Here’s a brain teaser for you: Suppose you were very bad at your job. Terrible, horrible, no good, world-historically awful. And suppose your incompetence was so vast and your mistakes were so egregious that they didn’t just embarrass your boss but literally pushed the world to the brink of all-out war. How may you expect to be rewarded?
In America, this question has two possible permutations. If you’re an ordinary person, the answer is simple: you’ll be fired, rightly humiliated, and asked kindly never to show your face in polite company again. If you’re a high-ranking Democrat, well, bub, clear your schedule because there’s an even bigger, better job in your immediate future.
Consider Wendy Sherman. A social worker, she was tapped by Bill Clinton to run his administration’s North Korea policy, a position for which she had as much training and aptitude as I do for the Zaouli, the Ivory Coast’s notoriously difficult traditional mask dance. In a 2001 oped in The New York Times, Sherman announced that Kim Jong Il, the rogue nation’s tyrant, “appears ready to make landmark commitments”. He was: committed to ignoring Sherman, he withdrew from the talks, continued his stroll towards nuclear ability, and, in 2006, announced that Pyongyang now had the bomb.
Naturally, then, she was Barack Obama’s choice to lead the nuclear negotiations with Iran, and, later, Joe Biden’s choice to serve as Deputy Secretary of State.
You know what happened next: $100 billion was paid to the murderous ayatollahs with virtually no strings attached in support of the Obama-Biden philosophy of regional realignment, focused on turning Tehran into a powerhouse and an American partner. The results of this policy were most clearly visible on October 7, 2023, when Iran’s proxies made good use of the cash and arms shipped to them by their patrons to take yet another stab at killing Jews.
Did that, perchance, finally cause Sherman to reflect?
Indeed it has, just not in the way you might’ve hoped.
I believe, Sherman told a podcaster last week, speaking of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, “that the prime minister has led us down a road, and we have been part of it, that has, in essence, created a genocide in Gaza”.
Readers of the JC hardly need to be told that the claim is spurious, a blood libel designed to boost the efforts of the radical Islamists vying to eliminate the world’s sole Jewish state. Why, then, would someone like Sherman, who had spent decades dabbling in diplomacy, repeat it?
Simple: She’s merely saying the quiet part out loud. In contemporary Democrat circles, believing – against all existing evidence, common sense, and basic human decency – that Israel is a genocidal pariah isn’t an outlier; it’s the future.
Don’t take my word for it. Just look at the latest survey from the Pew Research Center, released last month and asking Americans to share their views of Israel. Republicans, especially those over 50, expressed strong support. Democrats, especially younger ones, expressed the opposite: a whopping eight out ten polled reported having unfavourable or extremely unfavourable opinion of the Jewish state.
Hence voting against military aid to Jerusalem in the middle of a war against Iran, Hamas, and Hezobollah.
Hence the overwhelming partisan support for Maine Senate hopeful Graham Platner, who repeatedly dabbles in genocide accusations and had a tattoo on his chest that eerily resembled the SS head and skull symbol, which he removed in time for the campaign. New York’s Senator Charles Schumer, the most senior Jewish official in the Democrat Party, extended his support for Platner last week, proving once again that there is no principle he wouldn’t giddily abandon when political power was at stake.
And hence the rally in Pennsylvania last week for Congressional hopeful Chris Rabb, featuring the internet influencer Hasan “America deserved 9/11” Piker and a host of supporters waving the flags of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the deadliest Palestinian terror group.
Sherman, then, wasn’t speaking injudiciously. She was merely preparing herself for another job with another future Democrat administration keen on letting yet another American foe grow stronger and well-armed and censoring Israel some more as it tries to defend itself.
This kind of behaviour drove Alan Dershowitz, the famed attorney, author, and lifelong Democrat, to abandon the party after 67 years last month. “I believe,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the centre and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world”.
Other Jews are following suit. In New York, for example, still home to the largest Jewish population in America, support for Donald Trump shot up to 45 per cent of Jews in 2024, a radical increase from the 30 per cent who voted for him in 2020. And while Biden commanded 69 per cent of the state’s Jewish voters, Kamala Harris managed to get a mere 55 per cent of the Jewish vote, a precipitous downfall.
And Jews are hardly alone. Other minority groups are following suit and escaping a Democrat Party increasingly committed to radical chic rather than real-life solutions to the challenges real life Americans face. In 2020, for example, 66 per cent of African American adults, according to Gallup, identified as Democrats; that number has since dropped by 19 points. The same dynamic is true for Hispanic-Americans, two-thirds of whom voted for Biden in 2020 but only 55 per cent for Harris four years later.
What does it mean when Jews, Blacks, and Hispanics are all running away from the Democrats in droves? It says little about the voters themselves and a lot about the party they’re fleeing. The fundamental positions of these minority voters haven’t changed; but the Democrats, once the proud political home of these groups, opted instead to break hard to the left, embracing anything from delusional and harmful gender ideology to the savage pro-Palestinian voices that praise the rapists and murderers of children while blaming the victims for the mess.
Wendy Sherman, as she had always done, was merely the one to deliver her bosses’ true, innermost feelings: Democrats hate Jews. If you didn’t get it before, you ought to now.
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