Whether Trump wins or loses in November, the radicalization of white progressives at the heart of the mayhem represents the greatest threat to social cohesion in the United States.

By Caroline Glick, Israel Hayom viaJNS

Scattered among the thousands of cellphone videos depicting looting and destruction in the streets of America’s greatest cities are clips of a different sort. In these short videos, we see throngs of white people on their knees, bowing before black people and asking for forgiveness for their “white privilege” and the “structural racism” in the deplorable, irredeemable United States of America.

Earlier this week, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee former Vice President Joe Biden symbolically embraced these genuflecting denunciations of “white privilege” as the official position of the Democratic Party. Biden had himself photographed on bended knee with a group of African Americans standing behind him during a visit to a church in Wilmington, Delaware.

These videos point to a socio-political phenomenon that sparked the riots throughout the country following George Floyd’s brutal death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. They also make clear the reason that the liberal media in the United States continues to back the protests despite the fact that from the outset they have involved wide-scale violence, destruction and looting.

Contrary to the narrative being pushed by the media and America’s elites, the riots are not a consequence of increased police brutality towards African Americans. As Heather McDonald documented this week in The Wall Street Journal, over the past several years, police violence against black people has decreased significantly.

The violence we are seeing is a result of the steep radicalization of progressive white Americans. Biden gave voice to this radicalization last summer when, during a campaign appearance in Iowa he said, “We choose truth over facts.”

Last year, political scientist Zach Goldberg published an article in Tablet online magazine where he presented statistical data demonstrating the depth and breadth of the radicalization of white progressives over the past 10 years. Goldberg revealed that between 2010-2019, white progressives became the only demographic group in U.S. history to prioritize the interests of other groups over its own interests.

White progressives prioritize the advancement of the interests of minorities and immigrants over their own and over those of American society as a whole. Moreover, as Goldberg showed, white progressive positions on race and immigration are more extreme than the positions black, Latino and Asian progressives hold on these issues.

Goldberg argues that the massive increase in internet usage by white progressives over the past decade is responsible for the radicalization. Online platforms have created an information bubble that has created a warped presentation of reality to those inside the bubble. In this warped reality, race relations are far worse than they are in reality. Hence, those who inhabit this bubble prefer “truth” as presented in the bubble to facts.

Obama presidency a factor

Goldberg is undoubtedly correct that the more time people spend inside their internet bubble the more removed they become from objective reality. But the internet isn’t the only source of the radicalization. The Obama presidency was also a factor.

When Barack Obama won the presidential race in 2008, many Americans believed his victory was proof the United States had overcome its racist past. Obama however, did not support this view. Throughout his tenure in office, Obama used the power of his position to resonate and legitimize positions on race that until then had been relegated to the leftist margins of American politics.

Obama cultivated the view that far from being a post-racial society, America is inherently racist and that American racism is structural—that is, it was baked in and impossible to overcome. In so doing, Obama gave credence to the false claim at the heart of the riots: that black Americans are under continuous, existential threat from the state as a whole and from law enforcement bodies first and foremost. Calls by Hollywood celebrities and Obama administration alumni to defund the police take this view to its logical endpoint.

A third cause of the radicalization of white progressives is the higher education system. The more radicalized campuses are, the more radicalized graduates become.

The radicalization of white progressive politics has been given its most dramatic expression in the refusal of progressive mayors and governors to act forthrightly to end the violence in their streets. Instead, we had the likes of New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio (whose daughter was arrested for participating in the mayhem) stand with those burning his city.

In a letter to police sergeants in the New York Police Department, Ed Mullen, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, gave expression to the distress of New York police officers. “I know we are losing our city,” Mullen wrote.

“We have no leadership, no direction, and no plan. I know that you are being held back and used as pawns,” he continued.

He then asked the sergeants to hold the line.

“Remember,” he added, “you work for a higher authority.”

Challenge to American Jews

For American Jews, the violent riots constitute a challenge on several levels. First, there is the challenge of squaring their political identity with their Jewish identity. As the 2014 Pew survey of American Jews showed, around half of American Jews identify as progressives. As progressives, many American Jews share the views of their non-Jewish progressive counterparts regarding the need to prioritize the interests of minority communities over their own interests.

But the Jews’ progressive desire to work on behalf of those demonstrating for African Americans places their political identity on a collision course with their Jewish identity. Black Lives Matter, the radical group leading the demonstrations, is an anti-Semitic organization. BLM was formed in 2014 as a merger of activists from the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam, the anti-Semitic Black Panthers and Dream Catchers. In 2016, BLM published a platform that has since been removed from its website. The platform accused Israel of committing “genocide” and referred to the Jewish state as an “apartheid” state.

The platform accused Israel and its supporters of pushing the United States into wars in the Middle East. The platform also officially joined BLM with the anti-Semitic BDS campaign to boycott, divest and sanction Israel. BDS campaign leader Omar Barghouti acknowledged this week that the goal of the BDS campaign is to destroy Israel. BDS campaigns on U.S. campuses are characterized by bigotry and discrimination directed against Jewish students.

BLM’s platform’s publication was greeted with wall-to-wall condemnations by Jewish organizations from across the political spectrum. But today, Jewish progressive are hard-pressed to turn their backs on the group, despite its anti-Semitism.

As white progressives, they believe they must fight America’s “structural racism” even at the cost of empowering social forces that reject their civil rights as Jews. As Jews, they feel that their rights should be protected. One progressive Jew tried to square the circle writing in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, “Today Jews need to support Black Lives Matter; tomorrow we can talk about Israel.”

As white progressives radicalized over the past decade, radical Jewish progressives built a formidable Jewish organizational framework whose mission is to advance the progressive revolution. They have worked to recast Judaism itself as the apotheosis of progressive revolutionary ideals. under the banner of “tikkun olam.”

Last week Tablet published a 20,000-word essay titled “Bend the Jews,” on Bend the Arc, the flagship organization spawned by those efforts.

Bend the Arc first rose to the attention of the general public in 2018 in the wake of the massacre of worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. The organization quickly put out a statement blaming President Donald Trump for the massacre. When Trump came to the congregations to pay his respects, Bend the Arc organized demonstrations against him.

Bend the Arc: No members, lots of money

Bend the Arc may not have members, but it has an annual budget of tens of millions of dollars. $28 million of its budget comes from three non-Jewish foundations that have no other foothold in Jewish organizational life. On the other hand, one of the funders, the Rockefeller Foundation, is well known for its generous support for radical anti-Israel and BDS groups.

To achieve its goal of reshaping the worldviews of American Jews, among other things, Bend the Arc trains Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist rabbinical students. It also pays the salaries of associate rabbis in various communities. With many synagogues long steeped in financial crisis due to dwindling membership, Bend the Arc’s ability to pay rabbis makes its involvement with synagogue hiring an attractive option for many communities. This is doubly true for synagogues whose members are progressive.

As progressive politics paralyze Jews from acting against anti-Semites in their political camp, levels of anti-Semitic sentiment among white progressives are rising. As Goldberg reported, as white progressives became radicalized on issues related to minorities and immigration, they also turned against Israel. Today white progressives are hostile to Israel. And Goldberg argued that while they express support for Jews, “their sympathy toward and concern for Jews has become more conditional.”

What is it conditioned on? On Jews not being opposed by blacks or other minorities that are considered by white progressives to be less privileged than Jews are.

On the burning streets of America today, leftist Jew-hatred is on clear display. Although New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio has prevented New York police from taking firm action against looters and arsonists, he did instruct them to use all necessary force to prevent ultra-Orthodox Jewish children from going to school. Earlier this week, police in Brooklyn chased a group of Hassidic children and their mothers off a playground in Williamsburg.

Even worse, synagogues have been vandalized in New York and Los Angeles. According to Yeshiva World News, 75 percent of Jewish-owned stores in an Orthodox enclave of Beverly Hills were looted last weekend. Graffiti in Los Angeles made clear that the businesses and neighborhoods were targeted deliberately because they are Jewish.

Between BLM’s establishment in 2014 and the publication of its platform in 2016, anti-Israel activists went to great lengths to create an utterly false conceptual linkage between the Palestinians and African Americans. Today, anti-Israel activists in the United States have stepped up their efforts to capitalize on the riots. Anti-Israel activists in Bethlehem painted a picture of George Floyd wearing a khaffiyeh and draped in a Palestinian flag on the separation barrier. Photos of the picture are being heavily promoted on social media.

Democrats believe the riots will wreck President Trump’s reelection hopes. Polls this week indicate that at least in the short term, the unrest is hurting Trump’s chances of being reelected. Then again, it’s possible the chaos in the streets will strengthen public support for President Trump, who voters may view as the last bulwark separating them from national destruction.

Whether Trump wins or loses in November, the radicalization of white progressives at the heart of the mayhem represents the greatest short and long-term threat to social cohesion in America. It also represents the greatest threat to the communal future of American Jewry, to relations between the American Jewish community and the rest of the Jewish world, and to US-Israel relations.

Caroline Glick is an award-winning columnist and author of “The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.”

The post Caroline Glick: The great threat to America and to American Jewry appeared first on World Israel News.

It is not only an outlook that sees the Diaspora as so much better than a renewed clannish ghetto. It is the concept of Israel itself, as much as it is their misrepresentation of what Israel is and does.

By Yisrael Medad, JNS.org

The template of Babylon vs. Zion has taken many forms since the majority of Jews, in exile after the destruction of the First Temple and the loss of Jewish political independence, declined to return to the Land of Israel. It exists among Orthodox Jews and the less-to-non-observant Jews. Jews of the right and the left. Jews of strong identity and those who seek to be assimilated. But there is a new category today.

If, in the past, Jewish nationalism was disfavored or even rejected more because of how the Jews preferring a Diaspora existence viewed themselves, we now see an increasing willingness, if not a perverse delight, in dissing Israel not as a particularly internal Jewish matter, from the Bundists, the early Reform, the American Council for Judaism to the Neturei Karta and British Jewish opponents of the Balfour Declaration, but as a matter which is to be judged as how the Jews are affected in their Diaspora locations.

Mairav Zonszein’s tweet is one that sets the tone for this second most dangerous threat to Jews today after anti-Semitic non-Jews, the resurgence of Diaspora “supremacism.” She wrote:

“The Pittsburg shooting exposed in the most crass and heinous way just how much israel and pro israel leaders manipulate antisemitism and abuse Jewish identity to serve political interests.” (sic)

Her accusation highlights what Dennis Prager wrote a fortnight later:

“The security of the world’s only Jewish state is by far the greatest security issue for world Jewry. Yet many left-wing Jews attack Israel, support many of those who wish to destroy Israel, or, at the very least, do nothing to strengthen Israel’s security.”

And he added a specific concern: “The ADL, which at one time was preoccupied with fighting anti-Semitism, is now preoccupied with fighting Donald Trump and fighting on behalf of the American left.”

I look to the late professor Tony Judt, who recalibrated this new supremacist think of “we in the Diaspora are better than the Jewish homeland.” Back in 2003, he infamously published:

“The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”

And he provided the new twist in his justification for turning away from Zion:

“Israel continues to mock its American patron, building illegal settlements in cynical disregard of the ‘road map.’ The President of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist’s dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line …”

In his last interview in 2001, Judt expressed a feeling of “a declining sense of identification with the place: its behavior, its culture, its politics, its insularity, its prejudices have nothing to do with being Jewish,” and added, pointedly and presciently, “I know that is especially true of younger Jews.”

Most relevant to my thesis are these words of his, which also contain a thought on the danger his wishful thinking presents for a Jewish future altogether in the Diaspora:

“As to the future of Jews in the diaspora, they (we) will once again be the predominant community (once again as in classical times). I think Israel will grow increasingly marginal for most Jews, though I don’t quite know what their Jewish life will look like either in a secularized world.”

Israel has not become marginal. Its successes in science and technology affect more non-Jews than Jews now. Even countries which have not been historically favorable to Jews, whether in Europe or, surprisingly, the Muslim Arab world, are realigning their relations.

What has developed, though, is the increased choice of the younger generation to redefine their Jewishness as having little to do with actual Judaism either as a religion, a culture or an ethnic identity. Their Jewishness is a Diaspora one, and their moorings are fixed not in relation to something Jewish; they seek to apply any sort of Jewishness vestige they have and link that with the general surroundings in which they live.

One example of this is the reciting of the Kaddish by IfNotNowers (whose site includes this blurb: “DO YOU WANT TO STOP TRUMP AND HIS ALLIANCE WITH NETANYAHU?”) as well as a group of British Jews outside Parliament to mark the deaths of Gazan Arabs. If one believed that their deaths were unjustified, why not join in a Muslim ceremony? Why take something quite Jewish, not to mention its Holocaust connection, and exploit it for the purpose of expressing support for non-Jewish persons seeking to invade Israel to kill Jews? Even Leonard Bernstein, in mourning John F. Kennedy, felt a need to backtrack on his Third Symphony based on the Kaddish even though there is little similarity in the victims commemorated.

As that blurb quoted above indicates, the battle to reject Israel in preference for the Diaspora is here linked to an ideological political position that is basically Diasporian in character. And it seeks to blame Israel not only for what Israel “does,” as it were, to Arabs trying to eradicate it, but to shift that blame on Israel for what an American president does.

In the New York Post, Jonathan Neuman noted, “Before the bodies of the dead had gone cold, let alone been buried and mourned, the Jewish left sacrificed an opportunity to cry in unity and chose instead to call for division.” The coalition of the Torah Trumps Hate, Hitoreri and Uri L’Tzedek groups, no matter how miniscule they may be, issued a demand that the National Council of Young Israel

“retract its message of praise for a president who fans the flames of anti-Semitism and whose policies are anathema to Jewish values. It is time for the Orthodox Jewish community to reassert its place as the leaders and promoters of Abrahamic ethics.”

While we Jews may know the real numbers of these making media splashes, that doesn’t help when 11 members of another extremist group, Bend the Arc, succeeded in having themselves described as “Jewish leaders,” in The Washington Post and The Hill, when demanding President Trump not come to Pittsburgh. Even Bari Weiss entangled herself in this supremacist attitude when she wrote, seemingly innocently, in The New York Times:

“But to those who have spent their lives in places like Karachi or Aleppo, the things Pittsburgh Jews take for granted—our freedom from violence and fear—are nothing more than pipe dreams.”

But as my friend commented there:

“Apparently Ms. Weis’ (and The New York Times’) sympathies and empathies are not broad enough to include Sderot and Ashkelon and Jerusalem. For today’s intersectionalized liberals, Jewish ones especially, Israel does not seem to exist on the radar of their sensitivities. Only dead Jews in their own backyard can merit the mourning they grant to the dead of Allepo and Karachi.”

And whereas, as Yair Rosenberg has highlighted, there is a trend to universalize the Holocaust, these Diaspora supremacists employ an offshoot of this and push a new paradigm of universalizing Israel because for them, and their politics and identities, it is Israel’s Jewishness that seems to get in their way.

For the Diaspora supremacists, it’s not only a matter of diluting Judaism to create what they want Judaism to be in line with their external-from-Judaism essence. It is not only how Jewish they themselves want to be, if at all. It is not only an outlook that sees the Diaspora as so much better than a renewed clannish ghetto. It is the concept of Israel itself as much as it is their misrepresentation of what Israel is and does.

For the Diaspora supremacists, they are not only the better Jews (a new form of Ostjudenfahr or of Jews blaming Jews), but they are the genuine Jews and these illegitimate Jews, in Israel, are threatening them.

In seeking to be supreme and then to dominate, these Jews are channeling a greater hatred they claim to be combating.

Yisrael Medad is an American-born Israeli journalist and commentator.

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