The Democrats’ anti-Semitism problem

 Washington, DC

Republican strategists have long complained about how, every election, the Democrats mobilise minority groups against them. Now they’re trying to turn the tables. Right-wing social media warriors, encouraged by @realDonaldTrump, have spent months talking about ‘Blexit’: a black voter exit from the Democratic party. This week, the President and others have begun calling for a ‘Jexodus’ — a Jewish exodus — too.

How Trump must delight in those clunky portmanteaus. He knows that, while black voters usually vote Democrat, they are not altogether anti-Trump. He also senses that Jewish voters, traditionally the most left–liberal people in America, are alarmed at a new Democrat tendency to bash Israel. Suddenly, left-wing anti-Semitism has become a talking point, much as it has in Britain. As with Jeremy Corbyn’s Jewish issue, it is hard to tell real prejudice, right-wing spin and hysteria apart. What’s certain is that this story will dominate the news in the months ahead. At the centre of the controversy are two congresswomen elected in November: Ilhan Omar, from Minneapolis, and Rashida Tlaib, from Detroit — the first Muslim women in the House of Representatives. Omar is a Somali-American who wears colourful hijabs. In 2012, she tweeted that Israel had ‘hypnotised the world’. Then, last month, she wrote that Israeli influence in American foreign policy was ‘all about the Benjamins baby’. Benjamins is ghetto slang for dollars and Jews have a reputation for being rich. That tweet prompted such outrage that Omar felt compelled to ‘unequivocally apologise’ — though a few days later she reiterated her concern about ‘the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push allegiance to a foreign country’. Many commentators claim Omar is guilty of pushing the hoary old ‘dual loyalties trope’ about the Jewish diaspora.