During the lead-up to the fall of the French Third Republic in the late 1930s, the French far-right would sometimes say of Jewish Prime Minister Léon Blum, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Today, that saying appears to have become, “Better Hitler than Trump.”
There is no other conclusion to be drawn from Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s recent and already infamous recent statements about American Jewry. As reported, at a meeting of Jewish Democrats, she admonished her constituents to continue voting for her party, including the antisemitic candidate for U.S. Senate, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
“We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival,” she said. Then, brutally distorting the story of Queen Esther, she added, “It is perhaps up to us now to follow in her path, and sacrifice the comfort, safety and security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity.”
It appears that a handful of those present were receptive to Nessel’s kamikaze politics, but most of the rest of the community reacted, quite rightly, with shocked and astounded silence followed by outrage.
The most obvious criticisms of Nessel have already been made, and they are quite accurate. There can be no doubt that her comments were beyond psychopathy and, in some ways, beyond human comprehension. The only thing remotely comparable would be the admonitions of a cult leader like Jim Jones, when he extolled his followers in November 1978 to commit mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, in the name of some amorphous redemption to come.
Indeed, Nessel’s recommendations reminded me of nothing so much as Jones’s famous tape-recorded remarks to the members of the Peoples Temple shortly before they “drank the Kool-Aid” and died of the cyanide-laced beverage. Asked why it was necessary to also kill their children, who deserved a chance in life, Jones replied in a drugged stupor: “Yes, but you know what else they deserve? They deserve peace.”
As anyone who has seen photos of the aftermath can testify, however, there have been few things uglier and more repulsive than the “peace” that followed. It was, in a way, a self-inflicted Oct. 7 massacre, with babies slaughtered in the name of God.
Nessel and Jones’s kinship is difficult to ignore, with the only difference between them being the nature of the suicidal redemption; Jones’s being “peace” and Nessel’s being the need to “save the rest of humanity.” The only sane response to Jones was: In death, there is no peace. The only sane response to Nessel is: If this is what saving humanity looks like, we want no part of it.
All of this has already, to some extent, been noted by others. Still, there is something more to what Nessel said, and I have yet to see it commented upon. It is simply that, by speaking of sacrificing the Jews’ “own survival” and “the very future of our people,” Nessel admitted to something most Jewish and non-Jewish Democrats have thus far sought to deny: The progressive-Islamist movement represented by the likes of El-Sayed that has now conquered and colonized the Democratic Party is an existential threat to American Jews.
Every thinking person, I believe, knows this on some level, yet most Jewish Democrats and Democrats in general have sought to minimize, obfuscate and belittle the threat. They have done everything from portraying the progressive-Islamists as a tiny minority to accusing critics of outright Islamophobia and racism to claiming that any opposition to the progressive-Islamists is collaboration with the dreaded U.S. President Donald Trump to blasting opponents as tools of a pro-Israel conspiracy.
Perhaps to her credit, Nessel was having none of this. She had, at least, the monstrous courage of her convictions and the honesty to, perhaps unconsciously, admit to the reality of what is happening: An antisemitic mass movement has, for the first time in American history, risen to the commanding heights of American politics and threatens to, at best, marginalize and ghettoize the American Jewish community or—at least in Nessel’s opinion—destroy them outright.
In doing so, Nessel did us a great service. She threw in our faces precisely what is at stake. And that is the survival of the American Jewish community, and perhaps the entire Jewish people.
The word “ominous” is inadequate to describe the implications of this. I believe it very likely that the Democrats will win the Congress this year and possibly the presidency in 2028. We know what will happen then: an arms embargo on Israel, a complete severance of the U.S.-Israel alliance, the removal of all efforts to defend Jewish civil rights, the institutionalization of antisemitism and radical Islam, official indifference to antisemitic violence and potentially everything that “Better Hitler than Blum” brought upon France and Europe.
The task now is to accept Nessel’s assessment but reject her admonition. If American Jews do not do so, then, as Nessel said, their future and their very survival are at stake.
Thanks to Nessel, we can’t say we weren’t warned.
