Jewish “Humanitarian leftist”, self-described co-founder of the Democratic Socialists of America, Jo-Ann Mort sees anti-Semitism in conservative policies, but can’t see that it permeates the Democratic Party and the ‘Palestinians’ she so wants to see free and independent.
The majority of US Jews overwhelmingly oppose Netanyahu’s policies. But subtleties get lost and truly unleashed people react
by Jo-Ann Mort | Tuesday, June 3, 2025 | 3:00 PM EDT | Updated: 3:14 PM EDT
It happened again. The third time this year that Jewish people were attacked with murderous intent in a major US city under the guise of the assailant caring about the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza. It’s the second time that fires were set. The first happened when an attacker – a US citizen – broke into the official residence of Pennsylvania’s governor in Harrisburg, on the evening of Passover and set fire to the residence. The only thing that saved governor Josh Shapiro and his family was a quick response from security guards, leaving only some Passover Haggadahs, the text that charts Jewish hopes for freedom and liberation from one generation to the next, to burn on the tables still set from dinner.
About two weeks ago, there was the murder of two innocent Jewish Israeli embassy workers who were attending an event hosted by the The American Jewish Committee at the Jewish Museum in Washington DC on how to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza; these young people were chosen at random from a crowd apparently targeted intentionally since the murderer, again a US citizen, appeared to have wanted to hunt down and kill Jews in response to Israel – a sovereign country’s – military acts. Tellingly, the gunman had a brief association to the far-left Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL said in a statement that he is not a member and that his association with the group ended in 2017).
And now, again with the element of fire, we wait for word on the condition of at least 12 victims of a torching in broad daylight in downtown Boulder, Colorado, by an assailant named Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national, who yelled “Free Palestine” and scorched the skin of activists ranging from their 50s to the 80s who gathered peacefully in that square each week demanding one thing: bring the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas home.
Did you notice? The article’s subtitle tells us that “The majority of US Jews overwhelmingly oppose Netanyahu’s policies,” but in none of the three cases author Jo-Ann Mort noted was the assailant Jewish. And throughout the rest of her article, she cites not a single example of Jews doing this kind of stuff.
She did, however say:
I have said and written the same thing regarding Palestinian civilians being killed and will continue to write and protest any innocent civilians being killed. I also reject any attempts by any person or group or government to blame all Palestinians for Hamas’s actions.
Hamas live in Gaza, Hamas govern Gaza, completely before October 7th, and as much as it is governed today, and all of Hamas’ support, in food, in supplies, in military preparations, and operationally, come from the ‘civilians’ in Gaza. The ‘civilians’ knew where all of the tunnel entrances were, the ‘civilians’ helped conceal and hold the hostages, and the ‘civilians’ know, and knew, where the hostages were held.
The German civilians were not all Nazis, with only roughly 10% becoming Nazi party members, though civilian support was higher than that. The Nazis maxed out at 37% of the vote in free elections. But German civilians were very much part of Germany’s war efforts, providing the men and war materiel needed for the Wehrmacht. The German people never abandoned Adolf Hitler; there were no uprisings against the Führer and the Nazi government, and the Germans resisted the Allied invasion right up until Hitler killed himself. And while the Allies mostly confined their bombing efforts to military targets and infrastructure, you can’t bomb a war materiel plant without killing the people who worked therein, or the people, whether plant workers or not, who lived reasonably close to the plant. The Allies couldn’t attack the supply centers and production which provided food and fuel to the military without taking food and fuel from civilians as well. We did what was necessary to win the war!
Israel has been doing what is necessary for them to win the war.
Also, perhaps it needs to be said here and time again: I fully support, and have spent my life fighting for, freedom and self-determination for the Palestinian people, acknowledging the rights of two people to one plot of land).
Does Miss Mort not realize what she has said? She has expressed the very Westernized view that the Palestinians would be happy and satisfied if only,
only! the wicked Israeli government would withdraw from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, and let the Palestinians have their own nation. Perhaps there are some Palestinians who would be satisfied with that, but Hamas have been telling her, telling everyone, that such is not their goal, that their goal is to irradicate the state of Israel and impose an Islamic government “from the River to the Sea.” Yet, like so many Western civilization liberals, she simply cannot bring herself to believe what the Palestinians themselves have been telling her. She tells us even more:
I write this as someone whose entire life has been lived on the left, as a prominent activist and one who continues to believe in my gut in the values of a humanitarian left.
And therein lays the problem: the author simply cannot wrap her head around the fact that not all people have those same values. Hamas are not part of the “humanitarian left,” but a group that any part of the “humanitarian left” ought to see as wholly evil. Hamas have massacred civilians, used deliberate rape as a weapon of terror and revenge, kidnapped the innocent and used them as weapons. Women are second-class citizens, and anyone who is not sexually normal is subject to abuse, beatings, and even death.
Naturally, as a member of the “humanitarian left,” a Park Slope liberal, she went ahead and attacked President Trump, the father of a highly-trusted Jewish (convert) daughter, and father-in-law to a Jewish man he has previously used to negotiate the Abrahamic Accords, as cynically using anti-Semitism, even as he removed the restrictions on American weapons sold to Israel that were imposed by his predecessor. There has been no greater friend to Israel in our contemporary politics than Mr Trump. But, of course, her paradigm is so thoroughly restricted that she cannot see or believe anything outside of it.
While there are a few, with the emphasis on “few,” anti-Semites, they have been far more heavily concentrated on the political left in the United States, but the “humanitarian left” author doesn’t want to see that, doesn’t want to see what is right in front of her.