There is an old saying about the Bourbon dynasty: “The Bourbons forgot nothing and learned nothing.” Of course, there has never been a monopoly on this sort of mentality; others share it. Charles Schumer, the Senator from New York and the Majority Leader, is a classic example.

Schumer is a Jewish Bourbon. He has forgotten nothing about the history of the Jews but has learned little or nothing from recent events.

Schumer’s Nov. 29 speech about anti-Semitism has been widely praised, even by conservatives who do not normally have much use for him. This praise from conservatives came because Schumer, albeit rather briefly and vaguely, admitted his shock at the behavior of some on the left after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. Until he saw that, apparently, Schumer  had supposed others on the left had been on the same side was as he.

While the dead bodies of Jewish Israelis were still warm, while hundreds of Jewish Israelis were being carried as hostages back to Hamas tunnels under Gaza, Jewish Americans were alarmed to see some of our fellow citizens characterize a brutal terrorist attack as justified because of the actions of the Israeli government.

A vicious, bloodcurdling, premeditated massacre of innocent men, women, children, the elderly—justified!

Even worse, in some cases, people even celebrated what happened, describing it as the deserved fate of quote “colonizers” and calling for quote “glory to the martyrs” who carried out these heinous attacks.

Many of the people who have expressed these sentiments in America aren’t neo-Nazis, or card-carrying Klan members, or Islamist extremists. They are in many cases people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers.

One wonders whether these conservatives really listened to what Schumer said.

There is little excuse for Schumer’s shock, and his speech, delivered in his usual sanctimonious style, with his typical asides pretending he has just discovered some amazing point that is, in fact, widely-known, was unimpressive. It was not an analysis but rather an outburst of emotion—supposedly explaining the feelings of Jews to gentiles. (The feelings of Jews seem almost more important than the grim realities.) The speech seemed more an effort to avoid coming to grips with the real causes and problems posed by the crazed hostility toward Israelis, and often enough toward Jews in general, that has become obvious even to the willfully blind since Oct. 7.   

To be sure, this is no sudden development or complete break with the past. Violent hostility toward Israel on the part of the far left was becoming visible as far back as 1967, in the run-up to the third Arab-Israeli war—when, incidentally, the Jewish state was still run by democratic socialists. And the tired mantra that Israel is guilty of “settler colonialism,” apartheid, genocide, and maybe even something so awful as using fossil fuels, has been developing for decades. It is only the extent to which mouthing this rubbish has become commonplace that could be shocking. (I must admit that it has shocked me.)

Schumer could not restrain himself from adding in some gratuitous, if mild, slaps against Donald Trump (for the so-called Muslim ban, for example) and tired liberal bromides, e.g. “bigotry against one group of Americans is bigotry against all.” Moreover, “The growing and vibrant Arab-American community is a vital part of our nation and my city…”

But Schumer did not trouble himself or his listeners with noticing the slight problem of the attitudes of many in that community toward Israel and/or Jews in general. That is something he does not want to process. Dealing with that might interfere with liberal pieties about immigration—and, possibly worse, facing the dilemma that Arab and Muslim voters are sufficiently numerous, in some places, e.g. Michigan, that they are critical for his party. To deal with that aspect of things would alienate them, and the psychopathic left wing of the Democratic Party (and now the dominant wing).

Schumer paid only slightly more attention to the spread of hostility among people who are not Islamists or Arabs—those who “most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow-travelers.” He deplored this increasing hostility but did not perform the one service he might have offered by attempting to explain it. Instead, he just alluded to their ignorance and tendency to see everything through an ideological lens that identifies everyone either as oppressors or oppressed—though it may be that he views that tendency as wrong only because it now places Jews on the wrong side of the split. He seems more worried that there is a “significant disparity” between the feeling of Jews that there is a real crisis and the feeling of most non-Jews that the development of venomous hatred of Israel and overt anti-Semitism is just a “problem.” They are not “sensitive” enough. That lack of feeling seemed to burn him as much or more than outright hostility—suggesting an odd sense of priorities.

Schumer avoided discussing the real hard interests of the United States and the West—and for that matter a good chunk of the rest of the world—in dealing with Islamist fanaticism and terrorism. Like too many other people—non-Jews as well as Jews—he is so focused on the danger to Israel and his fellow Jews, that he misses much of the game. The self-centered nature of Schumer’s reaction—like that of so many others, including the Israeli government—is such that they damage, or at least unnecessarily weaken, their own case. A notable example is that Hamas’ murders and kidnapping of Thais and Filipino workers in Israel has only been rarely and barely mentioned. That is eloquent of the terrorists’ attitudes.

It is unlikely that those people were mistaken for Israelis.

To be fair, Schumer never pretended to treat anything but anti-Semitism. Most of his speech was a wearisome recounting of the sorry history of the Jews, (possibly with just a slight paranoid streak), as though Schumer thinks his audience is composed of dolts and total ignoramuses. Of course, there may be some justification for that assumption, given the dismal state of American public education.

Schumer’s recital assumed that the current hostilities are just the latest eruption of a basically unchanging virus of anti-Semitism. From ancient Egypt on through Oct. 7, 2023, nothing has changed—though he made sure to include a nasty crack against Europeans in particular. That way he could finesse dealing with the real issues of today and the unfortunate evolution of the attitudes of his old buddies.

It may have satisfied him. There is no reason it should satisfy anybody else.

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