ADL’s Greenblatt Says Dems Have Been Hijacked by a ‘Mob’ and That ‘Woke 2.0 Is Just Gaza’
The article features a statement from Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League, criticizing the Democratic Party for being influenced by mob mentality amid debates over the Gaza conflict.Greenblatt disputes claims of genocide, emphasizing that statistics do not support such a label, and expresses concern over how quickly political groups can be captured by emotional hysteria. He comments on the normalization of anti-Jewish rhetoric, noting that inflammatory language like “from the river to the sea” and accusations of Israel being a Nazi state contribute to rising anti-Semitism in the U.S., with record incidents of harassment and violence reported in 2024. Greenblatt also discusses the broader cultural shift towards increasingly extreme rhetoric and the misconception of equating Gaza activism with American civil rights movements. he highlights the dangers of inflammatory discourse, the normalization of anti-Semitism, and the rapid political capture by mob-like sentiment concerning the Gaza situation.
The Democratic Party has been captured “by the mob,” according to the director of the Anti-Defamation League.
During a recent interview, ADL Director and CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said the facts have been left behind in the debate over Gaza.
“There was no genocide. The statistics bear it out. There was no genocide, but Democrats are running on this as if it’s some sort of dogma, right?” he said in a new interview.
“And it’s terrifying to me how any individual, let alone an entire political party, can be so captured so quickly, Brian, by the mob,” he told host Brian Kilmeade.
“I think Bill Maher talked about this last week, like, woke 2.0 is just Gaza. And it’s insane,” he said.
Writing in the Atlantic, Jonathan Chait noted that even activists like Greta Thunberg, who once insisted the world would end, are now turning their apocalyptic rhetoric to Gaza.
“Woke 2 exhibits nearly all of the same behaviors as its predecessor — the fervent demands that society concentrate all of its attention on an apocalyptic crisis, the importation of academic jargon, and the reshaping of the social relationships and everyday decisions of its adherents,” he wrote.
“Wokeness is not concern about a particular issue or issues, or even an ideology. It is, instead, a political style, a form of apocalyptic obsession that is serially fixated on different issues, waxing and waning in intensity,” he continued.
“It offers the comfort of Manichaean morality — telling adherents that they alone can see the world in its true horror. But what it doesn’t offer, by design, is any practical resolution,” he noted.
Chait noted that wokesters who want the world to cast Hamas as the successor of the American civil rights movement are hiding the truth, not revealing it.
“The American civil-rights movement is not, in fact, the proper moral lens with which to understand a terrorist group that murders not only Jewish civilians but also dissident Palestinians, and whose objective is not the right to vote and sit at lunch counters but to impose sectarian theocracy,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Greenblatt said violent anti-Jewish rhetoric has been normalized, according to a recent interview with The New York Times.
“When you normalize language like ‘from the river to the sea,’ when you normalize language like ‘globalize the Intifada,’ when you normalize language like, again, ‘Israel is a Nazi state,’ this creates the conditions in which people feel not just compelled, but almost obligated, Lulu, to do horrible things,” he told New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
“I think this is a time of great concern for Jews all over the United States. At ADL, we track anti-Semitism. We measure attitudes. And we also track incidents. And we’ve never really seen a time like this, at least not in recent memory,” he continued.
“So on the one hand, elevated or intense anti-Semitic attitudes as a percent of the population have more than doubled in the last five years,” he said.
“And we also track incidents. What I can tell you is last year, 2024, was the worst year we had ever recorded in terms of acts of harassment, vandalism, and violence directed at Jewish people or Jewish institutions. That was the fifth time in the last six years that we’ve broken a new record,” he added.
“I think anti-Semitism has been normalized in the culture.”
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