We were disheartened to learn of Senator Chuck Schumer’s broadside against the Orthodox Jewish community over its alleged unwillingness to sharply criticize President Trump for supposedly failing to confront hate in the United States.
It is unfortunate that Sen. Schumer is prepared to casually drag the Jewish community into a conflict created wholly by his obsessive colleagues in the anti-Trump “Resistance.” But even more galling is that the senator is the last person to talk accusingly about a failure to confront hate.
We cannot forget that Sen. Schumer was the principal and highest ranking Democrat supporting the election of Congressman Keith Ellison as chairman of the Democratic National Committee after Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016. Mr. Ellison was for many years notoriously close to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has a decades-long record of spouting the most vile and incendiary anti-Semitic statements imaginable.
Mr. Schumer also comes up rather short on the merits of his Trump-as-hatemonger scenario. The senator reportedly based his comments on President Trump’s reaction to the violence last August in Charlottesville, Virginia, between demonstrators opposed to the dismantling of monuments dedicated to Civil War figures and those who supported their removal.
Neo-Nazi and white supremacist elements marched along with non-racist local opponents of dismantling the monuments while hard left activists, many of them from the violence-prone “antifa” movement, joined those on the other side of the issue. An ugly brawl soon ensued, culminating in the death of a young pro-dismantling demonstrator when a white supremacist rammed his car into her.
Mr. Trump blamed “both sides” given the confrontational dynamic that drove the violence and, taking into account that many of the demonstrators were locals in favor of preserving landmarks and not Nazis or white supremacists with an agenda of hate, insisted that there were “fine people” on both sides.
For Sen. Schumer and company, though, this was blasphemy, plain and simple, and the battle was joined. Soon it became the accepted truth among many journalists and liberal activists that the president’s “fine people” remark referred solely to the white supremacists when this was patently not true.
Mr. Schumer knows better. Nor was he sent to Washington to be part of a cabal obsessed with delegitimizing a duly elected president of the United States.