With few exceptions, the political left has become more and more anti-Israel. And, in that connection, it should be no surprise that AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is a particular target of theirs.
David Harsanyi, writing for the Washington Examiner, has just published an excellent article on this distressing (but not at all surprising) reality, titled “Everyone knows what the Democrats’ AIPAC obsession is really about”. You can read it all by clicking here. But let me show you a few key excerpts below:
California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer says that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, “is a dark money organization that should have no place in our politics.”
In other words, Steyer believes supporters of the Israel-United States alliance, which includes many Jewish Americans, should be barred from participating in electoral politics like everyone else in America.
The Democrats’ new AIPAC obsession is just a convenient way to tap into some ugly conspiracies and fearmongering about Jewish money and its alleged control over our politics. Democrats are increasingly, as the New York Times might put it, “J-pilled.”
There are, of course, wholly legitimate criticisms of American foreign policy. But Jew-baiting progressives such as Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) don’t merely argue that AIPAC sits on the wrong side of a foreign policy issue but that it wants to steal constituents’ healthcare and child care to enrich war profiteers and genocidal maniacs.
The world is filled with real genocidal Islamists, yet Khanna and his friends on the progressive Left and isolationist Right foster an unhealthy obsession with the only free nation in the Middle East. You don’t have to wonder why.
As of now, though you’d never know it, AIPAC is a minor player in American politics. In 2024, it spent around $50 million on all races. There was $2.68 billion spent by PACs in that cycle, and yet AIPAC is surely mentioned far more by liberals than all other PACs combined.
That next-to-last paragraph, ending with “You don’t have to wonder why”, sits heavily on me. I hope you feel the same.
And the last paragraph – which reminds us how disproportionately AIPAC is attacked compared to other, much more prolific/influential groups – is especially meaningful.
Illustratively, how often do mainstream media cite left wing PACs – most of them anti-Israel – that are financed by george soros; how often do they identify these PACs as such?
If your answer is that you rarely-if-ever see the (readily available) information David Harsanyi cites to show this disproportionate response to AIPAC, and you rarely-if-ever see the (readily available) information about anti-Israel PACs funded by george soros, you might ask a simple question: WHY?
What does the answer to that question tell you about most of what we call mainstream media? If you’re being honest, the answer is that it tells you plenty.
These are facts that well-intentioned people with leftist views – especially Jewish well-intentioned people with leftist views – should think long and hard about.
Candidly – lamentably – however, that introspection certainly hasn’t happened to any great extent yet. And, just as lamentably, I don’t expect that it will happen to any great extent in the near future.
Sometimes we are our own worst enemies.
