A number of Democrats were clearly hoping that once the war in Gaza was over, they could stop talking about it. But that’s not how litmus tests work.
“I am somebody who looks at the videos, the photos, the amount of pain that has been caused in the Middle East, and you can’t not be heartbroken,” Michigan Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow, who in October joined the jackals in falsely accusing Israel of genocide, told a local radio station. “But I also feel like we are getting lost in this conversation, and it feels like a political purity test on a word — a word that, by the way, to people who lost family members in the Holocaust, does mean something very different and very visceral — and we’re losing sight of what I believe is a broadly shared goal among most Michiganders, that this violence needs to stop, that a temporary cease-fire needs to become a permanent cease-fire, that Palestinians deserve long term peace and security, that Israelis deserve long term peace and security, and that should be the role of the next U.S. senator.”
It’s awfully rare to have a “genocide” take place, acknowledge it, and then plead with people to stop talking about it. One reason McMorrow wants to stop talking about it is that she doesn’t actually think Israel committed genocide, just as she doesn’t think the earth is flat. But she caved to pressure to say so because she wants the votes of people who think the Jewish state should be destroyed.
In other words, McMorrow, like many of her fellow Democrats, falsely accused Israel of genocide to please actual promoters of genocide.
In that sense, of course McMorrow doesn’t want to talk about her disgraceful kowtowing to anti-Semites for political gain.
Yet she’s not wrong about the problem of some in her party wanting to use a blood libel as a purity test. It’s just that if she really thinks the war in Gaza was a genocide, she wouldn’t be so troubled by its status as a litmus test.
Put another way: Should “genocide” be a litmus test? I’d bet McMorrow thinks so. If she were running against a Holocaust denier, for example, would she say that she is troubled by the amount of criticism the denier were facing? To ask the question is to answer it.
McMorrow almost gets there herself, when she says that the genocide accusation “does mean something very different and very visceral” to those “who lost family members in the Holocaust.” But it’s not that the word genocide means something very different to them. Genocide was coined to categorize the Holocaust. That’s what genocide means. People who lost family in the Holocaust are bothered by the term being applied inaccurately.
What McMorrow wants is to earn points with her party’s base by passing the litmus test without having to revisit what she had to do to pass that test. She never considers her other option: to answer the question honestly.
Similarly, today Jewish Insider reports that Scott Wiener is stepping away from his post as co-chair of the California legislature’s Jewish Caucus. As I wrote last week, Wiener declined to say Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza constituted genocide at a candidates debate against two of his congressional primary opponents. He, like Mallory McMorrow, thought they had moved on. He was wrong, and he got slammed by progressives for equivocating, and so he filmed a soul-crushingly pathetic video changing his answer to “yes.”
It certainly would be inappropriate for him to continue on as Jewish Caucus co-chair, and he recognized as much. But I was struck by his plea for open-mindedness: “As we move through this moment, it is even more important for Jews here and globally to foster open dialogue and acceptance of disagreement, even on the hardest of issues.”
Does he feel that way about other genocides? Again, how much “acceptance of disagreement” does he feel there should be in the Jewish community toward Holocaust denial?
Wiener and McMorrow—and who knows how many others, but the number is high—don’t think Israel committed genocide. They don’t actually believe that there are much more important things to talk about and that genocide is a distraction. They lowered themselves to gain the approval of terrible people, and they feel dirty about it, and they would like to not have to do it again. Their problem is simple: It’s degrading to accuse Israel of genocide and then have to look at yourself in the mirror.
