Encouraging violent assaults on your own constituents is a funny way for an elected official to do politics, isn’t it? But that’s what happens, when you are beholden to some party line, and fear the consequences of violating it more than whatever might happen to the suckers who vote for you.
Rock star progressive “Squad” member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did just that last Friday, when she stood up in Congress to accuse Israel of “genocide.” And yet on March 4, when harassed while out at the movies by anti-Israel “activists” who demanded she use that word against the Jewish state, something she had refrained from doing until then, she told them to back off and leave her alone, and even accused them of “lying.” So what happened in the intervening eighteen days? Did AOC take time off her busy schedule of defending the Chinese regime’s direct pipeline into 100 million Americans’ smartphones to fly to Gaza and see for herself what was going on? Did verified footage emerge of innocent Palestinians being machine-gunned into mass graves? No, and no. The pressure got to be too much for her, and she caved in, parroting the global Left’s line: the Jews are guilty of staging a second Holocaust!
Now, the 14th Congressional District of New York, which AOC represents, encompasses large swaths of the Bronx and Queens, two of the boroughs of New York City. In the New York metropolitan area, “there are more than 1.9 million Jews, or approximately 25% of the total U.S. Jewish population,” a recent survey found, out of a total of 23.6 million people in the region—about 8%. The 14th Congressional District’s population is about 730,000, so AOC has perhaps 58,000 Jewish constituents. Constituents who will now have to redouble their efforts to hide their Jewish identity, yarmulkes or Star of David jewelry, and pay for even more security around their synagogues, thanks to the morale boost their own Congressional representative just gave to the “Hitler was right” mob.
One wonders at the calculations going through AOC’s mind. Did she figure, to paraphrase Poppy Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker, “f*** the Jews, they won’t vote for me anyway?” Unlikely, as Jews in the New York area, like all American Jews, vote Democratic by lopsided margins. The old saw in American politics holds that “the Jews live like WASPs,” white Anglo-Saxon Protestants usually taken to connote Episcopalians of Baker’s sort, “but vote like Puerto Ricans,” AOC’s ethnicity.
No, AOC has to know that she is losing the votes of at least some of her Jewish constituents in the upcoming June 25 Congressional primary, when they have the option of voting for her moderate Democratic challenger, Marty Dolan. Some might even vote for her Republican opponent in the general election. Evidently, it’s far more important to her to stay in the good graces of the rest of the Squad, lest Ilhan Omar accuse her of being bought by the Jews, and Rashida Tlaib accuse herof genocide.
Back in 2019, after her first election, AOC admitted disarmingly that she didn’t know much about Israel and its conflicts. She gives no sign of having devoted any time or energy to learning in the years since, instead “acting like a politician” who is vulnerable to peer pressure and will sacrifice any principle if it will help her get ahead. It seems unlikely that AOC has any personal animus against the Jews, but that only makes her behavior craven and unprincipled. One thinks of Carl Jung, the renowned Swiss psychologist who had once been Sigmund Freud’s disciple. In 1933, he happily accepted the presidency of Germany’s General Medical Society of Psychotherapy, which the Nazis had just purged of all its Jews. He wasn’t antisemitic himself, just delighted to avail himself of the professional opportunity. As is AOC.
Emanuel Goldstein 