The Patriot Post® · Democrats Are Alienating Jewish Millennials
“In the hierarchy of crackpot Leftist intersectionality, it’s now clear that Muslim trumps black; black trumps woman; female trumps male; and all of the above trump white males, especially Christian males. And everybody hates the Jews.” —columnist Michael Walsh
Sarcastic? Absolutely. But there was also something quite telling in Nancy Pelosi’s effort to paper over — literally — the transparently anti-Semitic outbursts of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). In the entire seven page, boilerplate-against-all-hate resolution, mentioning “African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other people of color, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and others,” only two descriptors were attached to the word white: “supremacist” and “nationalist.”
Moreover, in the world of increasingly mainstream leftist intersectionality, Jewish Americans are a “two-fer:” Jewish and white, with the latter word becoming virtually interchangeable with the word “privileged,” among the nation’s self-appointed arbiters of morality.
Yet like the #WalkAway campaign initiated by openly homosexual Brandon Straka, and the “Blexit” movement birthed by conservative black American Candace Owens, another effort aimed at getting Americans to leave an increasingly radical and divisive Democrat Party is taking shape. Elizabeth Pipko, a 23-year-old Jewish figure skater-turned-model, has spearheaded the “JEXODUS” movement. “We are proud Jewish Millennials tired of living in bondage to leftist politics,” states the movement’s website.
Pipko illuminated her aims in an interview with Arutz Sheva. “The whole point is to have actual, physical events,” she stated. “We’re going to have rallies and other events where we can get people excited and have an environment where young Jews can feel safe and unafraid and stand up for their beliefs.”
Pipko further explains her undertaking was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. “I’ve had it in my mind for a long time,” she adds. “I think we saw it in the Obama presidency — the turn towards anti-Israel policies, accompanied by a rise in anti-Semitism in our country. And it’s only gotten worse, and right now we have anti-Semitism in the halls of Congress. So if not now, when?”
Remarkably, the same Democrat Party obsessed with “Russian collusion!” was conspicuously silent when Barack Obama’s administration sent $350,000 in taxpayer funds to Israeli group OneVoice, who campaigned to oust Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. Obama also employed the NSA to spy on Israeli officials — collecting conversations with U.S. lawmakers and Jewish American groups in the process.
Those efforts were an attempt to preserve Obama’s deal with Iran — the same Iran whose annual celebration of Al-Quds Day would not be complete without the requisite shouting of “Down with America” and “Death to Israel” by millions of Islamist loyalists.
Pipko was asked why liberal Jewish Americans still support Democrats. “That’s a question I’ve been trying to answer,” she said. “I grew up an incredibly proud Jew, which is what led me towards the Republicans. I was not raised a Republican, I was raised as a Jew before anything else.”
As columnist Bruce Bawer explains, that particular order of priorities doesn’t resonate with Jewish progressives. “Alas, I’m afraid it’ll take more than a little Der Stürmer-type rhetoric by Muslim Democrats to budge True Believers whose weekly religious devotions consist not of attending shul but of soaking in the Sunday New York Times, that secular Torah,” he writes. “No devout adherent of the Gospel according to Sulzberger would jump ship, after all, as long as all-knowing guru Paul ‘I won the Nobel Prize’ Krugman can write, as he did last Thursday, that ‘only one brand of antisemitism scares me — and it’s not on the left.’ I wonder what Natan Sharansky has to say about that.”
Krugman wasn’t alone in the attempt to shift the blame to the Right. Fellow Times columnist Michelle Goldberg “assumed” that while “Omar has been reckless rather than malicious,” there’s “still only one political party in America that is a safe place for hate.” Juan Williams insisted “Christian evangelicals’ frustration at their failure to divide Jewish voters from Democrats and bring them to President Trump,” was the “real story” behind last week’s House vote. And liberal Jewish group J Street warned that the greater threat to the Jewish community comes from “the surge of ethno-nationalism and racism that forces on the right, including President Trump, have unleashed here and across the globe.”
Then there were the rationalizers. Pelosi insisted Omar didn’t understand “the full weight of the words.” Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) argued Omar’s anti-Semitism was “more personal” than that of Jews whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Jewish American Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), who didn’t want to “trivialize” what Omar said, nonetheless asserted that “part of being a Jew is to be welcoming to the stranger. And I want to tell you, Ilhan Omar is a refugee from Somalia. She comes from a different culture. She has things to learn.”
Yet it was Women’s March co-founder and rabid Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions supporter Linda Sarsour who provided the greatest insight into modern leftist priorities. She attacked Pelosi, declaring that the House speaker — increasingly in name only, it appears — is a “typical white feminist upholding the patriarchy doing the dirty work of powerful white men.”
In another column, Walsh explains what Sarsour is really saying. The American Left has created a “Victimization Flow Chart,” where “oppression flows down from the top, starting with white men,” and any group “can only be oppressed by the groups above it,” he writes. Ergo, “Ilhan Omar, a non-white woman, simply cannot be guilty of bigotry against Jews. It is definitionally impossible.”
Yet there is something even more cynical at work here. Omar, and her equally radical House colleagues, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), might best be described as the Democrat Party’s “crash test dummies.” When they say whatever pops into their head, the bet here is party higher-ups take polls to see what resonates. If they get a positive reaction, leadership takes credit. If the reaction is negative, leadership, as they have already demonstrated, can “rein in” the behavior of their “inexperienced” but “passionate” colleagues.
It’s an ugly way to forge a party agenda, but as Walsh reminds us, “Victimhood rules must always be followed, no matter what. And that means Ilhan Omar can say whatever the hell she wants to say.” So can Tlaib, and AOC.
Will JEXODUS succeed? President Trump tweeted his support for the organization, and Pipko remains optimistic. “Our first events are going to be happening in April in New York and Florida around Pesach,” she revealed. “Hopefully right before and after Pesach will be our first events. Then we’ll continue through the month and on until the election in 2020.”
In the meantime, jexodus.org spells out its agenda in no uncertain terms: “We reject the hypocrisy, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism of the rising far-left. Progressives, Democrats, and far too many old-school Jewish organizations take our support for granted,” it states. “After all, we’re Jewish, and Jews vote for Democrats. Until today.”