{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under.}
The news, on this first day of Passover within the American Jewish community, is of the shooting-up of a number of Jewish facilities near Kansas City, Kansas. CBS reports:
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. -- An elderly man opened fire Sunday at two Jewish facilities in suburban Kansas City, killing a doctor and his teenage grandson and an elderly woman before he was taken into custody, authorities and witnesses said.Three people were killed including a local physician and his teenage grandchild.
The suspect was shouting anti-Semitic slogans as he was arrested, CBS affiliate KCTV reported.
"I've been told he was yelling 'Heil Hitler' as he was being taken away in cuffs," Rabbi Herbert Mandl, who serves as a chaplain for the Overland Park Police Department, told CNN.
Grandfather and grandson attended the United Methodist Church in nearby Leawood. The church's senior pastor, the Rev. Adam Hamilton, broke the news to church members at a Palm Sunday evening service, The Kansas City Star reported.There is a certain hideous irony, I suppose, in the fact that the Southern Poverty Law Center describes the killer, Frazier Glen Miller, 73, as a "raging anti-Semite" and a former "Grand Dragon" of the Ku Klux Klan... yet he ends up killing Methodists.
Although Corporan and his grandson apparently were not Jewish, the shooter could be charged with a hate crime if he targeted him because he thought they were.
My experience tells me that the truly troubling anti-Semitism in the west today comes out of the Left far more so than it does from the Right, but that does not mean that the political right-wing is free from anti-Jewish bigotry. The difference is that on the Right anti-Semitism is marginalized, while on the Left it is being maintreamed, hysterically enough, under the banners of "social justice" and "human rights."
Things have changed very much since the bad old days of mid-late twentieth-century American race hatred. In the 1960s and much of the 1970s it was the political right-wing which could be counted on to carry the proud banner of bigotry and racism, which is part of the reason that so many American Jews identify with the progressive-left and the Democratic Party. It is precisely because the Left took the lead in the struggle for civil rights after World War II that it earned a large majority allegiance within the Jewish community and rightly so, at the time.
Since then, however - sadly enough - the great majority of anti-Jewish sentiment comes from the Left in the west, not from the Right. The grand hypocrisy, today, is that the political Left expresses its dislike of the Jewish people as a matter of "anti-racism." Because the Arabs of the Middle East tell the world that the Jewish minority is mean to them, sympathetic progressive westerners have taken up their violent and genocidal anti-Israel / anti-Jewish cause as a matter of human rights.
How's that for a kick in the head?
And, yet, leftists are shocked and dismayed when their fellow Jewish leftists complain about little things like Nazi Swastikas entwined in Shields of David during anti-war protests in Civic Center, San Francisco. Or the fact that high profile western leftists joined with actually Jihadis, who they describe as "peace activists," in an attempt to confront Jews off the coast of Israel aboard the Mavi Marmara.
Traditional right-wing racism in the United States is not dead, but it is dying. As far as traditional right-wing Jewish animus goes, William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of the National Review, did as much as anyone on the political Right to combat that racism. Writing in the New York Times, Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The Times Book Review and Week in Review, tells us this:
In the 1950s, when American conservatism still bore the taint of anti-Semitism, Bill Buckley moved forcefully to erase it. One important step was banning anti-Semitic writers from National Review, the magazine he founded in 1955. Many of his allies included Jews — from Marvin Liebman, the publicist who helped organize conservative rallies and events, through his great friend Richard M. Clurman (of Time magazine) and also, as you point out, neoconservatives like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Buckley was also a champion of Henry Kissinger, who remained one of his dearest friends.I am not a huge fan of Kissinger, but that is not the point. I am not even a fan of the political right-wing, on the great majority of issues, but that is not the point, either. The point is that despite the old maniac in Kansas, the Jewish people in the United States, and perhaps the west, more generally, need to acknowledge that which they have been loathe to acknowledge.
We need to acknowledge the fact that the progressive-left, and significant segments of the Democratic Party, have betrayed their Jewish constituency through the acceptance of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism, and the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction (BDS) the Jewish State of Israel.
Until this betrayal is acknowledged, western Jewish leftists will continue to support, implicitly if not explicitly, a political movement that is perfectly comfortable in the defamation of Jews via anti-Zionism within progressive-left venues.
Until this unfortunate little fact sinks in to the minds of Jewish Democrats we cannot stem the tide of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism within western-left venues.
