Hyperventilating About Kanye Can’t Hide The Left’s Antisemitism Double Standard

Focusing on recent comments from Kanye West, Donald Trump, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait writes that there’s no comparison between how the two political parties handle antisemitism. Chait, you won’t be surprised to learn, minimizes the anti-Jewish strain infecting factions of the left and wildly overstates the antisemitism on the right.

Chait begins by reminding us that Ilhan Omar once said some “ugly things,” by which he means “Protocols of Zion”-style conspiracies about Jews’ supernatural ability to hypnotize the world for “evil.” Even “more significant,” he goes on, is what happened next: Omar apologized (as did Taylor Greene, so what?). He then points out that Democrats “voted for a House resolution denouncing ‘the pernicious myth of dual loyalty and foreign allegiance, especially in the context of support for the United States–Israel alliance’ as a form of antisemitism.” I wonder why they had to do that?

Let’s recall that the first revelations of Omar’s antisemitism brought no real rebuke. Long after everyone knew about Omar’s outlook on Jews, Nancy Pelosi appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone’s “women shaping the future” issue. It wasn’t until Omar alleged that Jewish “political influence in this country” was pushing “allegiance to a foreign country,” that there was any left-wing backlash — and then, almost exclusively from Jewish Democrats. And, yes, Omar’s party voted for a House resolution mentioning Alfred Dreyfus and Leo Frank, and denouncing anti-Japanese discrimination during World War II, Islamophobia, and the America First Committee, but not the Minnesotan. Of course Omar voted for a diluted, platitudinous laundry list of censurable hatreds. It meant nothing. Omar was coddled then, as she is coddled now.

Let’s also remember that Omar replaced Keith Ellison, a “former” acolyte of Louis Farrakhan, who accidentally kept going to meetings with the antisemitic minister after he was elected to Congress. Actually, the then-deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ellison attended a private dinner with Iranian regime “president” Hassan Rouhani, Farrakhan, and Democratic Congressmen Andre Carson and Gregory Meeks.

Then again, the Congressional Black Caucus has a long relationship with the notorious antisemite, inviting him to address their events and attending his. Maxine Waters can be seen on video schmoozing with the leader of the Nation of Islam, who called Hitler a “very great man” and compared Jews to “termites.” Danny Davis, who serves on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, called him an “outstanding human being” in 2018 — the same year Taylor Greene was writing about Jewish space lasers on comment boards. Only one of these two incidents merits any coverage, for some reason.

More pernicious than any trope or dog whistle or conspiracy about Rothchild weather machines is “anti-Zionism.” It is the predominant justification for violence, murder, and hatred against Jews in Europe and the Middle East, on American college campuses, and in the progressive protest movement. The left “handles” this movement by giving its champions columns in The New York Times and normalizing it within their political ranks.

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