Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on February 24, 2017

41 years later, Columbia University students are still equating Zionism with racism.

As part of their annual Israel Apartheid Week, the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, in conjunction with Columbia/Barnard Jewish Voice for Peace, are hosting an event Monday, February 27th entitled Zionists are Racists.

If you buy into Dr. Kings assessment that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice, then you buy into the idea that as humanity progresses, we sometimes must look back at the actions of the past and recognize that they do not conform to our standards of morality. The very essence of progress is predicated on acknowledging there is a problem which needs addressing.

The students who are hosting this offensive, bigoted, and hateful event are guilty of precisely the opposite. They drag us back to a past that is so shameful, it has already been corrected.

The 1975 United Nations General Assembly resolution that infamously gave the world Zionism is Racism was revoked in 1991 with 111 nations voting in favor of its repeal. Twenty-fivecountries voted against the repeal, including the shining beacons of democracy and equality of Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace are keeping fantastic company.

Even during its adoption, the righteous spoke out against the resolution. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was, at the time, Americas ambassador to the United Nations said:

There will be time enough to contemplate the harm this act will have done the United Nations. Historians will do that for us, and it is sufficient for the moment only to note the foreboding fact. A great evil has been loosed upon the word. The proposition to be sanctioned by a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations is that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. Now this is a lie. But as it is a lie which the United Nations has now declared to be a truth, the actual truth must be restated.

Moynihans words were prescient. Years later, calling for the resolution to be revoked, President George H.W. Bush said, to equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself, a member of good standing of the United Nations. This body cannot claim to seek peace and at the same time challenge Israels right to exist. By repealing this resolution unconditionally, the United Nations will enhance its credibility and serve the cause of peace.

These words may not trouble the organizers of Mondays event, who themselves challenge Israels right to exist and care little about serv[ing] the cause of peace, but they should trouble the rest of Columbias student body. Zionism is not racism. To equate the two is abhorrent and bigoted. That shouldnt have needed to be said 41 years ago, and it certainly shouldnt need to be said today.

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The Democratic Party refuses to come to terms with Obama's failures.

Democrats are struggling to reconcile an existential contradiction. They know that something has gone terribly wrong with their party and that it must adapt to new political realities. But they also know Hillary Clinton won 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, and that grassroots Democrats are energizedspontaneously crowding Republican town halls, marching in the streets, and paralyzing airports. Which means thatsome Democrats are now certain its not their partybut the country that must change. This confused line of thought was on display at Wednesday nights debate among candidates vying to chair the Democratic National Committee. This paralyzing cognitive dissonance has put the Democratic Party on a path toward an eerily familiar sort of internecine turmoil.

The next DNC chair will not only be tasked with recovering from three (out of the last four) disastrous election cycles but also from a crippling scandal that cost the former chairRepresentative Debbie Wasserman Schultzher job. Given those circumstances, the race has been remarkably cordial. This contest is nothing like the ugly and divisive process the Republican National Committee endured in race to replace their party chairman in 2009. The internal debate in which Democrats is not dissimilar from the one that preceded the rise of the Tea Party.

The race for what amounts to a glorified fundraiser is an unusually crowded one. Eight candidates clogged the stage last night, with the clearest division betweenmainstream Democrats andinsurgent reformers. More conventionalcandidates like former Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez and the radical alternative to the status quo, Representative Keith Ellison, did their best to coast through the affair. Save for a biography and affectation that Democrats in the era of Trump find attractive, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg was similarly underwhelming. A handful of also-rans on the stage were among the more notable attendees, not because they have a prayer of winning over the 400 or so Democrats who vote for DNC chair but for what they represent.

Former Fox News contributor and Rock the Vote president Jehmu Greene channeled the id of the Democratic Partys activist wing. She dubbed Trump a harbinger of fascism and the single biggest threat to our freedoms since King George III, advocated his impeachment, and alleged in a all-but-open fashion that his election was illegitimate. U.S. Air Force Veteran and former state-level candidate Sam Ronan channeled the anxieties of Bernie Sanders voters, who still regard the 2016 primary process as a rigged one that disenfranchised progressive voters. Both seemed to receive a warm reception from the audience of Democratic Party men and women. As Buttigieg observed with unconcealed trepidation, Democrats would not be well served by a factional struggle between the Bernie wing and the establishment wing. But civil war seems very much in the offing.

Wednesday nights affair indicated two things: The first is that the partys prospective leaders seem to see the energy bubbling up from the grassroots in opposition to President Trump as a cure-all. Each of these candidates leaned heavily into the notion that Trump represents an existential authoritarian threat. They failed to take into account the fact that neither Trump nor the GOP-led Congress has done much of anything. Coming just one week after the White House wascompelled to abandon its executive order restricting immigration, fire its national security advisor, and losea Cabinet nominee to opposition among their supposed allies, the definition of what constitutes authoritarian fascism is becoming unrecognizably broad.

Second, it is clear that the Democratic Party is finding it difficultto come to terms with the fact that it finds itself in the worst position it has been in institutionally since before the New Deal and that the partys decimation occurred under Barack Obama. In broad strokes, the contest between Ellison and Perez has become a referendum on Barack Obamas tenureone Obama seems likely to win. In the entire debate, only South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison (who dropped out today in favor of Perez) had the courage to say outright that the party had beendecimated between 2009 and 2017 and the Obamas Organizing for America had hamstrung local party machineryand rendered local efforts dysfunctional.

It would be a display of pigheaded determination for the Democrats to pretend their political predicament is not of theirown making and to refuse to acknowledge the validity of its base voters concerns. It would be insane for a political party that has lost over 1,000 seats in eight years not to make a course correction. It would be malpractice for a political party to invite the same conditions that led to civil war among its opponents just a few years back. Yet this is the trajectory on which the Democratic Party finds itself.

The Democrats do not necessarily have to change in order to benefit from a swing in the political pendulum in their direction. Still, itappears blind to its predicament. It is one visible to every Republican who watched the rise of the Tea Party with both apprehension and optimism. Until and unless Democrats come to terms with the failures of the Obama era, they are sleepwalking into a period of chaos. As Republicans will attest, whator whomight emerge from that process will be anyones guess.

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Commentary podcast: Deportations, the DNC, and conservatism's devolution.

On the last of this weeks podcast, the COMMENTARY crew discusses the problems with the new deportation policies, ventilates on the Democratic National Committees race for chair, and wonders whether Trump is wooing the conservative movement or whether the conservative movement has already surrendered its purity to his seductions. Give a listen.

No one outside media or the White House thinks either is trusted.

For a window into the reporting industrys crisis of confidence, look no further than the Washington Posts new motto: Democracy dies in darkness. This is about as close to a self-indulgent pep rally for the beleaguered press as there is. The admission implicit in this new mission statement is that the publics mistrust of journalism and the presidents attacks on the vocation are taking their toll. As CBS News anchor John Dickerson put it, and for reasons cataloged in countless studies and think pieces, the press did the work of ruining its reputation on its own. There will, however, always be ways in which the press can lift its spirits. The latest reprieve comes courtesy of the pollsters at Quinnipiac University. But this, too, may be illusory.

The newQuinnipiac survey is particularly unkind to President Donald Trump. It finds his job approval rating sagging below 40 percent among registered voters. It reveals that large majorities do not think the president is honest, level-headed, a good leader, intelligent, or representative of their values. Among the only area in which this survey provides Trump and his allies with some comfort is the discovery that a majority of those surveyed disapprove of how the press has covered this administration. While that will be seen in the White House as a partial vindication of their campaign targeting medias credibility, the finding is tempered by the fact that voters disapprove of Trumps attacks on the press by 61 to 35 percent.

Maybe the most consequential discovery in this poll, however, is that the public has not lost all faith in the pressat least, not when compared with Trump. Who do you trust more to tell you the truth about important issues? the poll asked. 37 percent said President Trump; 52 percent said news media.

As binary choices go, this is an awful one. Gallup, which has been testing public faith in institutions for decades, pegs the publics trust in television news and newspapers at just 21 and 20 percent respectively. The president, meanwhile, suffers from a historic trust deficit with the publica consequence of the presidents often antagonistic relationship with the facts and his frequently contradictory pronouncements. In a dynamic similar to the one that characterized the 2016 elections, neither media nor the president inspires much public trust. That dynamic may have contributed to the unreliability of some 2016 presidential polling.

In fact, both news media and Trump may benefit from being compared with one another. While Quinnipiacs registered voters are especially sour on Trump, a Fox News Chanel survey released last week found the public evenly split on whether government officials under Trump were more likely than the press to tell the public the truth. If respondents were asked whether they trusted Trump or the press versus an institution that retains the publics unambiguous esteem (institutions like the military, policy, churches, or representatives of small business), the results would be lopsided.

If either media or the president enjoyed the publics faith and trust, neither would be seeking to test their meager marginal advantages over the other. For those who are not invested in the outcome of the contest of egos between the West Wing and the Acela Corridor media community, what these surveys confirm is that the public has little faith in outlets that trade on trust like currency. This crisis is only exacerbated by tribal contests over points of pride. And no one benefits from that.

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Balancing majority and minority rights and privileges is lawmaker's task.

If you wanted to distill the breathtaking stupidity of our modern age into a single anecdote, you could do no better than New York Times reporter Daniel Victors latest effort.

In a Tuesday report, Victor chronicled the experience of students at a Massachusetts public school. Every Friday, the children who attended local elementary schools were greeted by uniformed police officers for what was dubbed High Five Fridays, which is exactly what it sounds like. The children were treated to a brief and positive interaction with police officers, the design of which was to reduce the anxiety some of the students may feel when confronted by law enforcement. The program was recently canceled by the schools superintendent and a local police chief because, according to the Times, a small number of parents who have had difficult experiences with the police complained.

In sum, a program designed to reduce apprehensions that typify the relationship between police officers and the community they patrol was scrapped because it had the desired effect. We are left to conclude then that, regardless of how it negatively affectstheir childrens prospects in the future, this small number of unduly influential parents prefer their grudging prejudice to progress. The story ends on a hopeful note, though, as the majority of parents for whom the program was a welcome one arent deferring to the will of a vocal minority, even if it is a minority with a call to action the press finds sympathetic.

In both foundational philosophy and law, the United States is, by any historical standard, remarkably dedicated to preserving the rights of the minority against the tyranny of the majority. If you listen closely, you can already hear the howls of incensed disapproval over that objective statement of fact. It is the chief virtue of a republic that it is suspicious of the mob, and America is forever trying to disperse its rabble. That obviously does not mean that the United States now or has at any point in the past perfectly preserved the rights of every citizen against those who would encroach upon them. This is a constant labor.

The American experiment is one defined by conflicts over the preservation of the liberty of the minority (broadly defined to mean everything from demographic subgroups to political factions), in both civic and societal terms. This perennial struggle is often wrongly defined, however, only as the exertions of the minority against the majority. The majoritys desires and pursuits must also be respected. It is a testament to the American publics ingrained respect for minority rights that the will of the majority is often mistrusted simply because it is the will of the majority.

Nothing is more indicative of this ennobling and uniquely American tension than the present Groundhog Day debate over the reformation of the American health care system. Anyone who closely remembers the tone of the debate in 2009 and 2010 over the Democrats planned healthcare overhaul (if not the substance) can recognize the similarities in the present debate. It is one that is too often defined not by dispassionate debate over policy merits or the principles of utilitarianism, but by emotionally manipulative appeals to unreason on behalf of the beleaguered minority.

National Journal Groups editorial director Ron Brownstein illustrated this unattractive tendency on Wednesday in response to House Speaker Paul Ryans declaration that freedom is the ability to buy what you want to fit what you need and ObamaCare is Washington telling you what to buy regardless of your need. The price of providing more freedom to buy what you want is those that need more extensive coverage -older, sicker-will inexorably pay more, Brownstein professed.

Brownstein is saying that those who require more of a product or service than the general public will pay more for those products or services. This is a bedrock economic principle that is controversial only in Washington and the nations faculty lounges. Because Brownstein has rather cloyingly framed the issue as one of heart and, of course, the tyranny of the penny-pinching majority, he compels us to ignore the laws of supply and demand and indulge only our basest passions.

When asked how he defends the fact that ObamaCare forces the majority of the public who are forced to subsidize those who consume more healthcare products than the average consumer, Brownstein retreated to the accepted logic of the welfare state. The goal of young and healthy is to someday be among the old and sick, and also benefit from the generational risk-sharing, he said. Like Social Security. This is a reasonable logic. It will invariably inform congressional Republicans thinking as they craft a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. Contrary to the caricature drawn byliberal ideologues, modern-day Republicans are not Randian dogmatists seeking to do away with the social safety net. Here, too, however, Brownstein indulges the impulse to tyrannize the majority.

If Social Security is the model, we are thus obliged to reform this program before it becomes a net cost to the government by 2020 and hits insolvency in (by estimates) 2034. Would-be reformers, who have for decades warned of the inevitable crisis involving entitlements, encounter a road block in the form of a vocal, politically active minority of elderly beneficiaries. The majority in this casefuture beneficiaries of this program and those not yet born to whom an insurmountable debt burden will be bequeathedis a tertiary concern.

The tension between addressing the concerns of the majority and preserving the wellbeing of the minority will never disappear. It would be a sign of civic ill health if they did. That is a popular thing to say. It lends itself well to emotional blackmail and special pleading, so youve probably heard it before. Less often stated is the fact that majority rights and benefits must also be preserved. Crafting policy designed not to balance rights but to punish the majority only because of its numerical superiority is morally compromisedto say nothing of the fact that it usually leads to bad policy.

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Continued here:
Zionism is Not Racism - Commentary Magazine

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