Thursday, July 15, 2010

Harassing the Jews on Daily Kos: An Introduction

{Cross-Posted at the NewsRealBlog.}



Daily Kos is among the largest political blogs in the world. It has well over 200,000 registered users and, whether anyone likes it or not, has some influence within American politics.  In the 2006 midterm, for example, they raised money for 17 netroots candidates, winning eight races: Jim Webb (VA-Sen), Jon Tester (MT-Sen), Tim Walz (MN-01), Joe Sestak (PA-07), Ciro Rodriguez (TX-23), Patrick Murphy (PA-08), Jerry McNerney (CA-11), and Paul Hodes (NH-02).  

Daily Kos helped drive Joe Lieberman from the Democratic party and the mainstream media promotes Daily Kos through Keith Olbermann. It also, of course, helped give Barack Obama the Presidency - an effort that I helped in, myself.



As I mentioned in my introductory post here at NRB, I come out of the progressive movement and am, on the issues, a liberal. But I have huge problems with liberalism or "progressivism" or Leftism, or whatever label we care to use, because those people seem ready to throw my people (the Jewish people) under the bus entirely. Despite however many friends I have within the Left - and I think that there still may be one or two - it simply must be acknowledged that the Left, as a whole, is no friend to either the Jewish state, nor the Jewish people.

The obvious must be acknowledged.

One way of looking at this is via Daily Kos. Daily Kos represents the liberal-left base of the Democratic party. It represents the "progressive" grassroots / netroots of that party. And the simple truth of the matter is that Daily Kos is entirely hostile to the Jewish state. The great majority who write on I-P over there despise Israel.

The hatred is overt. They claim to care about human rights. The fact is that they do not. They do not care about human rights in Tibet. They do not care about human rights in Darfur. They do not care about human rights in Congo. Nor do they care about human rights in Chechnya. They are, in fact, blatant hypocrites, because if they did care about human rights they would care about the human rights of people who do not happen to live in Gaza City.

Daily Kos is a hub in the war to delegitimize Israel and essentially has a stealth alliance with Radical Islam.  They are a cog in what Alan Dershowitz has called "the CNN strategy."  Jihadis have learned, for obvious reasons, that they cannot defeat Israel militarily.  They can, however, delegitimize Israel before the world.  The way it's done is to provoke and provoke and provoke until Israel finally responds, as it did last year with Operation Cast Lead.  This is where large, influential left political blogs, like Daily Kos, come in.  After Israel finally responded to years of near daily rocket attacks from Gaza, blogs like Daily Kos and the Huffington Post (see The Brothers of Judea) do their bit to help the Jihadis through ranting about "disproportional force" and "war crimes."

It's propaganda.

As a liberal horrified with the Left, what I want to know is just why Markos Moulitsas, the proprietor of Daily Kos, allows this transparent support for Hamas and Hezbollah and al Qaida, at the expense of the Jewish people - not to mention the American people - to take place on his blog?  No one has a problem with mere criticism of Israel.  Constructive and fair criticism is necessary for every country, because every country is flawed.  But they do not criticize Israel on Daily Kos, for the most part.  What they do is demean, debase, and dehumanize that country.  They are, of course, not formally allied with Jihadis and enemies to the Jewish people, but for all intents and purposes, they might as well be.

So, my question for Markos is "why?"

Why do you allow this to go on in your name? Why are conspiracy theories disallowed on Daily Kos, but not calls for the dissolution of the Jewish state? It's not good for Jews. It's not good for the Democratic party. And it sure as heck is not good for the Palestinian people.  He'll never answer the question, of course, because Markos, himself, never breathes a word about the Jewish state.  He simply allows his blog to be a venue for anti-Zionism, Israel Hatred, and anti-Semitism shrouded in the language of "human rights."

I intend to further explore this question in the coming weeks.

4 comments:

  1. I understand where you're coming from, but honestly, isn't it true that about 80% of Daily Kos never comments on I-P, and of those who do, it's split about 50/50 between support for Isreal and various levels of anti-Zionism? So that leaves about 10% of the site in the anti-Zionist camp, and you use that to tar the whole place?

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  2. Anonymous,

    your comment is fair.

    It is true that most of dkos avoids I-P discourse like the plague that it is.

    My problem with dkos is not that it's crawling with anti-Zionists, but that it provides a venue for the very worst sorts of unfair Israel bashing.

    If they would criticize Israel, that would be fine. But they don't.

    They demonize the national home of the Jewish people during a period of rising anti-Semitism. In this way they contribute to that anti-Semitism and implicitly defend groups like Hamas.

    It's not right and it sure as hell is not liberal.

    But thank you for the comment, please.

    You seem entirely rational, whomever you are, and I therefore hope that you will continue to visit here and help create a conversation.

    Cheers!

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  3. anonymous, you should have seen the rec'ed diary list where Volleyboy, now a sellout anti-Israel whore who once supported Israel, now supports "J-Street" for diary rec's and his own ego and does so to get a recommended diary. He has been transformed by the propaganda there.

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  4. Volleyboy is a good guy and a smart man, but I suspect that he's wrong about J-Street. I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they lost me when they declared the anti-Semitic play "7 Jewish Children" to be kosher.

    http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/j/

    I knew then and there that J-Street could not possibly really be pro-Israel, nor pro-Jewish.

    I suspect that Jeremy Ben-Ami's heart is in the right place, but he's also clearly a sucker. He's one of those who seems to think that if only all Jewish Israelis gather up in a line and hop up and down on one foot, then Israel will get peace.

    If ya get me.

    ReplyDelete