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March 7, 2020

The irony of a white supremacist's anti-Semitic attack against Bernie Sanders

By Andrea Widburg

On Friday, during a Bernie Sanders rally in Phoenix, a white supremacist held up a Nazi flag and made anti-Semitic statements.  Since then, Bernie-supporters have been showing appropriate outrage that a Jewish presidential candidate in America would be subject to this type of attack.  None, however, has noted the irony that the only thing Jewish about Bernie Sanders is his genetic lineage.  This lifelong socialist is hostile to Israel and surrounds himself with open anti-Semites.

BuzzFeed has a comprehensive report about what happened:

A man waving a Nazi flag and shouting "Heil Hitler" was kicked out of a rally for Bernie Sanders on Thursday, a shocking incident targeting the man running to be the first Jewish president.

The flag, styled professionally in the actual designs of Nazi Germany, hung prominently over a banister at the 7,000-person Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the start of Sanders' speech. The person stationed himself in the upper deck of the arena, behind where Sanders was speaking.

The man was shouting anti-Jewish slurs at Sanders and performing the Nazi salute, said Ron Mack, 40, an attendee at the rally who was sitting nearby.

[snip]

The Anti-Defamation League identified the man as Robert Sterkeson, a white supremacist who has "harassed a range of Jewish and Muslim organizations and events," often posting the stunts on YouTube.

Bernie-supporters, especially Jewish ones, were appalled:

It's that last tweet, the one from the Jewish Voice for Peace organization, that highlights the irony about the Nazi flag at a Bernie rally.  Jewish Voice for Peace is a radical leftist organization that exists to destroy the world's only Jewish state.  This is the tweet that this organization has pinned to the top of its Twitter page:

The ignorance in that map is appalling.  Before the modern era, that land was last an autonomous nation in 63 B.C., when the Romans conquered the Jewish state.  In 135 A.D., following the unsuccessful Bar Kokhba Revolt, the Romans sought to erase Jewish ties to the land by renaming it Palestine after the Philistines, who had occupied the land more than 1,000 years before.  In subsequent years, the land was a colony of Byzantium, the Persians, various Muslims, the Crusaders, the Mamelukes, the Ottoman Empire, and the British.

There was never an independent nation known as Palestine.  The land was always a colony that Jews continuously inhabited.  The people known today as Palestinians are descendants of a handful of Arabs who resentfully occupied the barren, swampy land known as Syria-Palestine; Algerians who left North Africa when France conquered Algeria in 1830; Circassian immigrants from the Russian Caucasus whom the Turks settled in Syria-Palestine in the second half of the 19th century; and a few Senussi Muslims from Tripoli who trickled into Syria-Palestine after WWI to escape persecution in their own land.

Not only does the above map represent ignorance, but it represents anti-Semitism, for anti-Semitism is a dominant feature behind today's "anti-Zionism."  Bernie, despite lip service to Israel, is an anti-Zionist.  Although Israel is a pluralist, multiracial, multi-religious state, he calls its prime minister a "racist" and hostile to Palestinian civil rights, while overlooking the judenrein policies in the West Bank and Gaza.  Moreover, he surrounds himself with open, aggressive anti-Semites:

As the final irony, Bernie espouses socialism, while consistently ignoring a few inconvenient facts: Karl Marx, also genetically Jewish, was a virulent anti-Semite, anti-Semitism infused the Soviet Union that Bernie so adored, and Hitler's anti-Semitism was a grotesque fusion of Marx's anti-Semitism and traditional German Jew-hatred.

None of this excuses the white supremacist at Bernie's rally.  It's just to say that it's a bit rich for Bernie suddenly to present himself as the avatar of American Jewishness.  He's not.

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