Israel hatred is US left’s loyalty test
IT HAS come to my attention that in my last column I called the esteemed parliamentarian and notorious horticulturalist Jeremy Corbyn a “terrorist fondler”. My intention was not to imply that Mr Corbyn has physically fondled any members, male or not, of Hamas, Hezbollah or any other terrorist group.
Mr Corbyn fondles terrorists in the way that half-cracked dog-lovers fondle, dandle and otherwise indulge their pets — in his case, his pet causes. He is not alone in this vanity, or in excusing the damage his pets cause. Much of the American left has lately excited itself into a similar moral coma. The left of the Democrats now resembles large tracts of the Labour Party in Britain, only better funded.Indeed, Mr Corbyn, while contributing little of value to British life, has already enriched the American vocabulary. To be ‘Corbynised’, in American parlance, is to lose control of your party and your moral compass, to loathe the West and to blame the Jews.
And so our caravan of sordid follies wends its way to the 11th Congressional District of Ohio, where the Democrats held a party primary earlier this month. The frontrunner was Nina Turner, an ex-state senator and “progressive” endorsed by Bernie Sanders, the Instagram celebrity Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Justice Democrats. The underdog was Shontel Brown, a councilwoman from Cuyahoga County. The prize: a near-certain shot at winning the general election in a heavily Democratic district, now that the splendidly named Marcia Fudge has been promoted to Secretary for Housing and Urban Development.
Turner had the radical grassroots on her side. She is not a terroristfondler. She declared herself to be pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, which is like being both pro-poultry and prochopped liver.
Shontel Brown had the party establishment on her side. She is also a strong supporter of Israel who strongly opposes BDS and actually bothered to meet Jewish community leaders. At one point, Brown was polling 35 points behind Turner, but she won, 51 per cent to
44 per cent.
Was it that moderate- and high-income suburbanites,
Jews among them, didn’t want to see their taxes rise, their schools disintegrate and their streets become full of demented drug addicts, which is what tends to happen when left-wing Democrats run things (see: San Francisco, New York City)?
Or was it, as some of the grassroots opponents of Brown are alleged to have said, that the Jews bought the election and that Brown was “in the pocket of the Israel lobby”? An anonymous resident of the 11th District claimed that as the elections approached, some of these opponents circulated a photo of Brown with a local rabbi as an example of Brown as being “pro-apartheid”. When the results came in, they compared the Jews of Cuyahoga County to “affluent white voters in the Deep South”.
“We didn’t lose this race,” Nina Turner claimed, “evil money manipulated and maligned this election”.
The truth, for what that’s worth, is that by late July, the Federal Election Commission
(FEC) recorded that Turner had raised a total of $4.5 million. Brown had raised less than half as much: just over $2 million.
So where could this “evil money” be coming from? The FEC figures don’t include donations from PACs (Political Action Committees, which funnel donations, some of them corporate, to favoured candidates). DMFI PAC, the political wing of the Democratic Majority for Israel, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for TV ads attacking Turner. Pro-Israel America PAC donated $536,000 to Brown. Republicans also donated to Brown from out of state, including Robert Kraft, a prominent Jewish donor. “We’ve got billionaire-funded to stand in our way,” Turner claimed. You can see what she means. But this is America: it’s not against the law to tip millions into an election.
And anyway, does spending millions guarantee a result? In Ohio, you can see why voters were more repelled by Turner’s loony-leftism than they were attracted by Brown’s hype. You can also see how Israel has become a loyalty test for the Democratic left, and how fond, fondling fantasies of Jewish meddling are the consolation prize of losers.
It’s not against the law to tip millions into an election