Small Steps toward Future Success

Until Simchas Torah, his principal issues had been two hardy perennials of the progressive left — legalization of marijuana and shorter sentences for criminals, even violent ones. Yet when he contemplated the reaction of the progressive left to massacre of Israeli Jews, he abandoned his progressive label before he abandoned his support for Israel.

Professor Eugene Kontorovich among others has pointed to the irony that Hamas’s assault on Simchas Torah was one of the most inhumane in recent history — murder, torture, assaults on women, burning victims to death, beheadings — and yet it was celebrated around the world that very day. And over time, Hamas became the object of international solicitude, while Israel was condemned for committing genocide by those who neither know what the term means nor have ever bestirred themselves over actual attempts to wipe out entire peoples in recent decades — e.g., Tutsis in Rwanda, black tribesmen in Darfur.

Fetterman, alone on his side of the aisle, has stood tall to remind the world again and again how the war started and of the Israeli hostages being held in inhuman conditions. But the key point here is: No one saw this coming. During his Senate campaign, Fetterman was still recovering from a serious stroke and could barely communicate at all or understand questions put to him.

IF FEW SAW Senator Fetterman as a passionate and resolute defender of Israel, I think it is safe to say few would have predicted that Candace Owens would turn out to be “a raging out-and-out anti-Semite,” in the words of Christine Rosen of the American Enterprise Institute. When Owens first came to public notice, conservatives could not get enough of the young, articulate black woman, who took no guff, whether being questioned on TV or in Senate committee hearings. She was quick on her feet, and able to skillfully point out the implicit racist assumptions behind questions directed to her and how her actual words had been deliberately distorted.