Anti-Israel extremists on both the left and the right are becoming more vocal and dangerous. Still, according to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City primary and the rebuff of Tucker Carlson by President Donald Trump demonstrate that the left is far more dangerous right now.
He’s joined on this week’s episode of “Think Twice” by Guy Benson, poticial editor of Townhall.com and a Fox News radio host who is deeply troubled by the way so many people have sympathized with the rapists, murderers and kidnappers of Hamas rather than democratic Israel after the terrorists atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023.
Benson considers this a manifestation of something bigger than just hatred for Israel and Jews and poses a threat to America. He argues that what he calls the “dirtbag alliance between Islamism and hardcore leftism” is creating a bizarre political alignment. “They hate the West, they hate Western values, they hate Western civilization itself, they hate the United States, and they hate Israel. So that’s where they align.”
He is equally concerned about the way the majority of Democrats now oppose the Jewish state and the mainstreaming of antisemitism that has been part of the post-Oct. 7 incitement against Jews. The trouble is, he maintains, that people like Mamdani are now mainstream on the left rather than outliers. The liberal establishment gives the Democratic mayoral candidate a pass for extremism and even for calling himself an African-American on his college applications.
That’s because, Benson says, they apply different rules to their side as opposed to what they say about political opponents. He believes most Americans are sick of this and that, among other things, explains why President Donald Trump won in 2024.
Benson believes that the anti-Israel and increasingly antisemitic “woke right” is more marginal than the extremists on the left. He nevertheless believes that people like Tucker Carlson and the “deranged” Candace Owens were not just dead wrong in opposing Trump’s airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. They are, he states, chasing conspiracy theories to continually tell their audiences that they are being lied to by the establishment as they seek the next “sugar high of crazy” in a “demented echo chamber divorced from reality.”
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