The loyalty of most American Jews to the Democratic Party and its current leader, President Barack Obama, is not in question. Yet while the ideology of the majority of their members and contributors is no secret, most major Jewish organizations, not to mention synagogues, attempt to stay out of partisan controversies, even while often espousing liberal causes. Most sensible people understand that these days, the Jews and Israel have friends on both sides of the aisle and it is bad politics as well as bad policy to forget that.
But some Democratic partisans want to eschew this common sense approach and to deploy the full force of organized American Jewry to demonize critics of the Obama administration. Their rationale is that some right-wing critics of Obama, and especially his plans to change America’s health care system, compared the president to Hitler and his programs to Nazism. Peter Keating of New York magazine recently wrote that Jewish groups ought to inject themselves into the health care debate on this shaky premise and wondered at their reluctance.
Such comparisons are, of course, not merely over-the-top insults but vile. Say what you will about the faults of ObamaCare as well as the absurd cult of personality that has grown up around the president but neither he nor his party can or should be compared to Nazis.
Obama is a preening puffed up poseur besotted with some very bad ideas but he is the elected leader of a democracy and no totalitarian. Hitler murdered six million Jews and launched a genocidal war that took the lives of tens of millions of others.
Any comparison between the two or of liberal Democrats with Nazis says everything about the people who make such comparisons and nothing about Obama. The simple rule for rational politics is that anyone who invokes Hitler loses the debate as well the respect of right-thinking citizens.
The promiscuous use of the word “Holocaust” to describe anything bad has gotten out of hand. Indeed, Keating notes that recently a Democratic member of Congress decried our current system of health care as a “Holocaust in America.”
But what liberal polemicists like Keating as well as other members of the Obama cheerleading squad want from Jewish groups is a full-court press by the entire organized Jewish world aimed at taking down Obama’s critics and effectively tarring all such dissenters from our Nobel laureate leader’s plans with the brush of extremism, if not anti-Semitism.
The goal of such a stand isn’t just to pass a bill they like but to intimidate all those who take the name of Obama in vain, not just people who foolishly circulate goofy e-mails about his place of birth or religion. It is opposition to ObamaCare and those who worry about Obama’s predilection for government power at home and appeasement of tyranny abroad that liberals wish to silence.
But if most Jewish groups, which – contrary to the myths propagated by the anti-Israel left – are mostly populated by mainstream liberals, are reluctant to join in this fray, they have good reason.
The most obvious reason is that while the general outrage heard from liberals about the nature of the criticism of Obama treats the use of Nazi analogies as something new, it isn’t. For the entire eight years of the administration of George W. Bush, such invective was commonplace.
There is virtually nothing nasty that has been put about by the nuts on the right about Obama that wasn’t already spewed by the left about Bush and Cheney. Liberals pretend there is something particularly dangerous about right-wingers who get up at town hall meetings and rant about expanding government power. But what exactly is the difference between such persons and many antiwar protesters who often used intemperate and insulting rhetoric about Bush as well as being just as contemptuous about the right of others to free speech?
Liberals chose not to notice the excesses of Code Pink provocateurs or the nonsense spouted by the Moveon.org crowd when they were portraying Bush and Cheney as totalitarians extinguishing the flame of American liberty. When, however, right-wingers behave badly it isn’t merely protesters losing perspective but the thin edge of a new wave of racism and anti-Semitism (the irony that the demonization of Israel is primarily a left-wing phenomenon is lost on those who make such accusations).