The city of Chicago is coming in for much criticism and ridicule for passing a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, instead of doing something for the residents of Chicago. But in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s defense, there will sooner be peace in Khan Younis than in Chicago.
Chicago, where a couple million people wake up every day despite their city government’s best efforts, is far from alone. Several large U.S. cities have redirected their taxpayer-funded time and attention away from their own towns and toward a place with greater potential: Gaza.
To be sure, none of these councils actually support a ceasefire in common parlance—which is to say, peace. Hamas has vowed in clear terms that if a ceasefire along the lines of Chicago’s were to be enacted, the terror group would simply conduct another Oct. 7. So what supporters of Chicago’s resolution, and others like it, are calling for is the spilling of more Jewish blood.
I don’t say this to demonstrate contempt for Brandon Johnson and his likeminded lemmings, for I truly believe they are beneath contempt. The point is that the rest of America should be aware that this kind of Jew-baiting is being baked into political survival strategies, perhaps in their own home town or state, threatening dark times upon our beloved republic.
At least the reporting on this trend has been entertaining. Take Reuters. Here’s the wire service’s headline: “US city councils increasingly call for Israel-Gaza ceasefire, analysis shows.”
They’ve run the numbers, you see. “Analysis,” in this case, means “the ability to count higher than ten.”
Reuters is trying to sound evenhanded. So we get sentences like this: “Critics of the city resolutions say they have no tangible effect on national policy and distract from domestic issues.” Critics say that, huh? In the critics’ opinion, the mayor of Chicago isn’t the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces. It’s a theory, anyway.
But the Reuters piece has a purpose: to warn President Biden that his opposition to Hamas could endanger his reelection prospects. “At least nine of the ceasefire calls were in Michigan, where Arab Americans account for 5% of the vote and Biden’s 2020 margin of victory over Trump was less than 3%,” we’re told.
Is the suggestion that the Arab vote in Metro Detroit—because that’s what we’re really talking about, since nine out of ten Arab-speaking Michiganders live there—will flip to Donald Trump? Color me skeptical.
Speaking of which, if you thought you could get through a single article on Israel without having a cold cup of racial politics poured over your head, no dice. Douglas Wilson, a Democratic strategist in North Carolina, treats readers to a humdinger of a quote: “It’s gonna be an issue here and in all the swing states because of the Muslim populations in these states, the Jewish populations in these states and the Black and brown population [in] these states.”
It’ll be on the ballot because of the Muslim people, Jewish people, black people, brown people, Purple People Eaters, Blue Man Group, Pink Ladies, Silver Surfers, Scarlet Knights, Indigo Girls, and Orange Juliuses.
This constant attempt to make Jews a stand-in for white power is both ignorant and dangerous. And we can see precisely where it’s going, too. One of the anti-Semitic fliers that make the rounds on college campuses and elsewhere every so often posits that what we think of as “white privilege” is in fact “Jewish privilege.” Therefore, “Ending white privilege starts with ending Jewish privilege.” There are other variants of this message floating around as well. It basically argues that everyone should put aside their differences and come together to fight humanity’s common enemy. Jews aren’t “white adjacent”; they’re the top of the totem pole.
This is essentially the argument being made to Biden: If you want to win, you need people who don’t look like the Jews. Those making this case are either lying, and Democrats won’t abandon their president just because of his perceived support for Israel, or they’re right—and the problem is only going to get worse.
