A dangerous alliance for Jews

The US has not reached the situation of France and Britain but there is no automatic guarantee of Jewish safety.

By AMIEL UNGAR
Updated: SEPTEMBER 26, 2018 11:40
US Rep. Keith Ellison (photo credit: REUTERS)
US Rep. Keith Ellison
(photo credit: REUTERS)
The recent election of Muslim congressional candidates in the Democratic Party primaries and of Keith Ellison to be the Democratic Party nominee for Minnesota’s attorney general despite the sexual harassment rumors swirling around him raise questions on the order of can it happen here. Will the United States go the way of France and Great Britain and see a potent alliance between the socialist left and Islam portending danger for Jews?
My late father-in-law used to mutter the name Maggie Thatcher as if it was an imprecation, my daughter-in-law’s father Jacques celebrated the victory of the Socialist Francois Mitterand in 1981 by diving into a Paris fountain. For me, the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party meant the revered Hubert Humphrey and not Farrakhan’s bud Ellison. I expect that had he been alive today my father in law would have transferred his imprecations to Jeremy Corbyn; my in-laws are thankfully in Israel not in Paris, and I am worried about the political fallout for American Jewry.
When the catastrophic Jewish demographic trends in the United States are discussed, some argue hopefully that we should be concerned with quality and not quantity. In terms of political power, quality can hold off quantity for only so long but it eventually is swamped as quantity becomes quality. It becomes clear to political entrepreneurs that when a community is going down the tubes demographically and another one is rapidly rising, it pays to wager on the ascending forces.
It was Pascal Boniface, the director of IRIS (Institute des Relations Internationales et Strategiques), a socialist think tank, who put it bluntly in a memo to the French Socialist leadership that mapped out the trend. He advised his party to forego the Jewish vote as the growing Muslim vote would soon dwarf it. Of course, Boniface was interested in more than electoral considerations. He chided George W. Bush for his failure to include Israel in his “Axis of Evil” and has become an avid defender of BDS.
Some may scoff at my alarmist tone by arguing that the Muslims are still an insignificant and not an especially well-liked minority and this accounts for the press buzz when some Muslim candidates actually succeed. Here, I again recommend looking at the European precedents. Pakistanis in Britain or Algerians and Moroccans in France were not regarded kindly, but as their voting power grew they were embraced by parties on the left. We can also look at the political revolution in the American South to see the process at work. Andrew Young, who went on to serve as Jimmy Carter’s UN ambassador summed up the process in a speech before black mayors. “It used to be Southern politics was just ‘nigger’ politics, who could ‘outnigger’ the other – then you registered 10 to 15 percent in the community and folks would start saying ‘Nigra’ and then you get 35 to 40 percent registered and it’s amazing how quick they learned how to say ‘Nee-grow,’ and now that we’ve got 50, 60, 70 percent of the black votes registered in the South, everybody’s proud to be associated with their black brothers and sisters.”
But doesn’t Young’s description show that we are dealing with an essentially positive process? After all, not only blacks, but Jews and other minorities in America used their voting strength to climb the social ladder as part of their Americanization process. The problem is that the processes are not equivalent. Jews and other minorities wanted to be recognized as equals and part of the pie. Muslim political organization is intended “to fight Jewish influence” and unless you are a useful idiot like Jewish Voice for Peace willing to denounce Israel full-heartedly, the distinction between antisemitism and antizionism becomes blurred as in France and Britain. The Muslim political mobilization drive such as the July 2018 Muslim Vote Matters rally in Dearborn is spearheaded by organizations such as CAIR, which was featured in a 2015 ADL report pointing to its ties with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, which has many offshoots including Hamas, also established American fronts that are permeated with its philosophy. The overt agenda is BDS and delegitimizing Israel while shutting off criticism by tarring critics with the charge of Islamophobia. Ironically, CAIR has fully enlisted in the fight against the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2018 designed to protect Jewish students on campus from harassment and intimidation on the grounds that it will muzzle free speech.
The Islamist organizations do not act alone. They are befriended by the hard left which believes that if it were not for Western arrogance in the treatment of Muslims, everything would be hunky dory. Allying with the Muslims is a convenient way to disassociate oneself from their accumulated sense of guilt and pointing a finger at Western countries that should not be made great but forced to atone. In normal times, the radical left is marginalized; in today’s polarized times, radicals like Jean-Luc Melenchon, Jeremy Corbyn and some Democratic Socialists in the US are perceived as the real deal and have a shot at power. They are willing to take the Islamists along for the ride and act as their lawyers.
The rise in Muslim political power is therefore not something to be celebrated but should sound alarm bells in the Jewish community. The very least that committed Jews can do is to withhold their endorsement from Muslim candidates until they have ascertained that they are not beholden to CAIR, hate-spewing imams or Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan. The US has not reached the situation of France and Britain but there is no automatic guarantee of Jewish safety. Jews will have to help themselves.