The Democratic Party’s Love Affair with Anti-Semitism . . . And Islam.
BY ERIC MARTIN
It is not possible for any moral or sane person educated in the history of the Jewish people to be an anti-Semite and, in turn, anti-Zionist. As to the rights and title of the Jewish people to Israel, there is no more authoritative basis than the findings found within the epoch feat of legal scholarship by Howard Grief — namely, Legal Rights and Title of Sovereignty of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel and Palestine under International Law. Although many Jews were forced into exile after numerous periods of conquest and persecution — from the Babylon to the Roman and Ottoman periods — a continuous Jewish presence has always remained in the Jewish homeland.
A Brief Historical View: The Land of Israel and Its People
The geographical region of Jerusalem and Judea was first named Palestine or Palaestina by the Roman Emperor Hadrian after the Philistines, the 12th-century (BCE) arch enemies of the Jews who had inhabited the region now known as the Gaza Strip. Most closely related to the Greeks, they were an Aegean sea people from the northeast of Egypt who invaded and pillaged the Jews of Judea and Samaria, but they had no historical, ethnic, or linguistic ties to Arabia or its people. In 604 BCE, the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed them, and they vanished into extinction.
In the 2nd Century (132 CE), after the Roman forces recaptured Jerusalem and Judea during the Great Revolt or Bar Kochba Revolt, Hadrian revived the name to demoralize the Jewish people and to obscure their identity and connection to the land.
During the Byzantine period (circa 390 CE), the imperial province of Syria Palaestina was divided into Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Salutaris, and the early modern-day English term “Palestine” became more commonly used.
The Ottomans, who conquered and ruled the territory from 1517 to 1917, loosely adopted and retained the name Filastin, which referred to the land south of Syria. While it was never officially designated Palestine, those who lived in that region under Ottoman Rule were known as “Palestinians.”
After World War I, the region now known as Israel, as well as current-day Jordan, was defined according to the original British Mandate. While Jews of that region customarily described it as Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel in Hebrew), they defined themselves as Palestinian Jews in English.
The rebirth of the Jewish homeland Israel after the Holocaust in 1945, which killed more than six million Jews and left the remnant Jewish population of Europe in desperate need of a nation, was nothing short of miraculous. While the Holocaust stressed the urgency, Jews had continued to pray for their eternal homeland for 2,000 years and continue to do so to this day — reciting, “Next Year in Jerusalem.” Ben Gurion, Chaim Weitzman, Golda Meir, and many other Zionist leaders were determined to realize those prayers and reconstitute the land of the Bible, of the prophets and heroes of Israel.
The opposition from the surrounding Arab nations was fierce, and the leaders of Egypt, Syria and Jordan declared that they would not tolerate a Jewish nation in their midst. The majority of the western nations that comprised the new United Nations sided with the Arabs, and the outlook for Ben Gurion was grim. President Truman, the head of the Democratic Party in America, hesitated to pick sides. The Arab nations, especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt, were American allies, and both of these nations flanked the Suez Canal, which was vital to American trade. Truman’s advisors warned him that it was not in the best interests of America to support a new Jewish state. The expectation was that he would agree with them.
Truman, however, decided to endorse the new state of Israel and pledged his support to Ben-Gurion. When asked why he made this decision, his response was simply: “It was the right thing to do.” President Truman was a decent man who recognized the existential urgency of the Jewish people for their own state. He also accepted that the roots of the Jewish people were in the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the land of Moses and King David.
Before Israel was reconstituted in 1948, the Jewish people were still commonly known as Palestinians Jews. This is reflected by the names of their football team players, such as those depicted in this 1939 photograph (right) and video (below).
Video (above): Australia vs Palestine [Jewish] Football Match (1939) For Dummies, 1939 (Israellycool, Posted June 25, 2018).
This is also evidenced by the Jewish newspaper, The Palestine Post, which is now the The Jerusalem Post, and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, which is now the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
Throughout most of the 1960s up until the Six-Day War in 1967, most Arabs in the region still identified themselves as Arabs, not as Palestinians. As Daniel Grynglas in The Jerusalem Post points out,
Before the Six Day War in 1967, when Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt ruled in Gaza, there was never any suggestion on the part of the ‘Palestinians’ that they wanted independence in their ancestral homeland. The reason was that the ‘Palestinian’ nation hadn’t been invented yet. In fact, before the State of Israel was born, the term ‘Palestinians’ was used by the Jews to refer to themselves and their organizations. ‘The Palestine Post’, the Palestine Foundation Fund, Palestine Airways, and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra were all purely Jewish enterprises.
“We first hear of Arabs referred to as ‘Palestinians’ when Egypt’s President Nasser, with help from the Russian KGB, established the ‘Palestine Liberation Organization’ in 1964. It was only during the 1970s that the newly minted ‘Palestinians’ began to promote their narrative through murder and assassination. The Arabs have justified their attacks as acts of the indigenous people struggling for national liberation.”
“Debunking the claim that ‘Palestinians’ are the indigenous people of Israel,” March 12, 2015
The fiction behind the Arabs’ indigenous claim to the biblical and historical Jewish homeland is further dispelled in Myths, Hypotheses and Facts Concerning the Origin of People: The True Identity of the So-called Palestinians:
Palestinians are the newest of all the peoples on the face of the Earth, and began to exist in a single day by a kind of supernatural phenomenon that is unique in the whole history of mankind, as it is witnessed by Walid Shoebat, a former PLO terrorist that acknowledged the lie he was fighting for and the truth he was fighting against:
‘Why is it that on June 4th 1967 I was a Jordanian and overnight I became a Palestinian?'”
[…]
“This declaration by a true ‘Palestinian’ should have some significance for a sincerely neutral observer. Indeed, there is no such a thing like a Palestinian people, or a Palestinian culture, or a Palestinian language, or a Palestinian history. There has never been any Palestinian state, neither any Palestinian archaeological find nor coinage. The present-day ‘Palestinians are an Arab people, with Arab culture, Arabic language and Arab history. They have their own Arab states from where they came into the Land of Israel about one century ago to contrast the Jewish immigration. That is the historical truth. They were Jordanians (another recent British invention, as there has never been any people known as ‘Jordanians’), and after the Six-Day War in which Israel utterly defeated the coalition of nine Arab states and took legitimate possession of Judea and Samaria, the Arab dwellers in those regions underwent a kind of anthropological miracle and discovered that they were Palestinians – something they did not know the day before.
In fact, “Palestine” or “Filastin” do not appear anywhere within the Koran. Yet, the term peleshet, which is the Egyptian and Hebrew derivative, appears in the Jewish Tanakh 250 times and at least eight times in eight verses of the Hebrew concordance of the King James Bible.
Video (above): Dr. Mordechai Kedar on al-Jazeera about Jerusalem and Islam, June 12, 2008.The question then that arises is how can Jewish re-settlement within Israel — after forced exile by imperialists — the ancestral and Biblical homeland of the Jewish people — be an occupation? This is an objective and historical fact of liberation prophesied in the Bible! If the “Palestinian People” really were distinct from other Sunni Muslim Arabs and historically legitimate, why was there no historical distinction, polity/identity, or political rebellion against the Ottoman Empire or Jordan in the few hundred years that preceded June 1967?
The Modern-Day Democrat Party: A Shift Away from Its Traditional Allies to Islam and Anti-Semitism
The Democratic Party, right up until the Clinton administration, was a firm supporter of Israel and, for all his faults, so too was Bill Clinton. The Jewish connection to the land was a widely accepted historical fact.
All this changed when Barack Obama came into power in 2008. Obama was not only Muslim in name but Muslim by creed. In his famous speech at Al-Hazar university in 2009, he made the absurd claim that Islam had contributed to the formation of America and that Muslims fought in the American Revolution. He made no secret of his love for the “Palestinian” people and their allies, particularly Iran. The Iran Accords, negotiated by his Secretary of State John Kerry, gave Iran free rein to develop nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them straight to Israel! Leaving no doubt about his religious and political affiliations, he declared that he would oppose all those who criticized the prophet of Islam. Obama was a Muslim in word and deed. His legacy to the Democratic Party has been a growing hatred of Israel, which has morphed into a virulent left-wing and Muslim anti-Semitism.
The recent victory of the Democratic Party in the 2018 election propelled two of the most virulent anti-Semites into the Congress of the United States: Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. Omar has accused American Jews of having dual loyalties, implying that their first loyalty was to Israel. She repeated the canard that Jews use their money to buy support in Congress — that “it’s all about the Benjamins, Baby!”
In 2012 she tweeted, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”
She also supports Hamas and the BDS Movement, which aim to cripple and destroy Israel. Her despicable attacks on the Jewish people and Israel have won her the adulation of the greatest anti-Semite in America, Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam. This admirer of Hitler has referred to the Jews as “termites” in need of destruction and extolled Omar’s anti-Semitic slander, saying, ”You have nothing to apologize for.”
The case against Omar as a reprehensible anti-Semite is beyond dispute, but Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat elite rewarded her generously. They gave her a seat on the prestigious Foreign Affairs Committee. This was tantamount to allowing a Muslim enemy of Israel, America’s only loyal ally in the Middle-East, access to vital information which could imperil the security of that state. Omar’s appointment signaled the future intentions of the Democrat Party.
There was an outcry from the Republican Party and patriotic Americans in reaction to Omar’s egregious hatred of Israel and Jews, forcing Nancy Pelosi and her party to take action. Donald Trump demanded that Omar be expelled from Congress, but Pelosi refused to comply. She took ten days to negotiate with her party’s czars about appropriate measures to censure Omar. The result of their deliberations? A ridiculous “statement of condemnation,” which absolved Omar of being anti-Semitic! As Pelosi put it, Omar had “… a different experience in the use of words and doesn’t understand that some of them are fraught with meaning that she didn’t realize.” Pelosi is a great dissembler and an accomplished liar!
Rashida Tlaib, being Muslim and a champion of the fictitious “Palestine,” came to Omar’s defense. Tlaib spouted the same anti-Semitic rhetoric and accused Jews and Israel of crimes against humanity. She is also a member of the Palestinian American Congress, which has vilified Jews and Israel. Their founder, Abdel-quader, made the outrageous claim that Israelis were not real Jews and had therefore had no historical claim to Israel. One can understand Tliab’s rage, since she is a Muslim and from “Palestine,” but what of the anti-Jewish sentiment of many prominent Democrat politicians who are not Muslim?
Cory Booker wanted to meet Louis Farrakhan because he sought to “normalize” his racist beliefs. Ocasio Cortez condemned Israel’s “occupation of Palestine” and joined her Muslim colleagues when they blamed Israel for justly retaliating against Hezbollah and Hamas terrorism. They and the Hard Left accuse Israel of human rights violations and looked the other way when Islamic terrorists murdered innocent Israeli civilians. Pew Research reports that “Republicans and Democrats grow even further apart in their views on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.” The traditional allegiance of the Democrat Party to Israel, for the right of Jews to a secure homeland, has been transformed by the specter of anti-Semitism, by a vile hatred which rivals that of the Nazis in the lead-up to World War Two.
Pew Research reveals that 79% of Republicans still sympathize with Israel, but the figure for the Democrats is just 27%. The support for Israel on university campuses has dwindled down to the Jewish and Christian student organizations. These brave students are attacked and demonized daily by hard-core leftists who belong to Antifa and the Communist Party. They are joined by the Muslim Student Alliance, and other Islamist groups. Supervising their racism and brutality are the Marxist professors and administrators who have brainwashed a generation of young Americans to betray their heritage. It is dangerous these days to walk on the Berkeley campus wearing a kippah or any other Jewish symbol. Just some forty years ago, Berkely was a wellspring for freedom of expression.
In the words of Linda Sarsour, a well-known anti-Semite, the Democratic Party “..is not perfect, but it now belongs to us.…” In other words, it belongs to radical Islam, to those who would initiate the destruction of Israel and the mass killing of Jews. For the first time in recent history, every major Democratic candidate for president declined to attend the annual AIPAC conference in Washington, D.C. This was a stunning declaration of hostility to the State of Israel and to those who love and support it. The Democratic Party under Obama allowed millions of Muslims to immigrate into America for one reason: to create a large and reliable voter base. Pelosi, Schumer, and all the other political gangsters have chosen sides. They have traded Israel for Islam, for Muslim voters, and for the millions of crazed leftists who want to destroy Judeo-Christian civilization.
America’s greatest threat now is from a political party which is intent on destroying the Constitution and the traditional rights of American citizens. The Democrats are the standard bearers of cancel culture, of the doctrine of political correctness which forbids and punishes freedom of speech and conservative values. The Democrats openly campaign against religious freedom, and Kamala Harris, who might someday soon be the next vice President, is the vanguard of the movement to censure and deprive the Little Sisters of the Poor their lawful right not to provide employees with free contraception. Harris and her colleagues make no secret of their desire to eradicate the Judeo-Christian values and traditions of America, but they extoll and promote Islam.
They have bowed to the demands of their Muslim voters, demonstrating a cowardice which accommodates Islamic tyranny. They are empowering and endorsing a religion which sanctions wife beating, female genital mutilation, the murder of gays, the death penalty for apostates, and the destruction of all man-made government. In Sura 8:39 of the Koran, Mohammed commands adherents to “…Kill the infidel until they submit, and the only religion is Islam.” The Democratic Party is indulging and sanctioning a religion which will one day annihilate them and their godless, morally derelict and corrupt party.
