Yet others, who should know better, such as historian Deborah Lipstadt, and former Anti-Defamation League head and Holocaust survivor Abe Foxman, defended the advertisement. Lipstadt suggested that it was fine because it was comparing the present administration not to the Nazi regime's extermination campaign, but to its anti-Semitic policies and practices early in its ascension to power.

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The most troubling aspect of the ad, to any fair-minded observer, has nothing to do with which particular Nazi policies it invoked, but with the lie at the heart of its analogy and the dangers of that lie. The producers of the ad seek to cast it as an effort to protect American Jews in the face of troubling developments in US society. But the ad fails to address the particulars of such developments and seeks to divert attention away from their primary source. It's not designed to protect Jews from increasing abuse, but rather to protect the Democratic Party from criticism for its role in fostering that abuse.

Anti-Semitism in America comes from four main sources: white supremacism, black supremacism, Islamism and elements of leftist progressivism. In recent years, the first has claimed the most Jewish lives, in Pittsburgh and in Poway. But Jews have been killed for being Jews in New Jersey and New York, and many more have been injured by assailants driven by one or more of the latter three ideologies. Moreover, by most measures, white supremacism has the least following in America of the four. Certainly, it has penetrated less into the mainstream than the other three. Those three, and their anti-Semitism, have extensive support on the nation's college and university campuses; have their Jew-hatred either ignored or downplayed in the mainstream media and in social media, such as Google, Twitter and Facebook; and have even penetrated into the halls of Congress. And in every venue, their normalization of Jew-hatred has been abetted by the Democratic Party.

In response to anti-Jewish tropes and memes from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), the party could not bring itself to pass a straightforward condemnation of her anti-Semitism, but instead acceded to Democrat caucus pressure and issued a bland generic critique of all bigotries. Omar and fellow Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), likewise given to anti-Jewish rhetoric, refused to join a party-sponsored trip to Israel in the summer of 2019 for new members of Congress, but instead insisted on having their travels sponsored by a Palestinian organization, Miftah, notorious for its Holocaust denial, its accusations that Jews use the blood of Christians to prepare Passover matzah and its promotion of anti-Jewish terror.

The party leadership's response was not to criticize the two, but instead to attack Israel for preventing their entry. In this year's Democratic primaries, despite the presence in their respective races of party candidates less hostile to Jews, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) endorsed both Omar and Tlaib for re-election.

The party has embraced the Black Lives Matter movement, has ignored the anti-Jewish rhetoric of BLM leaders, and was silent as BLM mobs attacked and defaced synagogues and targeted Jewish-owned properties in, for example, the Fairfax section of Los Angeles.

At the Democrat convention in August, places of honor were accorded to acolytes of Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan and Jew-bashers Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory, as well as Farrakhan promoter Pastor Frederick Haynes, who was featured at the convention's "Our Values" Black Caucus event. Imam Noman Hussain, notorious for inciting hatred of non-believers, particularly Jews, was given a place of honor at the convention's "Interfaith Welcome Service."

In the face of some censure of Sarsour's role at the convention—and some noting of its inconsistency with the Biden campaign's efforts to project an image of moderation—the campaign issued a statement criticizing Sarsour. That criticism unleashed a backlash by many in the party, and the Biden camp subsequently issued an unpublicized apology.

The Democrat Party has also been essentially silent about growing hostility towards Jews being promoted in Democrat bastions in the wider society. The major American institutions abetting anti-Semitism are America's colleges and universities, dominated by Democrats, and the party has made no effort to curb this disgrace. Jew-hatred is rapidly expanding from higher education into public and private schools, often aided by Democrat state and local governments, and this, too, proceeds unchecked by the party.

In addition, of course, is the hostility to Israel coming from major elements of the party, including from elements of its congressional delegation.

On all of this, the Jewish Democratic Council of America is silent, neither expressing concern nor seeking to arouse the vigilance of the Jewish community. Instead, it seeks to blame the Trump administration for the rising tide of anti-Semitism and to misdirect Jewish concern, particularly seeking to link the president to white supremacist anti-Semitism.

Ignored are the many times he has explicitly condemned white supremacists. Ignored is the fact that both the Pittsburgh and Poway killers expressed their hatred of Trump.

Even more substantively, it is Trump, not Democrat leaders, who has taken steps to address anti-Semitism in this country and around the world, and particularly to counter the epidemic anti-Semitism in American academia. Through his December 2019 Executive Order on combating anti-Semitism, his administration has moved to call universities to account for their tolerance of anti-Jewish sentiment on campus and to threaten counter-measures, as in its proceedings against New York University. Even before the Executive Order, Trump's Department of Education was challenging campus anti-Israel bias, as in its order regarding the Middle East Studies program at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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The Jewish Democratic Council of America, in its Trump as Nazi ad, covers up the truth about who is battling anti-Semitism and who is abetting it. In doing so, it serves a political end, but undermines the security of American Jews.

It is hardly unprecedented in American history for some Jews to try and move Jewish political opinion by invoking, at times scurrilously, perceived or imagined threats. Still, the issue of anti-Semitism in America and the well-being of the Jewish community is too serious a matter to be trivialized or misrepresented for narrow political ends of any sort.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

The post Are Jews betraying Jews? appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

And much has been written arguing that potential legislation in this vein would be an abuse of power, an assault on the rule of law, a victory for corruption, a blow to Israeli democracy. Beyond noting the prime minister's assertions of his innocence of criminal wrongdoing, relatively little has been written recently questioning the merits of the cases against him.

Just prior to the attorney general's announcement in late February of plans to indict the prime minister on charges of bribery and breach of trust, Alan Dershowitz, emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and a leading constitutional scholar, published several pieces warning such indictments would present a threat to Israel's democracy.

Dershowitz wrote that none of the claims against Netanyahu entail a clear violation of any laws, and that "no one should be charged with a crime unless he has willfully crossed a bright line and plainly violated a serious criminal statute. To bring down a duly elected prime minister on the basis of an expansive and unprecedented application of a broad and expandable criminal statute endangers democracy."

Two of the cases being pursued by the attorney general involve Netanyahu's interactions with media figures. Of these cases, Dershowitz noted more specifically, "The relationship between politics and the media – and between politicians and publishers – is too nuanced, subtle and complex to be subject to the heavy hand of criminal law. … To empower prosecutors to probe these mixed motivations is to empower them to exercise undemocratic control over crucial institutions of democracy."

Dershowitz's arguments focus on what he perceives to be dangerous expansions of prosecutorial authority. Others have suggested the attorney general's stance is problematic because it is politically biased. They note that many Israeli politicians have engaged in the same activities without incurring criminal charges. Dershowitz, almost two decades ago, did address the question of politically based prosecution of Netanyahu.

The potential for prosecutorial abuse over these years has largely derived from the fact that Israel's Supreme Court has for several decades been ideologically biased and at the same time uniquely activist and political compared to similar courts in other Western democracies.

Its political partisanship and discrimination have long been recognized by much of the public and have translated into significant public distrust. In a poll conducted by the Maagar Mohot Institute and published November 11, 2011, only 14% of respondents believed the Supreme Court represented all elements of the nation while 51% believed it did not. By 54% to 46%, those polled viewed the court as politically slanted. Of the 54% who declared the court politically biased, by 75% to 11% they saw it as slanted in favor of the Left.

The Supreme Court's ideological bias has been rendered much more consequential by its activism. The court has assigned to itself the right to pass judgment on and veto acts of the elected legislature. It claims the right to do so in the context of its supposed role as enforcer of the precepts of the Constitution. But Israel, of course, has no constitution. It has basic laws, and the Supreme Court has allowed itself the greatest possible latitude in interpreting Basic Laws in a manner that supports its power grabs. One consequence of the court's activism is its encouragement of expanded prosecutorial authority.

Both the ideological bias of the court and its assumption of such transcendent powers were codified by Aharon Barak during his years at the helm of the Supreme Court (1995-2006), and they have remained essentially intact since then.

An earlier Supreme Court president, Moshe Landau, said of Barak's arrogating to the court such power, "I think [he] has not, and does not, accept the rightful place that the court should have among the various authorities in our regime." Landau saw Barak striving "to interject [into all areas of Israeli life] certain moral values as he deems appropriate. And this amounts to a kind of judicial dictatorship that I find completely inappropriate."

There is yet another key contributing factor to the patterns of anti-democratic authoritarianism and political bias in the judicial and broader legal system: Israel's judicial appointments committee.

The committee is responsible for all of the nation's judicial appointments, including those to the Supreme Court. It consists of nine members: the chief justice and two other Supreme Court justices, two members of the Israel Bar Association, the justice minister, one other cabinet minister chosen by the cabinet, and two Knesset members, usually one from the ruling coalition and one from the opposition.

The dominance of the committee by members either on the Supreme Court (the committee's largest single bloc) or representing the IBA means that the committee serves almost inevitably as an instrument of self-perpetuation for the political predilections of the nation's highest court. The committee is set up in a manner that virtually assures it appoints new members to the Supreme Court, and in large part to other courts, who share the political perspectives of those currently holding the nation's highest judicial positions. While a few appointments to the Supreme Court in recent years have deviated somewhat from the 15-member court's groupthink, the basic pattern remains unchanged.

The circumstance of prospective judges having to embrace particular political views in order to enter the judiciary or to advance within it means that the entire legal "food chain" is skewed by the pressure – on those within the legal profession, including prosecutors, who aspire to such positions – to establish a professional record reflecting the favored views. Individuals in the profession who harbor such aspirations may resist that corrupting pressure to a greater or lesser degree, but the pressure is there.

The Israeli media rarely address the threat to the nation's democracy represented by a judicial and broader legal system that has successfully usurped legislative and executive authority and wields that authority essentially beyond the reach of elected officials. This silence is matched by that of Israeli academia and elements of the nation's cultural and political elites.  It is a reflection of the circumstance that the Israeli Left, largely excluded from government coalitions in recent decades, sees the courts and other elements of the legal system as its means of wielding national power even while consistently losing at the polls.

Nothing in Israeli governmental institutions represents as great a threat to the state as the elements of Israel's "judicial dictatorship." Indeed each element is itself a profound threat: the assumption of transcendent power over the legislative and executive actions of the nation's elected officials; the political bias with which that power is exercised; and the establishment of a self-perpetuating regimen for court appointments.

Will Israelis, courageous in so many respects, find the courage to remedy this situation? Will they reestablish a judiciary that conforms to democratic norms and to a genuine system of checks and balances among the branches of Israel's government? The future of Israel's democracy depends on their doing so.

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