head of a pro-abortion group and affiliated with the Israel Policy Forum, will also be speaking.

Also invited is Sara Yael Hirschhorn, who, as Moshe Philips at Israel National News pointed out, had accused Israel of "ethnic cleansing." "The Palestinian case shares some common features with South Africa – population transfer/ethnic cleansing," Hirschhorn tweeted. She also claimed that Israel is guilty of "daily violations of human rights."

Hirschhorn has cultivated a storied Israel-bashing career with New York Times op-eds like "Israeli Terrorists, Born in the USA" Her book City on a Hilltop, attacking Jews living in their historical homeland in Judea and Samaria, was featured, along with the author, at a Foundation for Middle East Peace event. FMEP, a part of the Arab Lobby, accuses Israel of "apartheid."

Past Never is Now conferences had at least tried for a pretense of balance by inviting a liberal pro-Israel activist or two. But now the ADL's Jonathan Greenblatt is taking off the mask.

The ADL is putting Israel, Jews and antisemitism on the back burner; the opening session of Never is Now features Daniel Dae Kim talking about anti-Asian hate. The third session is titled, "Confronting Anti-Black Racism to Fight Antisemitism" and falsely claims that "Anti-black racism is… an issue in our synagogues, schools and Jewish institutions."

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The ADL was never a good organization, but I can remember when it used to condemn Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan instead of echoing them.

Now the ADL's idea of fighting antisemitism is telling Jews that they're a bunch of racists.

"Without addressing the impact of racism," the ADL falsely claims, "we cannot move forward in the fight against antisemitism." It touts a panel that will "explore how critical it is to fight anti-black racism in order to build a stronger and more effective movement across communities to dismantle antisemitism." Making fighting antisemitism secondary to fighting racism is the most obvious symptom of a sellout organization that puts wokeness ahead of its core mission.

The NAACP does not tell its members that fighting racism should be secondary to fighting antisemitism. Nor does it create the artificial linkage that the ADL proposes, which not only makes antisemitism a secondary issue but demands that Jews admit to being racist.

After the past few years, in which there were two domestic terrorist attacks against Jews by members of the Black Hebrew Israelite hate group, in which major leftist movement leaders have praised Louis Farrakhan and in which there have been repeated antisemitic hate crimes in the New York area carried out by black assailants, the ADL should be addressing black antisemitism instead of accusing Jews of racism. But the ADL doesn't care about antisemitism.

Only the final sessions, "Combating Anti-Zionist and Antisemitic Activism in Progressive Spaces" and "Confronting Antisemitism on Campus" actually address commonplace, everyday antisemitism. Instead of putting the fight against antisemitism first, the ADL puts it last.

The careful tenor with which it addresses leftist antisemitism on campus and in organizational life is very different from its willingness to denounce every other form of bigotry. When it comes to its condemnation of racism against "Black, Latinx, AAPI, Muslim, LGBTQ+," the ADL doesn't engage in nuance or seek to distinguish between legitimate opinions and racist ones. Yet when it comes to leftist antisemitism, the ADL is careful to cultivate an imaginary distinction between good leftist hatred of Israel and bad leftist hatred of Jews so as not to offend its political allies.

Antisemitism is the only bigotry that the ADL believes requires nuance toward the bigots.

The ADL leadership is deferential toward leftist antisemitism because, unlike with far-right antisemitism or any kind of racism or prejudice, it concedes that leftist antisemitism has a point.

The roster of anti-Israel bigots it invited to present at Never is Now signals as much.

Instead of opposing leftist antisemitism, the ADL would like leftists to moderate it, to draw lines between appropriate and inappropriate hate, but as the history of its own collaborators in leftist antisemitism show, that line is as imaginary as the ADL's Jewish commitments.

The ADL's decision to not only stock its virtual conference with radical leftists who wage a disinformation war against Jews, but to invite high school students to attend, shows just how destructive to Jewish life the organization's wokeness under Greenblatt has become.

Instead of calling its conferences Never is Now, maybe the ADL should call them Now Again.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The Sunrise Movement DC's ultimatum that either the Jews had to be kicked out or it would boycott a D.C. statehood rally was a familiar purity test.

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Purity tests that have no constructive purpose except to undermine and oust a leadership that is insufficiently radical have become commonplace in the Reign of Terror era of American politics.

When Democrats adopt socialism, endorse the elimination of the police, tear down the statues of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, champion critical race theory and insist that there's no such thing as men and women, it's as the result of an escalating series of purity tests.

Hating Jews is just the latest progressive purity test.

Sunrise DC declared that it would not participate in events with what it falsely claimed were Zionist groups, but were actually mostly fellow leftists who hate Israel as much as they do.

The National Council of Jewish Women, one of the three groups singled out by Sunrise DC, had supported or allied with Linda Sarsour, Peter Beinart, and Rep. Ilhan Omar. The NCJW had gone as far out of its way to align with the Hamas caucus as it was possible without actually turning into an anti-Israel protest group. Revealingly, nothing it had done was good enough.

It never is.

Why beat up on Sarsour and Omar's pals? Sunrise DC was actually imposing an antisemitism purity test on the Declaration for American Democracy, a pro-election-rigging coalition. And true to form, its ultimatum was met with an uncomfortable refusal by other leftist groups and politicians to either condemn antisemitism or condemn the Jews. The purity test had succeeded.

Black Lives Matter DC swiftly jumped in to declare that Sunrise DC's "statement wasn't anti-Semitic, no matter how many times oppressors want to repeat it." This was as much a threat to any leftist, prog, or liberal who might want to stand up to antisemitism as it was to Jews. Fail the antisemitism purity test and Black Lives Matter will damn you as an oppressor.

Even before the BLM threat, the message had been received, and the outcome noted.

The same Democrat establishment that tossed away American history, including its own, opposition to racism, support for women's rights and dozens of other things that it used to claim were principles but actually turned out to be mere shibboleths, was ready to throw Jews on the bonfire of its convictions. Not that it should have surprised anyone except Jewish leftists.

The antisemitism purity test was inevitable based on the history of the last two centuries and a much more recent history of modern institutional antisemitism at colleges and universities.

Sunrise DC and BLM DC were running the same play that their members had likely taken part in on college campuses, where Jewish students are routinely ousted from student government and campus positions on the pretext that they must be Zionists. Like safe spaces and pronoun police, what happens on campus doesn't stay on campus. Only now the entire civic space is playing the role of the helpless university administrators who don't want to offend the radicals.

The leap of these anti-Semitic purges from the campus to major leftist advocacy groups foreshadows the next stage of the leap—when they become a fundamental reality of public life in the institutions, private and public, controlled by the new generation of identity-politics leftists.

Hating Jews, under the putative guise of opposing Zionism, is about to become a core progressive value. And those values have become the moral code of the ruling class.

The Jewish groups that failed to fight campus antisemitism are about to live under it.

A movement like this is not just the product of a few activists with social media accounts. Nor is the evolution of the antisemitism purity test a tantrum being thrown by a few obscure groups.

When you follow the money, it becomes all too obvious what is really taking place here.

The Sunrise Movement is funded by George Soros and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, among others. Soros and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund are the premier funders of the anti-Israel movement in America. It's unlikely that the Sunrise Movement, an environmental group that previously showed little interest in Israel, suddenly decided to boycott a completely unrelated rally because organizations with the "J" word in their name were going to be present.

Likewise, it's implausible that the Movement for Black Lives, a BLM umbrella group, launched its support for BDS and opposition to the Jewish state for reasons unrelated to its close ties to the Ford Foundation, whose own funding of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activities are legendary.

The rise of what some have called the new antisemitism is not simply an activist phenomenon. Nor is it especially clear that there is an authentic grassroots leftist movement that can be separated from the billionaire donors and foundations who finance the groups that fund it. Much as Soviet front groups couldn't be properly detached from the Old Left, the foundations that serve a similar role can't be detached from the New Left. Tracing the money is difficult enough, but determining when the foundations fund ideas or originate them can be all but impossible.

What is clearer is that leftist antisemitism is a top-down, not a bottom-up, phenomenon.

American Jews have tried to convince themselves that individual incidents, first on campuses and then in the streets, violence and vandalism under the guise of political correctness, did not make a pattern. They have gone on trying to ignore these "random events" while refusing to connect the dots, and trying to silence those who were connecting the dots for them.

And when they finally do connect the dots, they're eager to blame Israel, not the anti-Semites.

But the left was purging Jews before there was a modern State of Israel, on the grounds that they were reactionaries, bourgeois, cosmopolitans, or any number of similar accusations.

Zionism is just the latest politically correct excuse for hating Jews. And it's not the only one.

The National Council of Jewish Women, much like the anti-Israel activists of the Religious Action Center of the Reform movement, might wonder why they were targeted. If they had any sense of history, including their own, they would know that the whole point of purity tests is to reduce the base to mindless radicalism by convincing them to embrace what they once knew to be wrong. That includes convincing people to hate others and to hate themselves.

Each purity test passed destroys the morals, principles and basic decency of human beings. It's how normal people turn into the howling mobs we read about in history books or watch in historical newsreels. "What kind of people could do that?" we wonder.

The answer is all around us.

Compelling people who used to be Democrats, then liberals, then progressives and finally dogmatic leftists to jump through one more hoop makes them more willing to do anything.

And if there's anything that history teaches about the left, from Stalin to Mao, from Che to Pol Pot, from Kim Jong-il to Mengistu, it is that there will come a time when ordinary people will indeed be expected to do "anything," whether it's to kill or to be killed in the name of the revolution.

antisemitism is just one more stop on the extremist expressway. Like critical race theory and much of the rest of identity politics, it divides people into those who deserve to be beaten and those who deserve to do the beating, to distract everyone from the fact that the leftist ideology of victims and oppressors is really about creating plenty more of both as grist for its political mill.

The Sunrise Movement claims that the planet is on the verge of destruction, and Black Lives Matter insists that the greatest threat to black people are police officers. Both are absurd lies, but like antisemitism, they're really weaponized distractions for a massive power grab.

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Meanwhile, the same American Jewish establishment that was convinced that the answer to antisemitism was social justice can't help but double down on it even as it is becoming inescapably obvious that social justice isn't the answer to antisemitism: it is antisemitism.

Organizations like NCJW or RAC embrace the extreme margins of the left and are baffled when the antisemitism from those margins not only intensifies but burns hotter than ever. The purity tests intensify with each concession: each willingness to embrace Sarsour, Omar, and whatever leftist social justice bigot follows on their heels only leads to worse hatred.

The leftist antisemitism that began on college campuses is defining a leftist America.

Featured on JNS.org, this article was first published by FrontPage Magazine.

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Whenever I get asked about Israeli politics on the radio, the first thing I do is point out that Israeli politics isn't America, it's European.

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Israel was controlled by the British. More of its founders were European than American. That means the same messy coalition parliamentary politics without even the benefit of regional representation and direct elections.

It's a terrible system that serves all the wrong people.

The last few years have been a grinding disaster of repeat elections because first, a huge chunk of Israel's political spectrum wants to oust Netanyahu. Those on the left, including pseudo-centrists like Yesh Atid Party leader Yair Lapid, are motivated by ideology. Others, on the right, are scrambling for power.

Second, no leader within Netanyahu's Likud or outside has emerged as a viable alternative to him. Non-Likud parties have little credibility. Especially those on the left. The fake centrist parties that act as leftist stalking horses have even less credibility.

What finally happened is that one of the alternative right-wing parties got together with the left and Israel's worst enemies to form a coalition. And the media is celebrating Netanyahu's downfall while preparing to spin this as proof that Israel is terrible.

I'm not in the business of making political predictions, but I am skeptical that a coalition so ridiculously unwieldy can hold up. And Netanyahu is far from done. There are plenty of reasons for Israelis to be disappointed by Netanyahu, but this alternative coalition is the equivalent of Never Trumpers campaigning for Hillary. Except it's even worse, by a factor of a few thousand.

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The only thing uniting the Never Netanyahu coalition is hatred of the man himself, and of religious Jews. That's a weak bond and won't make for a stable power-sharing arrangement even assuming it manages to get any further off the ground.

The only thing that the coalition proves is that the Never Netanyahus have yet to come up with an alternative to him.

Featured on JNS.org, this article was first published by FrontPage Magazine.

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After DeSean Jackson of the Philadelphia Eagles posted a fake Hitler quote claiming that "white Jews knows that the Negroes are the real Children of Israel and to keep Americas secret the Jews will blackmail America," he was sentenced to a Zoom session with a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor.

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"I'm taking this time to continue with educating myself and bridging the gap between different cultures, communities & religions," Jackson informed the world via his Instagram account.

The NFL player is presumably still a Farrakhan supporter and will go on playing with the Eagles.

Then Nick Cannon, the host of "The Masked Singer," took off his own mask when he hosted a podcast which praised Farrakhan and claimed that the anti-Semitic things that he and his guest, Professor Griff, formerly of Public Enemy, were saying weren't anti-Semitic because black people are the real Semites.

Nick also apologized and visited a Holocaust museum. As if Hitler, not Farrakhan, were the issue. And he'll keep on hosting "The Masked Singer" because cancel culture is backward when it comes to Jews. Anti-Semitism actually helps convince Jewish organizations to promote anti-Semitic celebrities.

After Chelsea Handler posted a Farrakhan video and then told anyone who didn't like it to "go f*** themselves," she not only didn't lose out on her HBO Max special or her Penguin Random House book tour, but got Jewish federations to help promote her book about her new politically correct wokeness.

You're not going to get canceled for anti-Semitism, but you can get canceled for philosemitism.

Over in the United Kingdom, Stephen Lamonby, a university engineering lecturer, was booted out for speaking positively of Jews. "I believe that the Jewish are the cleverest people in the world. They are much maligned because of it," he had allegedly said.

Judge C.H. O'Rourke upheld Lamonby's dismissal, contending that, "a Jew told they are good at physics, because they are a Jew, may well consider that as demeaning their personal intellectual ability."

And yet one can't help but suspect that if Lamonby's crime had been cheering on Hamas and suggesting that the Jews were the new Nazis, there would be a legion of academic defenders rising on his behalf.

The problem wasn't that the 73-year-old Hollywood veteran was anti-Semitic, but philosemitic.

Cancel culture rewards anti-Semitism, even as it ruthlessly punishes the mildest forms of political incorrectness, and assails those people who express an affinity for Jews and support for Israel.

And the alphabet soup of organizations that claim to represent Jews plays its part in this perversion.

The institutional infrastructure of federations, museums and organizations that claim to represent Jews, despite having been subject to fewer elections than a Cuban dictator, knows quite well what to do with anti-Semites. At least those who are famous enough to do more than dismiss them out of hand. It takes them to a Holocaust museum and asks them not to be so mean and hurtful the next time around.

The ritual is degrading and pointless for everyone involved, but only the anti-Semites understand that.

A few years ago, DC Councilman Trayon White suggested that Jews control the weather. So naturally, he was taken to visit the D.C. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he made assorted bizarre remarks and then left early. White, who has the expected Farrakhan ties, is still in office, but he hasn't lately accused Jews of controlling the weather. He knows what will happen if he does. Another museum tour.

But philosemites who may express their friendliness in politically incorrect ways are awkward.

The neurotic liberal establishment that insists on dragging Farrakhan fans who believe that Jews control the world, the weather, and are only pretending to be Jews, to Holocaust museums, does so because it wants to be liked by people who hate Jews and believes bigoted celebrities are the best sorts of people.

It doesn't especially want to be liked by people who like Jews because they're not very trendy.

Choosing between Nick Cannon and Stephen Lamonby -- a young black celebrity and an elderly white male engineer -- is an easy choice for organizations concerned not with integrity, but with popularity.

Like every nerd, they don't want to be thought of as clever, but cool.

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The dirty little secret of fighting anti-Semitism is that it's never been concerned with what the wrong people do, but with what the right people say. The Anti-Defamation League got started battling vaudeville depictions of Jews by Jews because the latter, Eastern European and Russian Jews, embarrassed the ADL's German Jews. If American Jewish organizations had put in a fraction of the effort trying to save Jews from the Holocaust that they did battling for admission to country clubs, fewer Holocaust museums would be needed.

The battle against anti-Semitism is obsessed with class perceptions instead of actually saving lives.

Even now, there's a lot of interest in policing speech and little interest in preventing violence. When an idiot celebrity spews hate, he's taken off to view photos of Auschwitz. Meanwhile, Peter Beinart can call for the destruction of Israel and still have plenty of speaking opportunities in temples across America.

Resuming foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority, the updated brand of the PLO, which directly compensates terrorists who kill Jews, is the mainstream position of the Democrat Party.

If only the Jewish Democrats who wanted the host of a show where famous people dress up as giant singing geese to visit a Holocaust museum were as motivated to stop the actual murder of Jews.

While organizations that spent generations lecturing about anti-Semitism supported sending the Palestinian Authority more money so it could go on paying terrorists to kill Jewish teenage girls in Jerusalem, President Trump stepped in and took an ax to the terrorist money pipeline.

To their outrage.

Jewish Democrats are working hard to elect Biden so that terrorists will once again be paid to kill Jews.

President Trump, like Lamonby, often expresses his affinity for Jews in politically incorrect ways. The same organizations that were falling over themselves to tell DeSean Jackson about the Holocaust wouldn't be caught dead with Trump. Like Lamonby, he's another old white male. Politically incorrect.

But his cutoff of aid to the Palestinian Authority actually saved Jews from being killed by terrorists.

The organizations conducting their unauthorized battles against anti-Semitism have conflated prejudice with violence. They have no clue how to fight the former and no interest in fighting the latter.

Prejudice isn't fought with Holocaust museum tours, but with dignity. The first line of defense against it is having enough self-respect not to offer atonement to bigots who have nothing but contempt for you. Unfortunately, too many Jews on the left and the right can be counted on to launch into militant defenses, asked or unasked, of bigots on their side and to do so by leveraging their own status as Jews.

And too many organizations are happy to whitewash trendy bigots while ignoring uncool supporters.

What the fight against anti-Semitism really needs is the ability to separate class anxieties about acceptance from real threats. And that won't be done by organizations like the ADL, whose class anxieties have transformed it into a generic leftist advocacy group with little interest in Jewish issues, or the rest of its organizational cohort whose priority is winning the acceptance of the urban upper class.

And that acceptance is premised on embracing the left-wing politics and anti-Semitism of that class. That's how fighting anti-Semitism to mute class anxieties perversely turns into embracing anti-Semitism.

Distinguishing between class anxieties and real threats doesn't require futile efforts to educate celebrities who like Farrakhan with Holocaust museum tours, but to educate Jews about dignity and self-respect. People who are less worried about acceptance by those it's not worth being accepted by are better able to deal with real threats to their physical existence instead of threats to their feelings.

Cancel culture is the product of people who don't have actual problems and spend all their time worrying about their feelings. Jews do have actual problems, including synagogue attacks by black nationalists and alt-right gunmen, Iranian nukes and the harassment of Jewish students on campus.

When we focus on real-world attacks, then the real problems of anti-Semitism also come into focus.

A people possessing its own dignity is able to stop chasing the affections of its enemies, whether in the Middle East or closer to home, and accept the affection of its friends even if they aren't trendy enough.

This article was first published by FrontPage Magazine.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Joe Biden was forced to apologize for opposing crime and busing. Bernie Sanders had to offer up mea culpas for ever being on good terms with the NRA and for questioning open borders, Kamala Harris had to apologize for enforcing whatever passes for the law in California, as did Amy Klobuchar, who also had to apologize for having once supported border fencing and English as the country's national language.

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After jumping into the race, Michael Bloomberg launched his own apology tour for trying to stop gang violence with 'stop and frisk', for criticizing Obamacare, and the easy loans that wrecked the economy.

No candidate, no matter how lefty, is ever truly pure enough for the party of the perpetually woke. Any politician old enough to run for the White House also has a history of believing in things like borders, language, biology, math, law and order, free speech, and any other realities that offend the Wokeratti.

Only a candidate who has done nothing except chastely spout radical nonsense can pass the purity test.

That's why Bernie Sanders, a hack from a minor state who, until being excavated by some Obama campaign people who hadn't gotten a gig with the Clinton campaign, was an obscure nobody who had done nothing except rename post offices, is leading the Democrat death march to political oblivion.

There may be 48 years' worth of difference between Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, but they both have the same amount of experience getting anything done in Washington, D.C. The only thing either of them has ever done, him in a long career, her in a short one, is lay out imaginary visions of socialist utopias without having the life skills to change a flat tire, catch a bus, or make their own breakfast.

The Democrats have become a party divided between the moderates, obsessed with destroying Trump, and the socialists, obsessed with destroying the Democrats. The emerging representative of the former is Bloomberg: a billionaire willing to blow through 1.5% of his net worth to stop President Trump. And Bernie represents the vanguard of the oppressed proletariat of Burlington, San Francisco and Aspen, who are slightly to the right of Castro, but, like their leader, have no clue how to get anything done.

Bloomberg represents the core Dems who don't care about anything except beating Trump, while Bernie represents the radicals who care less about beating Trump than about beating the Bloombergs.

The average Democrat outside the DNC doesn't understand this distinction. That's why Bernie is leading.

In the party's current electability obsession, any candidate who does well is electable and can beat Trump. That includes Sanders, a talking horse, and Klobuchar. Biden maintained the lead for so long because he seemed electable. Details like what he actually believes and whether he's playing with a full deck were deemed irrelevant. Those same details also don't matter when it comes to Bernie.

But that just meant that the Democrats outsourced policy to the radical fringe that cares about issues.

That's why the 2020 primaries have seen Democrats endorse gun confiscation (Beto O'Rourke), letting the Boston Marathon bomber vote from prison (Sanders), eliminating private health insurance (Sanders, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren), eliminating free speech on the internet (Warren) and taking away the tax-exempt status of churches and synagogues that don't back gay marriage (O'Rourke).

These are not winning issues.

Most Democrats claim they want electable candidates, but they're going into 2020 with unelectable policy proposals hanging around their necks that will alienate the average voters they need to win.

House Democrats could have changed that, but instead they were sucked into the impeachment black hole. And no matter how much Speaker Pelosi resisted, the one part of elected government that the Democrats control is best known for an obsession with Trump and a disinterest in everything else.

Hating Trump isn't a winning strategy. The post-impeachment polls showed that all too clearly.

But it's either that or nationalizing health care, confiscating guns, banning churches and letting terrorists vote from prison. And those are even worse platforms to run on than Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The Democrats are now on track to have a nominee who once said, "I don't mind people coming up and calling me a communist" because they didn't care about anything else except destroying Trump.

And, instead, they're destroying themselves.

The Democrats have locked their party into only one possible strategy and that's turning out as much of their base as possible. But turnout signals from the primaries have been mixed and large-scale national events like the Impeachment Eve rallies and the Women's March fizzled badly with few attendees.

The white suburbanites whose cultural hostility fueled the "resistance" appear to be fading. Despite their hatred of Trump, they're wary of socialism. And a Sanders win would depress their turnout. But a win by anyone except Sanders will depress turnout by his base of Marxist profs and unemployed vloggers. None of the leading candidates summon much enthusiasm from black voters.

Massive turnout requires a united party. And that was a lot easier when they were uniting against something.

2018 saw great turnout because the Democrats rallied around their common front of hating Trump. But uniting against Trump is very different than uniting behind Bernie, Bloomberg, or any other candidate.

Hatred is a powerful force. But it's no substitute for leadership.

Republican primaries have seen massive turnout because of support for President Trump. A united party is set to face off against a divided party. And that is very bad news for the subdivided Democrats.

Hatred doesn't unite political movements. It divides them.

Any political movement that depends on division is inherently fractured. The deeper the divisions become, the harder Democrats hate their common enemy. But underneath that common hatred are a thousand festering hatreds, rivalries and resentments, waiting to break out into internecine warfare.

The Democrats are now at risk of winding up with a brokered convention because hate divided them.

In the Trump Derangement Syndrome era, the Democrats no longer really stand for anything and are willing to fall for anything, from radical ideologies to billionaires and socialists buying the nomination.

Hatred has hollowed out the Democrats, leaving behind nothing but a great empty void.

The primaries are the dark night of the Democrat soul. The party's soul has fed on poisonous hatred. Morning has come to America. But morning may never come to the Democrats divided in darkness.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

This article was first published by FrontPage Magazine and reprinted with permission from JNS.org. 

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