Anti-Semites Waste So Much of Our Time

Now she’s really gone and done it. Francesca Albanese, the U.S.-sanctioned unofficial Hamas mouthpiece with a UN badge, has finally crossed J Street’s line.

Yes, it turns out, even J Street has a line for anti-Semitism.

This week Albanese, the globetrotting intifada groupie who has said every horrific thing imaginable about Jews, joined yet another social media incitement campaign. In response to an Al Jazeera post criticizing Jews for buying homes outside of Israel, Albanese wrote: “Watch carefully. Cyprus, Greece, Serbia, south of Italy. Globalizing apartheid one brick at the time. One gated community at the time.”

In a surprising move, the left-wing pressure group J Street couldn’t even stay silent—although its critique was amusingly gentle:

“Israelis buying property in other countries is not apartheid. Words have meaning, and we have a responsibility to use them wisely. Francesca Albanese’s now-deleted post grossly feeds the kind of collective blame that can spill over into hostility towards Jews. The UN does important work. It deserves representatives who strengthen its credibility, not undermine it.”

You have to laugh at the “can spill over into hostility towards Jews” when the post is about encouraging anti-Israel “resistance” anywhere in the world one sees an Israeli buying a house. And of course the post ends with praise for the United Nations.

Back in J Street’s early days, its founder Jeremy Ben-Ami told the New York Times that the organization’s mission was to help Barack Obama, who was trying to put daylight between the U.S. and Israel: “Our No. 1 agenda item is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back.”

There are various practical effects this “blocking back” strategy has. One of those effects is to waste lots of everybody’s time.

I’ll explain. When a political figure emerges as a harsh critic of Israel, there is an instinctive circling of wagons around him, even when he don’t exactly radiate good faith.

Organizations like J Street that exist to point out Israel’s flaws don’t want anybody on their side of the aisle accused of anti-Semitism, because smart anti-Semites (I know, I know, that’s an oxymoron) will use the arguments already advanced by such groups. It gives them cover. They can say, “I’m just saying what these Jewish groups have already said.”

But anti-Semites obsess over Jews and Israel. And before long, that fixation asserts itself. They continue using the kind of rhetoric that a group like J Street might use—but they start using it all the time. Pretty soon they can talk about nothing else but the evils of the world’s one Jewish state. It’s a clear red flag that this person has an unhealthy concept of Jewish power in his head and self-pitying resentment in his heart.

That’s an explosive combination, and eventually it blows up. When that happens, crass anti-Jewish comments and actions start to show in place of the previously-measured “just anti-Zionism.” When that rhetorical escalation is criticized, the anti-Semite will toss aside all pretense and embrace the fame of podcasters and influencers who rally around them.

It will become obvious that those who initially raised concerns about them were right all along. At that point, partisan pressure groups will throw in the towel. They will condemn the rhetoric, after months (or years) of either silence or running interference for the now-obvious-anti-Semite.

Zohran Mamdani seems to finally have hit that point after his ghoulish statement and behavior on October 7. In the opinion of many liberal Jews in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed is getting there, too. The defenses of Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo—his Nazi tattoo—went on for months, during which time we were expected to pretend the Nazi tattoo didn’t have a very obvious explanation.

It is into this illustrious company that I guess we can finally place Francesca Albanese. For well over a decade Albanese has been making openly anti-Semitic comments. But her cheerleading for Hamas after October 7 really crossed a line for the Biden administration, which called her an anti-Semite. Even the secretary-general of the United Nations admitted she was “a horrible person.” Now there appears to be no one left with a sliver of mainstream legitimacy to defend her.

And all that was lost is time. What a waste of everyone’s time.

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