Let’s be very clear: If you decide to participate in the national Women’s March, you are enabling and abetting hatred of the Jewish people. If you are writing sanctimonious apologetics for the organizers, you are sanitizing and normalizing anti-Semitism.
It was amazingly useful for Tablet magazine, in a recent report, to confirm that three of the four leaders of the Women’s March are proud anti-Semites—that even at their first meeting, they berated a Jewish organizer for what they alleged was her unresolved “white supremacy” and ultimately pushed her out.
Many of us didn’t need this confirmation. The fact that Linda Sarsour was involved in the group was enough. And it didn’t take long before Sarsour was celebrating Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh, who was convicted and held in an Israeli prison for 10 years for her role in a 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing that killed two Hebrew University students. And then we discovered that the organizers had a thing for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
(Even without those disturbing issues, I would never participate in anything called a Women’s March because it is, by definition, anti-feminist. To call something a Women’s March assumes that all women think alike. It is the very foundation of sexism—precisely what early 20th-century feminists fought against.)
Tablet’s extensive reporting uncovered the primary motivations behind the Women’s March as created by its top national organizers: To be a front for the most insidious identity politics, where Farrakhan and terrorists are lionized, and Jews and Israel are ideologically lynched. As such, its organization and signature annual event—now scheduled for its third year on Jan. 19 in numerous cities across the country—can be called only one thing: the March of Hate.
Have Jewish apologists for the Women’s March not considered why Jews are being asked to go along with people who hate us? To overlook the march organizers’ “flaws”? Can you imagine any other minority in 2019 being asked to do the same? How are Jews supposed to be a light unto nations if we are on our knees groveling behind people who continue to spit in our faces?
That is not the kind of Jew I was raised to be, and it is certainly not the kind of Jew my 9-year-old son is being raised to be. I proudly teach him the history of civil rights—and the enormous role Jews have played in establishing and protecting them. But we have never done so at the expense of our self-respect, and no amount of “intersectional” gobbledygook should change that.
Indeed, through the storm of the Women’s March, we now see very clearly that “intersectionality” is propagating a very dangerous theory on the left: the notion of the “privileged white supremacist Jew.” They have created a poisonous stereotype they claim is responsible for all of the world’s problems and which is unable to face racism.
As Seth Frantzman wrote in The Jerusalem Post, “How can this be, only 70 years after the Holocaust, that people genocided for being non-white and non-European are now called white supremacists? It is part of a carefully managed agenda in the United States to not permit Jews to be part of discussions about ‘people of color’ or racism. … Jews are even told that any discussion of Jews being victims of racism is a way for Jews to ‘dwell’ or ‘center’ on themselves.”
Identity politics and the March of Hate swept into Congress such triumphs as Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who already has replaced Israel with “Palestine” on her map, accused Jews of dual loyalty and can be seen in a photo with a Hezbollah supporter; Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), another supporter of the BDS movement whose known links to the Muslim Brotherhood are growing by the hour; and my personal favorite, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), whose lack of qualifications make her very existence in Congress an affront to feminism.
Jews are being gaslighted—psychologically manipulated to the point of questioning our own sanity and reality—by Farrakhan, Sarsour, Tamika Mallory and the leftist Jews who reflexively defend them. I suppose the only good thing that one can say about actual white supremacists is that they don’t lie about their true intentions.
Karen Lehrman Bloch is an author and cultural critic living in New York City.
Article originally published at Jewish Journal.