The White House and its allies shouldn’t
need to smear American Jews–and a sitting senator–as dual loyalists to make
their case
Chuck Schumer is a politician—a skilled and successful
one. Which means that today’s announcement, following months of wildly
uncharacteristic silence, that the senior Senator from New York is opposing the
Administration’s nuclear deal with
Iran is first and foremost a reflection of his calculations as to where his own
self-interest lies. It does not take an electoral genius to imagine why a
Senator from New York State might oppose a deal that keeps many Jewish
voters—and an even higher percentage of non-Jewish voters—up at night. Keeping
your base happy is generally the first rule of political survival.
It also seems unlikely that Senator Schumer would not
have consulted with his most powerful political ally and patron, Hillary
Clinton, who also happens to be the presumptive Democratic Presidential
nominee, before making such a big decision. Deciding to oppose a potentially
world-altering legacy-oriented foreign policy move by a sitting Democratic
president is not the kind of thing that Democratic Senators do
lightly—especially with a presidential campaign now officially in progress.
While Schumer doesn’t speak for Clinton or for her campaign, his decision to
oppose the deal after months of pressure from the White House is a strong
indication that neither Democrat felt like Schumer’s position was likely to
have a particularly negative effect on her chances.
So,
what about the Iran deal itself? Some of us support the deal, because—like a
majority of American Jews—we support the president, and we sympathize with his
aims of ending Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons while keeping America out of
another Middle Eastern war. Some of us oppose the deal because we believe that
it falls very short of the criteria for meaningful limits on and inspections of
Iran’s nuclear research programs that the Administration itself repeatedly
promised to America and the world. Some of us are less concerned with the
specifics of the deal than with the prospect of an American alliance with the
theocratic Iranian regime, which the deal appears to be designed to cement.
As heated as the arguments between us can get, we can all
agree that all of these positions, and their many variants, are entirely within
the bounds of legitimate political debate—and that none of them are evidence of
anyone’s intent either to rush America to war or
to obliterate the State of Israel.
What
we increasingly can’t stomach—and feel obliged to speak out about right now—is
the use of Jew-baiting and other blatant and retrograde forms of racial and
ethnic prejudice as tools to sell a political deal, or to smear those who
oppose it. Accusing Senator Schumer of loyalty to a foreign government is
bigotry, pure and simple. Accusing Senators and Congressmen whose misgivings
about the Iran deal are shared by a majority of the U.S. electorate of being agents of a foreign power, or ofselling their votes to
shadowy lobbyists, or of acting contrary to the best interests of the United States, is the kind of naked
appeal to bigotry and prejudice that would be familiar in the politics of the
pre-Civil Rights Era South.
This
use of anti-Jewish incitement as a political tool is a sickening new
development in American political discourse, and we have heard too much of it
lately—some coming, ominously, from our own White House and its representatives.
Let’s not mince words: Murmuring about “money” and “lobbying” and “foreign
interests” who seek to drag America into war is a direct attempt to play the dual-loyalty card. It’s the kind of dark, nasty stuff
we might expect to hear at a white power rally, not from the President of the
United States—and it’s gotten so blatant that even many of us who are generally
sympathetic to the administration, and even this deal, have been shaken by
it.
We
do not accept the idea that Senator Schumer or anyone else is a fair target for
racist incitement, anymore than we accept the idea that the basic norms of
political discourse in this country do not apply to Jews. Whatever one feels
about the merits of the Iran deal, sales techniques that call into question the
patriotism of American Jews are examples of bigotry—no matter who does it. On
this question, we should all stand in defense of Senator Schumer.
