The authors of a new book titled “White Rural Rage” appeared on MSNBC last week, accusing rural Americans of being the “most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay” demographic, people who “don’t believe in democracy” or “free speech” and (in keeping with the left’s latest slur) are likely to be “Christian nationalists.” Former MSNBC host Chris Matthews likened the internal conflict to “fighting terrorism” and expressed bafflement that “the regular guy in the country” can’t stand the coastal elite.
“It’s a weird thing,” he remarked.
During their Super Tuesday broadcast this week, MSNBC managed to insult the residents of two entire states. Jen Psaki mocked Virginia voters who stated that immigration was their top concern. Co-host Rachel Maddow joked, “Well, Virginia does have a border with West Virginia ... build the wall!”
Meanwhile, Tablet magazine published “My Mother’s Secret,” written by Justine El-Khazen, whose mother had worked as a Middle East analyst for the CIA. On her deathbed last December, Ms. El-Khazen’s mother begged her not to raise her children Jewish, for their own safety. (Ms. El-Khazen’s mother was not Jewish; her father was.) This dying wish perplexed Ms. El-Khazen. But she was frankly shocked by the comments of her mother’s colleagues in the CIA when asked about the source of her mother’s views.
One told Ms. El-Khazen that “Israel is the only reason for anti-Semitism in the Arab world.” Former CIA Director John Brennan told her the Hamas terrorists responsible for the Oct. 7 attack on Israel were just “high on drugs.” Mr. Brennan and other CIA operatives insisted the real threat of anti-Semitism comes not from the Middle East but from “right-wing” movements, “including the anti-Semite of the whole world, Trump.”
This is absurd. For decades, the left’s party line about hostility to the world’s Jewry is that it originates on the “far right.” But the abbreviated term “Nazi” comes from the German “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei,” or “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”
Fascists and communists have much in common, including virulent anti-Semitism.
Hitler hated Jews, but Karl Marx, the founder of Marxism, despised them just as much. In his essay “On the Jewish Question,” he asks rhetorically: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” Marx’s socialist and communist followers justify attacks on Jews because they are seen as the personification of capitalism. In his 2015 article “Karl Marx’s Radical Anti-Semitism” in The Philosopher’s Magazine, author Michael Ezra gives a pointed example:
“Ulrike Meinhof of the [German] Marxist Red Army Faction ... stated the opinion that ‘Auschwitz means that six million Jews were murdered and carted on to the rubbish dumps of Europe for being that which was maintained of them—Money-Jews.’ As far as she was concerned, hatred of Jews was actually the hatred of capitalism and hence the murder of the Israeli Olympic team, at the 1972 Munich Olympics, was not only justified but something that could be praised.”
Reading Jewish commentary is compelling if at times bemusing. It’s clear some of its distinguished writers are struggling with what they view as betrayal by those they thought were their ideological allies on the left, as well as with the difficulty of concluding that they have allies among such an unlikely cast of characters as evangelical Christians, working-class Americans, Trump voters, and former President Donald Trump himself.
Both Tablet’s editor, Liel Leibovitz, and Ms. El-Khazen provide—at best—only a passing acknowledgment of the Abraham Accords signed while President Trump was in office. That and his decision to move the United States’ embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv show significant support for the Jewish state separate and apart from arming it to defend itself against aggression by its neighbors in the Middle East.
One must also ask why ideologies that encompass such hostility to Jews and Christians appear to be so tolerant of members of the Muslim faith. In some instances, it’s just a reflection of the “oppressor versus oppressed” neo-Marxist worldview that characterizes the United States, Christians (regardless of their color or ethnicity), Israel, and Jews as “privileged” and Muslims as victims. This of course ignores that Muslims have dominant political control in most countries in the Middle East and that those governments often restrict the rights not only of members of other faiths but also of women, homosexuals, and children.
In other cases, it may be that despite all their blather about Jewish or Christian “extremists,” Western leftists do not truly fear violent activism by either group, but they do fear retaliation by Islamic fundamentalists.
But even the most rigid of political ideologies cannot explain the visceral attacks upon Judeo-Christianity or the refusal to acknowledge the countless improvements to the human condition that have been conceived, developed, and implemented over centuries under it. It appears at times as if those who wage war against Jews and Christians are shaking their fists at the God of both faiths, rejecting the absolute truths and corresponding personal obligations that belief in Him requires.
They cannot prosecute a war against this God. But they can certainly attack His followers.
