IT'S AFRAID!
nypost.com
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>Anti-Zionism manifests itself in many forms — and it isn’t any better than its older cousin, anti-Semitism.
>Britain’s opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has elevated it to an art form, describing terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends” and causing Labour members to bolt. In France, persistent attacks on Jews and deadly rioting by self-declared anti-Zionists forced President Emmanuel Macron to denounce their cause as a “reinvented form of anti-Semitism.”
>Now a new crop of American politicians want in, too. Oh, sure, our anti-Zionists claim to champion the right to criticize Israel. Or its policies. Or Likud. Or the occupation, apartheid, racism, whatever. It’s just an accident that the new anti-Zionists are obsessed with the world’s one Jewish state.
>On Monday, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who’s become Corbyn’s BFF) took to Twitter to defend the right of her colleague Ilhan Omar to hate — oops, “criticize” — Israel. So did Rep. Rashida Tlaib and, soon after, three leading Democratic presidential contenders.
>Earlier Omar, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, criticized Israel for — well, she didn’t say what — while traveling in the Horn of Africa. “Proud to see peace prosper here,” she wrote from Eritrea.
>Eritrea is ranked just behind North Korea as the world’s most oppressive country. But if you’re a young Muslim woman of color, smearing democratic Israel while praising much more abhorrent regimes can sound really, really cool.
>On the left, “Zionism is racism” is back in vogue. Never mind that the far right’s racists are all-in, too: David Duke is now a full-fledged “anti-Zionist” and celebrates Omar.
>What drives today’s anti-Zionists? Is it principled opposition to Theodore Herzl’s vision, born in the late 19th century, of Jews returning to their ancestral land?
