AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, Pool, File
New York Magazine’S Jonathan Chait condemned in a scathing article on Monday the anti-Zionist protesters expected to riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week and called on his Democratic colleagues to join him.
He argued that while many of the groups leading the protests in Chicago and other cities across the country were said to have pure motives, most of them celebrated the barbaric October 7 attack on Israel, wished death on “every single supporter of the Zionist state,” and systematically harassed prominent Jews.
“This practice of glorifying and whitewashing protesters’ actual beliefs protects their ideas from correction,” Chait wrote. “The bill for this leniency is coming in Chicago. The long-awaited protests against the Democratic Party have raised fears about the electoral impact and the possibility that Donald Trump will benefit from them.”
“They will not stop spreading fear and discomfort among Zionists because they simply do not believe in liberal principles that would allow people with different views on the Middle East to live in peace. Even if they do not have the power to murder Zionists, they still have the power to make them deeply uncomfortable,” he added. “That is why they constantly abuse their victims and vandalize their homes.”
“Democrats and progressives must decide whether to treat these groups as noble idealists on the right side of history or as fanatical supporters of an illiberal and unjust agenda,” Chait continued, after outlining his own problems with Israel and some of its supporters in the U.S. “In the Middle East, that agenda calls for endless war until Jews are driven from the soil on which they unnaturally live. In the West, it means enforcing social norms that make most Jews feel alien and unwelcome.”
“To achieve justice for Palestinians and Jews, there is no need to appease, form alliances with, or give ‘influence’ to the adherents of this hateful agenda,” he concluded. “The morally correct response is to confront this ideology the way liberals confront other forms of hatred: by calling it by name.”
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