Yesterday, Axios reported that longtime anti-Israel campaigner Maher Bitar, a former Biden administration intelligence official, will essentially be running the Democratic Party foreign-policy group founded by Jake Sullivan and Ben Rhodes. While Rhodes is held in low regard in the foreign-policy world, Sullivan is not. But the former national security adviser appears to be handing the torch to a veteran of the anti-Semitic BDS campaign against the Jewish state.
The key takeaway here is that there is almost no resistance within the party structure to the ascendant anti-Zionist contingent. There won’t be a fight for the party; there will simply be a process in which the old hand the reins to the new.
The Philadelphia Inquirer also reported that Chris Rabb, a state lawmaker running for Congress, shared a social media post that blamed the Bondi Beach massacre on “Zionists,” pushing a conspiracy theory that the whole attack was a Jewish false flag.
Rabb blamed a staffer and said he condemned the sentiment. But while Rabb’s post was grotesque, it wasn’t necessarily shocking. Last week, he campaigned with prominent progressive anti-Semitic influencer Hasan Piker, who backs Hamas over Israel and has used various slurs to refer to Jews.
As Jewish Insider notes, Rabb is in a competitive primary contest, but he has received the backing of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the leader of the anti-Israel congressional bloc and possible 2028 presidential candidate. He was also endorsed by Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.
And today the Washington Free Beacon reports a rather unsettling detail about one of the Democrats running for the party’s nomination for a New Jersey congressional seat. Adam Hamawy “was an associate of terrorist mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman—the ‘Blind Sheikh’—and served as a defense witness at the trial that ultimately saw the cleric put away for life, court records show.” The Beacon piece contains a number of interesting details about the friendship between Hamawy and the man connected to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
Hamawy is running against a dozen other Democrats, though as the Beacon notes, he is leading the field in fundraising and has the backing of anti-Zionist Rep. Ilhan Omar and the political arm of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He is also supported by “a new super PAC funded in large part by donors to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D., N.Y.) mayoral campaign” as well as “Track AIPAC, which accuses pro-Israel politicians in the United States of being ‘foreign agents.’”
In other words, Hamawy’s radicalism is to his advantage and he is seen as the clear choice of those who prioritize punishing Israel and defending anti-Semites over other issues. Since Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner all but secured the nomination after the revelations about his Nazi tattoo, and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan caught a wave of momentum after also appearing with Piker amid revelations about El-Sayed’s own radicalism, Hamawy has plenty of reason to believe he won’t be derailed by his connection to the Blind Sheikh.
Mamdani himself seemed to get a boost during his campaign after he refused to denounce a slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Middle East. Ocasio-Cortez’s obsession with anti-Jewish conspiracy theories hasn’t cost her anything. The aforementioned Ilhan Omar is holding her own. And Platner, to whom establishment and elected Democrats have flocked, is soaring.
It would be less alarming were this a story of Democratic primary voters getting ever more radical while the establishment tried to mitigate the influence of anti-Semitic progressive celebrities. But it’s not. It’s all the same story, because everyone in the party is on the same page.
Source:
www.commentary.org
