At a Bernie Sanders event in New York City, a black “community activist” began ranting about “Zionist Jews” running the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. At previous events, Sanders had been quick to condemn what he claimed was bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric by Republicans. But when confronted with the real thing by a left-wing activist at one of his own events, he couldn’t do it.
There was no condemnation of anti-Semitism. Instead after an initial claim that he was proud to be Jewish, he switched to a rambling speech criticizing Israel and distancing himself from Zionism.
Bernie Sanders had suggested at the same event that President Clinton was racist for defending his crime fighting policies to Black Lives Matter protesters, but would not condemn anti-Semitism. Instead of defying left-wing hatred for Jews, he tried to suggest that he wasn’t one of the “bad Zionists”. He was one of the “good Jews” who had a balanced position on Israel and “Palestine”.
It was a sad and shameful display. And this was not the first time that Bernie saw bigotry and blinked.
When NPR’s Diane Rehm accused him of having dual citizenship in Israel, he stumbled through a reply, but never condemned the anti-Semitism inherent in the question. He backed Jesse Jackson despite the Hymietown slur. When asked about it, he did his best to avoid directly condemning anti-Semitism.
Bernie Sanders came out of a political movement rife with anti-Semitism. He encounters it in public on a regular basis. And he is too much of a coward to stand up to it.
After Roseanne Barr ran for president, she stated that during the campaign, “everything I had ever believed about the left was severely shaken” and that she discovered that “many of those I had considered comrades were naked bigots”.
And she did what Bernie Sanders won’t do. She condemned the bigotry.
There’s little doubt that Bernie Sanders has encountered far more anti-Semitism in private than he has in public. And at every turn of the road, he made the decision to fall in line and keep his mouth shut.
In the UK, prominent Jews and non-Jews within Labour have been speaking out against growing anti-Semitism within the party and its political adjuncts. But here there’s a culture of silence about anti-Semitism on the left. And those who speak out pay the price. Consider the response to Phyllis Chesler’s The New Anti-Semitism. And, in contrast, the mainstreaming of Max Blumenthal’s blatant bigotry.
The “gentleman’s agreement” used to be that Jews were expected to keep quiet about anti-Semitism on the left while claiming that all the bigots were on the right. Bernie Sanders is a product of that system. His refusal to talk about anti-Semitism while accusing the right of bigotry is typical of how it works.
The Sanders event at the Apollo Theater also featured Harry Belafonte, who had claimed that “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich” and Spike Lee who had responded to criticism of anti-Semitic stereotypes in his movies by saying that he “couldn’t make an anti-Semitic film” because Jews run Hollywood. What does it say about Bernie Sanders that these are the ugly views of the people whom his campaign used in order to present him to a black audience?
