Marching with devil worshipers
Those women and men who marched in the Woman’s March under the leadership of Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory colluded with evil.
Alan Dershowitz
These two leaders of the Women’s March worship the most influential anti-Semite in the United States today. They claim to disagree with his crass anti-Jewish (and anti-gay and anti-feminist) preaching — though there is a reason to doubt this, as it relates to Jews—but they admire him for his impact on elements of the Black community. They must understand that this impact includes influencing hundreds of thousands of Blacks to consider Jews to be “termites” and destroyers of the world. But they don’t care. They regard him as great—Mallory has called him the greatest of all time (GOAT).
Marching with these devil worshipers is the equivalent of marching under the banner of David Duke, who inspires white supremacists with the same sort of bigotry with which Farrakhan preaches Black supremacy. Hitler inspired pride in Aryans, Mussolini made the trains run on time, and Stalin spread the wealth. But would the women who marched with Farrakhan’s admirers have marched with these devils? Well, maybe Stalin!
What’s the difference? The painful difference is that antisemitism is more tolerated on the hard left than other forms of racism. Moreover, antisemitism can mask itself as anti-Zionism— singling out only the nation-state of the Jewish people for unique opprobrium, which is itself a form of bigotry, though one which is acceptable on the hard left. Consider the front page story in the New York Times Sunday Review, which singled out the Palestinian issue as “one of the great moral challenges of our time,” ignoring Syria, Ukraine, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, Tibet, Cyprus and many far greater moral challenges, which are largely ignored by the hard left. The Palestinian issue receives centre stage on the hard left, not because of how the Palestinians have been treated – they did, after all, reject offers of statehood and the end of the occupation on numerous occasions – but because of whois allegedly oppressing them: namely the nation state of the Jewish people.
Back to the marchers and their complicity with evil. Recall that Hitler was not elected by anti-Semites or because of his antisemitism. He was elected as the result of his economic and other policies by people who gave him a pass for his antisemitism because they approved of his other policies.
People who support Farrakhan because of the alleged good he does for the Black community and despite his overt antisemitism are complicit in bigotry, and those who march under the banner of such bigots are only one degree removed from such complicity. There must be zero tolerance for antisemitism by the left and right alike, just as there must be zero tolerance for other forms of bigotry. Everyone must pass “the shoe on the other foot test.” If you would not march with leaders who declared David Duke to be “the greatest of all time” so, too, you must not march with leaders who declare Farrakhan to be the “GOAT.”
Farrakhan is far more dangerous than Duke precisely because his antisemitism is given a pass not only by the hard left, but also by several African American members of Congress and even two former presidents. Would President Clinton have remained at memorial service if one of those on the stage had been David Duke? Of course not. He would have marched out in protest. Yet he remained on the stage at Aretha Franklin’s memorial service, sitting only a couple of seats away from the diabolical Farrakhan. Years earlier, Barak Obama posed with Farrakhan and participated in his Million Man March. Would he have done these things with white bigots?
So, shame on those women – Jews and not Jews alike — who displayed tolerance for antisemitism by marching under the banner of leaders who support the dangerous and influential anti-Semite, Louis Farrakhan. None of their rationalizations or excuses justify their complicity with evil.
Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of The Case Against the Democrats Impeaching Trump, Skyhorse publishing, 2019.
This article first appeared in Gatestone.
