Pirate's Cove

Slate has been working hard to out-Salon Salon, being as unhinged and nutty as possible. And writer Michelle Goldberg is in high dudgeon over the allegations that Keith Ellison, a front runner to be the head of the DNC, has been called anti-Israel and anti-Semetic. So, guess who’s to blame?

The Smearing of Keith Ellison Reveals the Warped Priorities of the Israel Lobby

The first time I visited Shuhada Street in Hebron, a city of 200,000 in Israel’s West Bank, I felt as if I’d stepped through a looking glass. For most of the past 12 years, the once-bustling market street has been under lockdown to protect 800 militant Jewish settlers who’ve seized part of the old city. Aside from soldiers and a few orthodox Jewish women pushing baby carriages, Shuhada Street is empty and silent; in the parlance of the Israel Defense Forces, it is “completely sterilized,” which means that Palestinians aren’t allowed to set foot on it. Most of the Arabs who once lived in the area have left, but the few who remain are virtual prisoners in their apartments, where cages protect windows and balconies from settlers’ stones. Palestinians who live on Shuhada Street aren’t allowed to walk out their front doors; if they must go out, they have to climb onto the roof and down a fire escape into a back alley. My tour guide, an orthodox Jewish IDF veteran who’d become a fierce critic of the occupation, described what happens if the Palestinians get sick. “The Jewish subset of the Red Cross doesn’t treat Palestinians here,” he told me. “What you see a lot of times is Palestinians carrying people by foot to an area with an ambulance.”

There’s actually a point to this opening of Goldberg’s as she jumps into

Keith Ellison, the Democratic congressman from Minnesota and candidate for Democratic National Committee chairman, was also stunned by what he saw in Hebron; I spoke to him about it after his first trip there. This summer, hetweeted a photo of one of the city’s caged apartment windows, where someone had put a sign saying, “Caution: This was taken by Israel. You are entering Apartheid.” Now that tweet is being used to smear Ellison as an anti-Semite and derail his candidacy for DNC chairman. The anti-Ellison campaign, coming at a time when Donald Trump’s election has emboldened genuine anti-Semites to a degree unprecedented in living memory, is evidence of warped priorities among a good part of the American Jewish community. The need to defend the indefensible in Israel is leading to the demonization of an ally of Jews in America.

So, blame the Jews, blame Trump supporters (in honesty, some seemed to be anti-Jews, especially when it came to Ben Shapiro, and avowed anti-Trumper), and blame Israel. Can’t blame Ellison, you know, even though he has been viruently anti-Israel and anti-Jew for quite some time (like a lot of Democrat voters). Goldberg attempts to defend Ellison with this blamestorming, along with some spin, before jumping into

It is true that as a young man, Ellison collaborated on anti-racist campaigns with the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam, an association he apologized for in a 2006 letter to Minnesota’s Jewish community. “I did not adequately scrutinize the positions and statements of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, and Khalid Muhammad,” he wrote. “I wrongly dismissed concerns that there were anti-Semitic. They were and are anti-Semitic and I should have come to that conclusion earlier than I did.” Minnesota’s Jewish community largely accepted his apology; as Sami Rahamim wrote in the Forward, “For me, and the vast majority of Jewish Minnesotans, this full-throated apology for past mistakes is exactly the kind oft’shuvah (repentance), which our tradition honors.” Ellison’s disavowal of anti-Semitism was certainly more forthright than Trump’s grudging dismissals of the alt-right.

Ellison spent almost a decade being part of the Nation of Islam. How do you spend that time and not know what they stand for? Oh, he knew. He was part of it. He espoused the same views. He has a long history of being part of radical Islam, especially those who are racist, bigoted, and against Jews and Israel. He’s trafficked in 9/11 conspiracy about the attack being a false flag operation originating with those Jews/Israel. He defended an anti-Jew statement that had already been retracted by the person who said it. He accepted money from CAIR in 2006, which is linked to the Israel/Jew hating Muslim Brotherhood, and Ellison had a 2 decade relationship with CAIR at that time.

There is video of him from 2010 slurring Jews and Israel. A big time Democrat donor, Haim Saban, stated

“If you go back to his positions, his papers, his speeches, the way he has voted, he is clearly an anti-Semite and anti-Israel individual,” the Israeli-American said Friday about the Minnesota lawmaker. “Words matter and actions matter more. Keith Ellison would be a disaster for the relationship between the Jewish community and the Democratic Party.”

Obviously, this is the fault of the Jews and Israel, at least in Goldberg’s world. She even has the audacity to mention the graffiti featuring swastikas and Trump’s name, alluding this as being the fault of Trump supporters, when they were all done by people who are anti-Trump, meaning that he is Hitler. And, of course, she whines about “Islamophobia”, a catch all for Leftists, and especially against Ellison, as she white washes his long history of being involved with hardcore Islamist groups which hate Israel and Jews, among others.

Is Keith Ellison as bad as some are painting him? Reading both sides, probably not. But, it is absurd to do a bit of Jew/Israel blaming when things in Ellison’s past rear up to bite him in the rear.

Crossed at Right Wing News.