Will Biden capitulate to the antisemitic vote?

If the president surrenders to the pro-Hamas fifth column, it will have dire implications for American Jews.

Recently, the media has been quite strategically awash in reports that President Joe Biden is at odds with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and may be about to force Israel to end its war against Hamas before the terror group is fully destroyed.

These stories come on the heels of equally strategic reports on Biden’s troubles in the swing state of Michigan, where the pro-Hamas fifth column is attempting to sabotage his presidential candidacy, even if it means a second Trump presidency.

These not-too-subtly interconnected reports raise two questions: 1) Will Biden give in to the fifth column? 2) If he does, what would it mean for Israel and American Jews?

I freely confess that I have no clear answer to the first question. Given Michigan’s electoral importance, Biden may well capitulate to the fifth column. Nonetheless, American Jews are also a powerful Democratic voting bloc, including in swing states like Pennsylvania. While there is a near-total media blackout on the subject, it’s clear that American Jews are mad as hell and seriously reassessing their relationship with what the Democratic party is becoming.

I doubt very much that this will lead the majority of American Jews to vote for Donald Trump. He is too toxic and too identified with right-wing antisemitism in their eyes. But American Jews could very well vote for a third party in protest or simply not vote at all, depriving the Democrats of an essential part of their coalition. Worse still for the Democrats, Jews could cut their organizational, financial, intellectual, and activist ties with the Democrats, which would leave the party bereft of many of its most important and energetic members.

While the New York Times and its minions will never report it, Biden and his advisors must be at least somewhat aware of this. Whether they will give it sufficient weight is another question. The Democrats have gotten used to the idea that American Jews are a wholly owned subsidiary of the DNC. They may be unable to shift the paradigm quickly enough to save their party.

As for the second question, I am not a military strategist, and I have no real idea of what Israel’s capabilities are if American support wavers. Further American arms shipments may be essential to the war effort or Israel may be capable of replacing them with its own materiel. That is an issue for those more expert than me to address.

Politically, however, I believe Israel is perfectly willing to continue the war whether Biden likes it or not, even if it results in near-total diplomatic isolation. Israelis truly do not care whether the world hates us at the moment. We care about preventing another Oct. 7 and nothing else. If the UN’s head explodes in a fit of incontinent rage as a result, we won’t bat an eyelash. If the US stops using its Security Council veto on Israel’s behalf, I doubt very much that it will stop Israel from continuing the war as it sees fit. Nonetheless, this is certainly a situation to be avoided if at all possible.

In many ways, the worst consequences of a Biden capitulation will fall on American Jews. If Biden surrenders to the fifth column, it will have become clear that, for perhaps the first time in its history, the United States has an antisemitic voting bloc of sufficient power to impose its racist ideology on a major political party.

This would not just be a disaster. It would be an existential threat to the American Jewish community. It would mean it is very possible that, in the near future, Jewish life in the United States will become unlivable. What comes after that is unknowable, but none of it is pleasant to think about.

Nonetheless, the antisemitic bloc is here. In fact, it’s been here for a while, but both American and American Jewish leaders preferred to ignore it or wallow in denial. They lacked the courage to pick a fight with powerful forces in American life and chose to hope that the antisemites might be persuaded to change their minds. If the orgy of genocidal celebration that followed Oct. 7 proved anything, it is that this was, at best, a catastrophic miscalculation.

I believe that, as a result, American Jews now face an ordeal of the most grievous kind. They must contend with the first mass antisemitic movement in American history and the terrible task of destroying it.

The situation is far from hopeless, however. American Jews are a strong community with numerous resources to draw on. Moreover, unlike in many other countries, American Jews have powerful allies, including the vast majority of non-Jewish Americans.

Nonetheless, the fight will be a long and brutal one. American Jews must steel themselves to face it.

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My latest JNS column deals with the quite distasteful real estate tycoon Mohamed Hadid (yes, he’s the father of the two young Reifenshtals) and his recent threat to kill President Joe Biden.

Hadid, of course, is just another in a long line of blithering Hamans with whom the Jewish people have had to contend for centuries. And like many of them, he knows something very important: He can get away with anything. In this case, anything includes threatening to kill the president of the United States. And Hadid can get away with it because people who should know better let him get away with it.

The same holds for the rest of the pro-Hamas fifth column in the West and especially in the US. So long as you express the right opinions on Israel and the Jews, you are declared effectively beyond good and evil. In fact, it is all but certain that some of the thugs currently polluting American campuses will—like their predecessors such as Bill Ayers—enjoy lucrative teaching positions at the same institutions in the future.

It is sad that this requires reiterating yet again, but there is a simple way to solve this problem: Demand that the responsible authorities enforce their own laws. If they were willing to do so, Hadid would be in jail on federal charges, the campus thugs would be expelled and/or under arrest, and the swine-fiend who killed Paul Kessler would be charged with first-degree murder rather than involuntary manslaughter.

Unfortunately, at the moment, many of these authorities are not willing to act. Most of them are terrified of Muslim and progressive violence, cower at the thought of the professoriate’s wrath, and don’t particularly care for Jews or Israel anyway. Why, they no doubt wonder, should they risk the consequences of doing their jobs?

The answer, of course, is that it’s their job. That this appears not to occur to them is certainly telling. It means that they have no business wielding the authority they do (or don’t, in this case) and ought to be replaced with more responsible parties.

Thankfully, with congressional hearings on this issue ongoing and the American Jewish community having only just begun to fight, the fifth column’s enablers may well be on their way out. Even if they aren’t, the threat of losing their privileges may be enough to push them to action. These are not, after all, particularly courageous people.