Jews in Oz: How Did We Get Here, Dorothy?

by Mike Lumish


If people had told me a year or two ago that I would be participating on a blog associated with David Horowitz, I would have told them that they were out of their bleeding minds. I’m a liberal, for chrissake. I just spent almost the last ten years hatin’ on the Bush administration, marching against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, phone banking for MoveOn.org, donating money to the Gore campaign, the Kerry campaign, the Obama campaign. I am in favor of a woman’s right to choose, in favor of Gay rights, in favor of governmental regulation of polluting industries, and would prefer to see a more equitable distribution of wealth via the tax code. Heck, I even live in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, the bluest neighborhood in the bluest city of a dominantly blue state.

And, yet, here I am. The reason for this is actually very simple and straightforward. The Left has betrayed the Jews. Yikes! Those may be stark terms, but there is simply no two ways about it. The Left is absolutely up to its proverbial neck in anti-Zionism and Israel Hatred. For years I was a member of Daily Kos, otherwise known as the Great Orange Satan, and the more I saw of the “progressive” base of the Democratic party the more horrified I became. Day after day after day, participants on the Left blogs kick the holy crap out of the Jewish state and demonize and demean anyone who comes to its defense. They make apologies for suicide bombers and rocket attacks against innocent Israeli civilians and large numbers of them are entirely opposed to Jewish self-determination and self-defense.

They want to see the Jewish people on our collective knees and they do so… get this… in the name of “human rights.” For two-thousand years Jews have gotten their asses kicked in one country after another. Pogroms. Expulsions. Persecutions. All culminating in that romping good time that we had in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, and these people believe that as a matter of human rights the Jewish state should not even exist?

What a bunch of cards.

The truth of the matter, of course, is that they do not honestly care about human rights. If they cared about human rights they would care about the human rights of people who do not happen to live in Ramallah or Gaza City. They don’t. I did a tag search of Daily Kos a few months back in order to compare the attention given to the Israel-Palestine conflict versus the attention given to China-Tibet. I found that over the course of about fourteen months there were 1,242 diaries concerning Israel, the vast majority of which were anti-Israel smear jobs, and a grand total of 18 concerning Tibet. So, while they claim to care about the poor, suffering Palestinians they definitely don’t care about the poor, suffering Tibetans. Nor do they care about the poor, suffering Darfurans, Congolese, or Chechens.

I may still be a liberal with many friends in the Democratic party, but the Left is dead to me.

{Cross-Posted at Lord of the Karmafishes.}