This essay by Joel Kotkin at Tablet takes a jaundiced look at the "fashionable radicalism" currently on display in the big US cities. It will only, says Kotkin, end badly for the Democrats (in the blue states), as the liberal middle class flees the increasingly chaotic and divided urban centres for a life in the suburbs and less crowded smaller towns and cities.
Worth reading in full, but this is a point worth making about the links between Black Lives Matter and antisemitism:
Blue state leaders have been slow to recognize—or perhaps slow to acknowledge—that BLM politics are more akin to the Black Panther Party of the 1960s than the Southern Christian Leadership Council. Academic Melina Abdullah, a prominent BLM spokesperson and co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter, is an open admirer of the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan. She describes the protests not as a cry for reform but an “uprising” or “rebellion.” In late May, Abdullah explained: “We’ve been very deliberate in saying that the violence and pain and hurt that’s experienced on a daily basis by Black folks at the hands of a repressive system should also be visited upon, to a degree, to those who think that they can just retreat to white affluence.” Among the areas where rioters visited pain was LA’s traditionally Jewish Fairfax district, where stores were destroyed and synagogues were vandalized and spray-painted with slogans like “Fuck Israel.” A BLM leader in New York has endorsed the armed takeover of neighborhoods, something that has already occurred, with deadly results, in painfully white and hip Seattle.
On the latest from Farrakhan and his hip supporters – and the silent complicity of the left – see Elder of Ziyon here and here.
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