The Democratic Party establishment would rather be called out for going easy on antisemites than confront the hate within their own ranks.
By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS
Deny it though he may, the evidence produced in a House Committee on Education and the Workforce report about antisemitism on college campuses is an appropriate coda to Sen. Chuck Schumer’s career-long attempt to pose as the shomer of Israel in Congress.
That he was advising leaders of Columbia University in New York City not to worry too much about criticism of their failures to protect Jewish students because only Republicans cared about the issue is a disgrace.
Still, the gap between Schumer’s public lip service condemning the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism in the United States and what he says in private is indicative of more than his own corrupt mendacity.
It demonstrates how badly compromised the supposedly pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has become in recent years.
While many in the GOP would agree with Schumer’s assertion about their party being the only one that cares about antisemitism, it really isn’t accurate.
Many rank-and-file Democrats, including a solid number of Jews who may be politically liberal but unlike Schumer, are still ardent supporters of the U.S.-Israel alliance, are deeply troubled by the rise of the anti-Israel left-wing of their party.
The Senate punts on antisemitism
Still, it was no accident that it was the Republican-controlled House that conducted the only serious hearings and investigation about the plague of antisemitism sweeping across the country in the weeks and months following the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in southern Israel by Hamas and other Palestinians.
The Democrats control the Senate and could have easily seized on this issue but given the hostility to Israel from some prominent members of their caucus, Schumer made sure none of the upper body’s committees seriously took it up.
The same is true of Schumer’s decision not to allow a vote in the Senate on the Antisemitism Awareness Act that codified the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of the term into federal law.
That measure overwhelmingly passed the House last May by a 320-91 margin with 21 Republicans and 70 Democrats voting no.
But Schumer, like the Biden-Harris administration’s chief worry during the course of the presidential campaign, is about alienating so-called “progressives” in his party who traffic in the hatred of Israel and Jews.
That’s why he is carefully avoiding fighting the most prevalent current form of antisemitism, which is focused on the demonization of Israel and its supporters, even though he never tires of claiming that he is the Jewish state’s biggest booster.
The fact that he’s getting very little pushback from centrist Democrats for this failure is telling.
For decades, the Senate Majority Leader has used a superficial similarity of his last name with the Hebrew word for “guardian” or “watchdog” to claim that he could be counted on to defend Israel and the Jews.
But as President Joe Biden—his longtime Senate buddy—would have put it, that was always a “load of malarkey.”
Schumer has always been, like so many of his fellow politicians, a cynical opportunist rather than a man on a mission to stand up for the interests of his own community.
A vicious partisan who even stooped to personally threatening Supreme Court justices for rendering decisions he opposed, Schumer has had a longtime goal of power, not policy.
Whenever he was presented with a test of whether he would stick to the principles he claimed to support and partisan interests, he chose the latter.
That was true when it came to the dangerous 2015 Iran nuclear deal (which he technically opposed while pledging not to try to influence anyone else to join him in voting “no,” rendering his stand meaningless).
And it was equally true when he bashed Israel’s government in the middle of a war for its survival, thus providing cover for Democrats who were seeking to prevent the Jewish state from defeating Hamas after the Oct. 7 massacre.
Advising Columbia
As damning as those examples were, the text messages from former Columbia University president Minouche Shafik to her board members about the advice given to her by Schumer is the sort of betrayal that should put an end to his pretensions about being someone who gives a damn about antisemitism or the welfare of Jewish students.
By telling her that Columbia’s leaders should merely “keep [their] heads down,” Schumer showed his true colors.
According to Shafik, they should merely wait for the storm over the rampant Jew-hatred occurring on campus to pass because of their tolerance for pro-Hamas protesters intimidating Jewish students.
The reason for this was even more troubling. The advice relayed to Columbia board members David Greenwald and Claire Shipman was that they needn’t worry too much because the school’s “political problems are really only with Republicans.”
Schumer’s office has denied the evidence produced by the House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, chaired by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), calling it “hearsay.”
But it’s highly unlikely that Shafik would have lied about her conversations with Schumer in private communications with her board that were subsequently subpoenaed by the committee.
The revelation about Schumer’s contemptible indifference to the treatment of Jewish students as well as Columbia University’s institutional failure to do something about the way its Hamas-supporting students and faculty members were turning the Morningside Heights campus into a no-go zone for Jews made headlines.
But the 325-page House report is a compendium of many other outrageous examples of how some of our elite universities betrayed their principles and their students after Oct. 7.
The committee behind the report is chiefly remembered for its hearing last December, during which the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania responded to a question from Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) about whether advocacy for genocide of Jews violates the rules of their schools.
Each answered that “it depended on “the context,” which demonstrated that, like Schumer, they were more worried about being attacked by the intersectional antisemitic left for opposing antisemitism than they were about their willingness to give Jew-hatred a pass.
What mattered about that exchange was not so much the subsequent opprobrium that rained down on their heads from a broad cross-section of American public opinion outraged at the idea that elite universities thought antisemitism was merely a matter of opinion.
That’s especially true since everyone knows that advocacy for prejudice against other minorities, like African-Americans, would cause the full weight of the power of these schools to come down on the heads of anyone who advocated for, say, the lynchings of black Americans—the way the pro-Hamas mobs did for the killing of Jews and Israelis.
The committee’s report reveals how the behavior of a number of elite universities was actually worse than it was initially reported in the media.
And it makes an ironclad case that their actions were clearly in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which prohibits federally-funded institutions from engaging in discriminatory behavior.
The report is important in its own right. But it begs the question as to why the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, rather than the largely powerless and ineffective Department of Education, isn’t addressing the issue of antisemitism in our education system.
The answer is that the current regime at the DOJ is much more interested in enforcing the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that is primarily responsible for enabling exactly the sort of outrages that are detailed in the House report.
What is needed is a change in federal policy that will produce a DOJ that is interested in rolling back the widespread discrimination produced by DEI rather than supporting it.
Schumer’s contemptible denials of his complicity in what happened at Columbia remain unsurprising, but they are compounded by the fact that a new book is expected to be published under his name (though likely ghost-written by a staffer) in February is reportedly devoted to his analysis of contemporary antisemitism.
Given Schumer’s inveterate partisanship, it’s likely that the book will talk more about false accusations against former President Donald Trump than it will about the real antisemitism happening within his own party.
But after the House report, his publishers would be wise to spare themselves further embarrassment and shelve plans for rolling out the senator’s book.
Antisemitism shouldn’t be a partisan issue. While clearly outnumbered, there are still Democrats like Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) who provided the country with a profile in courage when it comes to standing up for Israel and against the woke antisemites in Congress.
The two parties have largely exchanged identities in the last half century as each changed course on Israel. Whereas once the opposite was true, today, the Democrats are deeply divided when it comes to support for the Jewish state while Republicans have become lockstep in their support.
Their attitudes towards antisemitism directly stem from this sea change.
And though they haven’t demonstrated the kind of influence that the radicals of the House “Squad” wield over the Democratic Party, there are Jew-haters on the right, like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who deserve close scrutiny and condemnation.
Schumer’s public and private conduct as Senate Majority Leader made it clear that the Democratic Party establishment would rather be called out for going easy on antisemites than confront the hate within their own ranks.
Regardless of the outcome of this year’s presidential and congressional elections, that decision demonstrates a trend that is at the heart of the nation’s antisemitism problem.