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June 24, 2024

The pogrom in Los Angeles might help Democrat Jews rethink their allegiance

By Andrea Widburg

Yesterday in Los Angeles, hordes of pro-Hamas protestors, many of them masked, descended upon one of the most Jewish neighborhoods in America and attacked a synagogue. In the ensuing battle, many Jews were bloodied. The LAPD was conspicuously absent both before and during the attack. Today, a Jewish Democrat in Los Angeles wonders what happened. If he were wise, he’d realize that the Republican party is the answer. Sadly, I’m betting he’ll still vote for Joe.

Monica Showalter has written about the terrorism in Los Angeles, so I don’t need to repeat that here. What I want to focus on is one Jew’s slowly dawning realization that the people he supported for so long—namely, Democrats—do not support him back.

Take, for example, Sam Yebri, a Jewish immigrant from Iran, who is a Yale and University of South California Law School grad (the former of which is a bastion of antisemitism). He seems like a lovely person and, as a sign of gratitude for America having taken him in, Yebri has worked to help bring in other immigrants. For example, in 2021, he remembered with pride how, two years before, he worked with the Los Angeles Council to make the city a “Welcoming City” for refugees:

The Anti-Defamation League, with which Sam Yebri worked, was at the forefront of being excited about LA’s being an official refugee city. What they seem to have missed was that the refugees that these Jews, including Yebri, so proudly welcomed into LA included those from the Muslim-majority countries that Obama had designated as terrorist-sponsoring nations. Moreover, once you have an open border, anyone can come in, including jihadists.

The problem, of course, is that these well-meaning Jewish leftists have no sense of discrimination. Certainly, discrimination can be a force for evil (see, e.g., Jim Crow). However, at its core, it simply means looking at things and making intelligent distinctions.

For example, there are refugees who come to America to escape genocide and who simultaneously embrace American values. However, not all genocide refugees do embrace those values. Lots of them just want to escape genocide against them and, given the chance, commit a different genocide in their new country, usually against Jews. Discrimination helps you figure out those subtle but important distinctions. All refugees are not the same.

But Yebri’s donation history shows that, like so many other Jews,  he thought the Democrats were a safe party that shared his values and didn’t hate him. While Yebri hasn’t made political donations since 2018, his past donations were all Democrat all the way (e.g., Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, the Los Angeles County Democratic Central Committee of California, Chuck Schumer, Villaraigosa for Governor, and Eric Swalwell).

As noted, Yebri stopped donating after 2018. I want to say he did so because he could no longer stomach what his party was doing. However, his proud stance against Trump in 2019, about which he was still boasting two years later, suggests that whatever else dried up his checkbook, it wasn’t a change in his political allegiance.

Still, there’s still room for change. Maybe the fact that the Democrat-run Los Angeles government knew what was coming to the Jewish community and did nothing will change him. Certainly, he seems to be figuring out that there’s a problem:

If it were me, at about this time, I’d be rethinking my loyalty to the Democrat party. After all, it’s home to the open antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric of Jamaal Bowman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and all of academia. It’s also home to the covert antisemitism of the Biden administration, which is protecting Hamas and Hezbollah, both of which are Iranian proxies and Israel’s genocidal enemies.

Not only are Democrats demanding a ceasefire even as Israel is prevailing, but they also want to force a two-state solution, pairing Israel with people who are open about their exterminationist goals. Even more consequentially, Biden is strangling the ammunition supplies Israel needs to fight. (One of the tragedies of Israel is that it’s dependent on America for ammunition.)  

However, when it comes to most Jewish Democrats, I’m not optimistic. Like the beaten wife who returns to her husband when he cries crocodile tears and never promises to hurt her again (or like Charlie Brown with Lucy and the football), Democrat Jews are eternal optimists. When the same people attacking them cry with them and promise to sin no more, they believe it. That’s why, rather than looking at what the Democrats are doing regarding Hamas and Hezbollah (supporting them covertly and overtly), they’re taken in by weepy tweets:

As I said, Sam Yebri seems like a good man. But goodness is not enough. He and others like him need to face reality, and the reality is that the American left, like the left in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other parts of the world, despises Israel and Jews. Until Jews turn away from leftism, they are, in the words of my friend Robin M. Itzler, building their own cattle cars.

Image: Sam Yebri (cropped). YouTube screen grab.

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