Chuck Schumer: Name the Antisemites in Your Party or Sit Down

In August of 2020, as BLM protests and riots spread across the country causing billions in damage to businesses and communities, Joe Biden’s Twitter account sent out an accusatory tweet blaming President Donald Trump, of all people. “Remember: every example of violence Donald Trump decries has happened on his watch. Under his leadership. During his presidency.” Biden may come to regret that statement heading into 2024, as a wave of antisemitism sweeps over the country—much to the silence of his own party and their loyal satrapies in the media.

Having witnessed the October 7 Hamas terror attack which included the murder, rape, torture, and execution of 1,200 Israeli citizens and the kidnapping o 240 more, members of the Democratic Party have openly attached their name to the Hamas chant “From River to the Sea.” They have egged on mass protests with that chant as their mantra. They have affixed their names to Hamas’s blood libels, such as when Hamas blamed Israel for an Islami Jihad bombing of a hospital. They’ve stood by while hostage flyers are removed from Ivy League campuses by faculty members and in liberal cities like New York, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles.

This current wave of antisemitism in America isn’t being led by tiki-torch carrying khaki-clad Nazi LARPers. It’s being carried out by the voting base and elected officials of Biden’s own party—by people like Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Squad. And while they represent a fraction of the Democratic Party as a whole, those representing the more moderate view that maybe the Hamas butchers aren’t the victims in this whole scenario are too afraid to speak up.

This was the primary problem with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s speech on the floor on Wednesday, which drew high praise from both sides of the political aisle, and in conservative media as well. Senator Schumer took to the Senate floor to condemn the spike in antisemitism that’s spreading across the nation.

Schumer, the highest Jewish elected official in the federal government, has been an outspoken ally for Israel during this conflict, and to his credit, he named specific instances of antisemitism that are spreading from the Left—from his side.

“After October 7th, when students on college campuses across the country who wear a yarmulke or display a Jewish star are harassed, verbally vilified, pushed, and even spat upon and punched — that is antisemitism!” Schumer said. “After October 7th, when an author in a prominent left-wing magazine labeled the pro-Israel rally in Washington a “hate rally” — that is antisemitism!”

And yet, he did not name the supporters of Hamas in his own party, in his own state. Schumer chose to speak in broad platitudes of the dangers of this new antisemitic wave.

So while I applaud Schumer’s speech, he is approaching antisemitism as though it is a Never Ending Story-style black cloud of nothingness, driven by mysterious, unseen forces, and happening in random odd places. It is not. It is being driven and funded by the Democratic Party apparatus in this country—in government, activism, media and academia. It’s being driven by people whose names Chuck Schumer well knows.

Dark money groups of his own party sponsoring activists like disgraced Women’s March Director Linda Sarsour as well as Democratic House Members like Ilhan Omar, who has been admonished in the past for her antisemitic remarks, went nameless in Schumer’s remarks. So did Congresswoman Tlaib. Even as Schumer made specific references to incidents like the Jewish teacher in Queens who was forced to hide from her own students, Schumer neglected to accept responsibility that this is happening in his own state. Queens, New York is not MAGA Country.

Until Schumer is willing to call out these elements stemming from his own state and jurisdiction and members of his own donor base and Democratic colleagues, he cannot simply be praised for doing the bare minimum. The closest Schumer came to admonishing his own party for their role in promoting and endorsing antisemitism was a passive reference to “people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers.”

Without standing up and naming names for fear of intra-party backlash and a “Dems in Disarray” media news cycle, Schumer’s words, while eloquent, remain politically hollow.

Jewish Americans deserve real leadership.

Stephen L. Miller has written for National Review, The Spectator, the New York Post and Fox News, and hosts the independent podcast Versus Media on Substack.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.