charlie, again with your dishonesty. You bring up candidates who have no chance in winning (and anyone can be a candidate), while at the same time downplaying democratic antisemitic candidates like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson — who have tremendous influence in the Democrat party! Al Sharpton was almost as fixed a presence at Kerry’s side the night of his acceptance speech! Yet, it is common knowledge that this failed contender for the Democratic nomination incited anti-Jewish violence in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in 1991 and in Harlem in 1995. In the latter incident he encouraged the explicitly anti-Semitic boycott and picketing of a Jewish-owned store named “Freddy’s.” Eight employees of the store were killed in a fire started by one of Sharpton’s followers. But none of this unpleasantness has kept Sharpton from being treated with oily sycophancy by the Democratic leadership.
Also in 2002, the Alabama Democratic congressional incumbent Earl Hilliard attacked his challenger, Artur Davis, in a flier that read: “Davis and the Jews, No Good for the Black Belt.” (Both men are black.) Hilliard’s racist rhetoric did not prevent him from receiving support from 24 members of the Congressional Black Caucus and from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, one of the party’s funding agencies.
Also, Ernest Hollings, the South Carolina Democratic senator, alleged, on the floor of the Senate, that Bush had sent the country to war “in order to win Jewish votes.” (Apparently Hollings, during his seven terms, had never discovered that a majority of Jews would vote Democratic even if Yasser Arafat and Osama bin Laden were at the top of the ticket.)
Outside of the Islamic world, the anti-Semitic upsurge of recent years is mainly a left-wing phenomenon. It is therefore not surprising that it should have brought the Democratic Party, more swiftly than the Republicans, to that dark and bloody crossroads where politics and conscience collide.