For those who oppose President Donald
Trump, the tragic shootings of two individuals in Minneapolis last month
while protesting efforts to enforce immigration laws, demonstrated that
the administration has gone too far. But it is now also painfully clear
that the now widespread and growing willingness of his opponents to
analogize both the president and the agents of the Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency with German Nazis has also taken this
debate beyond the bounds of acceptable public discourse.
And it’s imperative that the pushback
against not merely cheapening the memory of the Holocaust, but the sort
of rhetoric that is antithetical to a working democracy, not just come
from the president’s supporters or others who agree with his policies.
To date, there haven’t been many indications that there actually is a
critical mass of centrist Democrats who are ready to take on the left
wing of their party over this matter. But, as with the increasing volume
of antisemitism and anti-Zionism coming from some of the same people
throwing around irresponsible Nazi comparisons, it’s important that the
debate about this issue not be one fought strictly along party lines.
A debate among Democrats?
So, it was encouraging to see that one
Democrat whose experiences have become part of the discussion about the
normalization of the tropes of Jew-hatred in his party was willing to
speak up about the escalation of the rhetoric about Trump and ICE. Last
month, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro injected himself into the debate about antisemitism. Now, he’s spoken up about comparisons between ICE and the Nazis, and is being roundly bashed by left-wing Democrats.
Whether or not this is a cynical tactic by
an ambitious liberal politician looking to position himself in the
moderate lane in the 2028 Democratic presidential race doesn’t really
matter. That can be true even if it turns out that there is no room at
the top of the Democratic ticket for anyone who says such things. What’s
needed most is a willingness on the part of people on both sides of the
political aisle to oppose the way that extremists are seizing control
of the public square.
The point being that even if you oppose
Trump, the consequences of allowing the country to go down a rabbit hole
in which a “resistance” is seeking to thwart alleged Nazis—i.e., the
elected government’s efforts to enforce the law—is a catastrophe for
democracy. Just as important, it needs to be recognized that those who
are pushing this kind of discourse are largely the same voices that have
promoted blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” and fueling a
surge in Jew-hatred.
Though he claims to be solely focused on what is likely to be an easy campaign for re-election as governor, Shapiro, 52, laid down a marker
for 2028 by discussing his vetting for the vice presidency in 2024 by
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s staff. He does that in
his new memoir, Where We Keep the Light.
His revelation that Harris’s handlers
asked him if he had “ever been an agent of the Israeli government,” or
if he was prepared to apologize for condemning the mob-like protests and
tent encampments at the University of Pennsylvania in the wake of the
Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, may have shocked
many observers. But it was no secret that some prominent Democrats,
including then-President Joe Biden and Harris, were so intimidated by
their party’s intersectional left-wing base that they were falling over
themselves to distance themselves from Israel and its supporters. Many
Democrats thought
the fact that Shapiro—though a conventional political liberal and by no
means an outspoken supporter of the Jewish state’s efforts to defend
itself against Hamas terrorists—was simply too Jewish and insufficiently
anti-Israel to fit on their presidential ticket in 2024.
Shapiro is obviously seeking to preempt
efforts by left-wing Democrats to recycle that talking point in 2028.
And by criticizing Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s claims
that ICE agents are “wannabe Nazis”
and calling those remarks “abhorrent,” he was similarly seeking to draw
a broad distinction between centrist Democrats like himself and the
party’s hardline base.
In response, Krasner bashed Shapiro as a
“wimp” who was knuckling under to a Republican administration that was
using a “Nazi” and “fascist playbook.”
Does this tiff on the left matter?
To conservatives who have become
infuriated by the way liberals and left-wingers alike are opposing the
efforts of ICE agents to enforce laws and repair the enormous damage
done to the country by the previous administration’s open borders
policies, Shapiro’s comments are too little and too late.
Instead, they think the main issue is
whether Democrats reviving the “resistance” tactics they employed during
Trump’s first four years in the White House will derail the president’s
second term. And they rightly think that the liberal media’s pile-on
against Trump and ICE in the aftermath of the deaths in January of Renee
Good and Alex Pretti, both 37, is transparent partisanship. It is part
of an effort to ensure that the president can’t fulfill his campaign
pledges to deport the millions of illegal aliens, including those who
have committed more crimes since entering the United States, let in
under Biden. They are particularly exorcised by the way the liberal
media has focused on the plight of Good and Pretti but have largely
ignored the stories of the many Americans who have been murdered by illegal aliens protected by the Democrats’ “sanctuary city” laws from being arrested by ICE and deported.
The media’s sole focus on the alleged
meanness of this roundup of criminals—whose invasion of the country has
had a catastrophic impact on working-class wages and housing costs, as
well as overwhelming the social services of many communities—is not a
reasonable critique of ICE. It’s a campaign to distract
the country from the cost of illegal immigration, and in particular,
the welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota by Somali immigrants that
diverted billions to lawbreakers, including some connected to terrorism.
Parallel causes
Though they’re not wrong about that, the
question of how to conduct a debate about illegal immigration in America
is equally important. And that is why the divide between conventional
liberals like Shapiro and ideologues like Krasner deserves our
attention.
Krasner is a typical example of the sort
of pro-criminal prosecutors that have been elected in cities around the
country by the efforts of left-wing billionaire George Soros. Many on
the left have falsely claimed that criticisms of Soros—a Jew born in
Hungary who has used his money to fund a host of extremist groups,
including those who oppose the existence of the State of Israel—are
inherently antisemitic. But there is nothing antisemitic about pointing
out that his efforts to “reform” the criminal justice system by largely
dropping enforcement of the laws are making many cities unlivable.
Krasner, whose father was Jewish, likes to
play the antisemitism card against his and Soros’s critics. Still, he
did little to defend Jewish students when they were being targeted by
pro-Hamas mobs in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Indeed, his visit to an encampment of Israel-bashers at Penn, along with pro-Hamas Philadelphia City Council member Jamie Gauthier, sent the message that Jewish safety was not his priority.
That people like Krasner are doubling down
with claims that Trump and ICE are Nazis, while not opposing those who
seek Jewish genocide or cheer for it here in the United States, is not
an accident. The notion that Trump’s efforts to stop illegal immigration
by closing the border and arresting those who have entered without
permission are a crime against humanity has its roots in the same toxic
leftist ideologies that falsely claim that Jews and Israelis are “white”
oppressors. And those who think that it’s a righteous cause to
obstruct, harass and attack ICE officers while they are carrying out
their duties seem to be cut from the same cloth as those chanting for
Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews
everywhere (“globalize the intifada”).
So if Shapiro and the few other Democrats
speaking up against such excesses, like Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.),
another legislator Krasner has derided
as a “sellout” for criticizing his Nazi analogies, can help shift the
national discussion away from this destructive, anti-democratic
resistance narrative, that’s something that should be encouraged. That
is the case even if you disagree with some or many of their political
stands.
Avoiding violence
It can be argued that the shootings amid
Minneapolis mayhem were proof that ICE agents have not received
sufficient training to be able to deal with the problems of crowd
control. As a result, they have made fatal mistakes under pressure. That
can be true even if the shootings were not crimes and the protesters
were far from the nonviolent saints the liberal media have been
depicting. Violence could also have been avoided if local authorities,
including Gov. Tim Walz, who himself falsely compared the illegals to Holocaust diarist Anne Frank, had cooperated with federal authorities rather than obstructing them.
But what has happened isn’t merely the
result of a possible shift in the national mood on the issue of what to
do about a situation the Biden administration created when it stopped
enforcing the laws, allowing several million illegals to enter the
United States with impunity. Trump’s opponents aren’t merely protesting
what they consider to be bad or illicit behavior by ICE agents. They are
treating all of the agency’s efforts to arrest migrants with
deportation orders as proof that the United States is now governed by
fascists who are employing the moral equivalent of Nazi storm troopers
to target the innocent.
Making that leap from a normal debate
about policy to a position in which much of the Democratic Party is now
speaking as if it is conducting a “resistance” against an illegitimate
authoritarian government that must be stopped by any means possible has
not just caused chaos in Minneapolis. It is, once again, turning up the
political temperature to the point where apocalyptic pronouncements
about the end of American democracy—routine throughout the 2022 and 2024
election cycles—are not just being recycled. The overheated and
disingenuous rhetoric of Trump’s foes is creating an atmosphere in which
normal political discourse is being replaced by hyperbole inciting the
kind of street violence that is antithetical to democracy.
It is that same sort of ideological
framework that has been on display since Oct. 7, as antisemitic
invective, coupled with the delegitimization of Israel and Jewish
rights, was mainstreamed and normalized. A country where the rule of law
is considered less important than leftist ideological objectives about
illegal immigration is one where Jew-hatred and anti-Zionist politics
will also become mainstream.
Wherever you may stand on immigration, the
damage done to U.S. political discourse by misguided Holocaust
analogies and efforts to depict the debate as one against fascism can’t
be denied. That’s why it is important that as broad a cross-section of
Americans as possible reject the language and actions of those who are
justifying “resistance,” rather than loyal opposition. This is a debate
that need not pit Republicans against Democrats; it’s one of the
reasonable political center versus extremists on both ends of the
spectrum. If that doesn’t happen, then it will become not just a matter
of street violence about immigration but an environment in which
extremist Jew-haters will be emboldened.
