We Need to Call Out Fellow Liberals

As liberals, we cannot afford to lose the moral high ground. There’s a Republican POTUS in office who defines immorality, embraces hate groups (remember “many sides”?) and yet remains the man who leads the GOP. As liberals, we cannot let hate-filled people poison our ranks.

To that end, the last thing that we should be doing is letting our fellow liberals skate on something as basic as condemning anti-Semitism. Therefore,  we ask the following: Where is the outrage from our side of the aisle regarding Louis Farrakhan’s most recent blatantly anti-Semitic remarks? If you do not know to what we are referring, watch the clip below.

How can you watch that clip and do anything but condemn it? Especially if you have praised the man in the past or kept company with him? How can you listen to a man who has referred to “the Satanic Jews” and not condemn him?

That brings us to Rep. Keith Ellison, who, by the way, is #2 in the Democratic National Committee. Rep. Ellison has praised Farrakhan in the past. He’ll tell you that it was way back in ’95, but so what? He was 32 years old, not a teenager. It wasn’t just Farrakhan either. Rep. Ellison, while a student at The University of Minnesota, introduced Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael, for a speech. In that speech, Ture called Zionism a form of white supremacy. Yes, you read that correctly.

We on the left condemn Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his racist past, and rightfully so. Our Twitter feed condemned Sessions as recently as two days ago:

Sessions’ legacy also includes a letter penned by Coretta Scott King in 1986 opposing his federal judgeship. “[I]f confirmed, he will be given a life tenure for doing with a federal prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years ago with clubs and cattle prods.”

— Rudin Writes (@RudinWrites) March 7, 2018

So how can we not condemn Rep. Ellison’s embracing of full-fledged anti-Semites? You want to give Rep. Ellison a pass because a little over a decade ago he disavowed his embracing of Farrakhan? First off, why? Secondly, Rep. Ellison, as it turns out, was not being entirely truthful in his disavowal. He met with Farrakhan as recently as 2016 according to the Washington Post. The Washington Post, one of the newspapers that many of us on the left rely upon, gave Rep. Ellison four Pinocchio’s (which the Post uses to refer to comments that are “whoppers” of lies), for his claim that he has disavowed Farrakhan. The Post went on to add that

Ellison repeatedly has danced around the question of his association with Farrakhan, including whether they have crossed paths since he publicly cut ties with the Nation of Islam in 2006. But he needs to provide a better explanation for what he was doing in Farrakhan’s hotel suite in 2016 and what they discussed. He cannot claim to have “disavowed” Farrakhan more than a decade ago while moving the same circles and apparently having a friendly chat behind closed doors.

Moreover, Rep. Ellison isn’t the only one who has met with Farrakhan. Indiana Rep. André Carson met with Farrakhan in 2016 as well. The Daily Caller has pointed out that the following Democrats have attended meetings with Farrakhan as sitting members of Congress: California Reps. Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee, Illinois Rep. Danny Davis, New York Rep. Gregory Meeks and Texas Rep. Al Green. In fact, Rep. Davis went so far as to call Farrakhan an “outstanding human being” before walking that statement back because of the backlash. We’re not exactly Daily Caller fans here, but they sure as heck were right about Rep. Ellison’s association with Farrakhan.

Farrakhan association is not the only anti-Semitic problem that we have on the left. If you read this space, you’ll remember that our editor had a problem deciding whether to march with his wife at the Women’s March because of Linda Sarsour’s presence as a Board Member. That led to a compromise wherein he marched while wearing the shirt below.

Despite the fact that we don’t have neo-Nazis on our side, we do have an anti-Semitism problem on the left and it’s time that we admitted it. Our anti-Semitism problem isn’t the Swastika waving variety. It goes by a different name: BDS. Students on college campuses and a growing number of liberals support the BDS movement, which aims to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel.

We’ve posed the questions to you before and we’ll pose them again: Ask yourself why Israel, the one place in the Middle East that actually promotes equal rights for women, the LGBTQ community, and any other progressive ideal you can think of, is in the cross-hairs of liberals. Before answering, ask yourself which country in the Middle East allows freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly.

Israel may have a conservative-led administration right now but don’t we have one here too? Does that mean that we throw in the towel on our whole system as Americans? Do we give up on the Constitution and the ideals that make us who we are? No. We criticize the current people in power because we want our country to be led by people who embrace our sense of what’s right.

So . . . why not criticize Israeli politicians instead of moving to boycott, divest from, and sanction the one nation in the Middle East with shared values? If you think that the proponents of BDS chose Israel for a reason other than anti-Semitism then you’re doing some real mental gymnastics. Criticize Israel’s right-wing government all you want, but if you’re talking BDS, you’re talking anti-Semitism.

The silence of our fellow liberals on the issue of anti-Semites like Farrakhan being linked to top Democrats is deafening. The BDS movement in our wings is a stain on all of us as well. Conservatives on the other side of the aisle will tell you that we have these issues because our ranks are filled with anti-Semites. Well, are we anti-Semites? No. But we must stand up against those in our movement who are. We must call out those on our side who promote anti-Semitism and those who embody it. As we have learned, silence = complicity.