This week in “I’m a Nazi; you’re a Nazi; everyone’s a Nazi,” the viscerally repugnant union boss thug, Randi Weingarten, is now running with the line that criticism of her performance as the head of the country’s largest teachers’ union — for instance, her brutal lockdowns that set America’s public schoolchildren back years, likely to never recover — is tantamount to antisemitism:
If you’re a member of a minority group, well, there’s lots of antisemitism. I happen to be… married to a rabbi. And I happen to really believe in my faith. And there’s a lot of homophobia. And I happen to be the first out lesbian as a labor leader in the country.
Related: Teachers’ Union Head Randi Weingarten KO’ed in Congressional Hearings Over COVID School Closures
In a delicious irony, it turns out that Weingarten herself was the recipient of the “anti-Semite” smear when she reportedly deemed her “Jewish critics” a part of the “ownership class.”
Via American Jewish Committee, April 2021 (emphasis added):
Randi Weingarten is no antisemite, but her comments, in a JTA interview regarding Jewish critics of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union she heads, are nonetheless offensive and unforgivable. She dismissed Jewish critics of her union's resistance to opening public schools now as being members of the "ownership class," who should have no voice on the issue.
Weingarten's remarks were particularly puzzling as the organized Jewish community has not taken on the issue. Individual Jews may have, but that hardly justifies speaking of Jews as a class, a common tactic of antisemitic bigots.
If such remarks had come from Minister Farrakhan or a leader of the Proud Boys, they would correctly have been condemned as raw, unadulterated antisemitism.
The sweeping claim that Jews are in the "ownership class," and thus have no business criticizing public school teachers and their unions for resisting reopening public schools due to Covid, will inevitably aid and comfort those who thrive on propagating the imaginary notion that all Jews are rich and use their wealth to somehow control everyone else.
This whole obscene spectacle is super gross on multiple fronts, but not unexpected at all coming from the likes of Randi, who has also smuggled in her status as a lesbian to deflect criticism as homophobic.
Does actual antisemitism — the discrimination/prejudice against Jews on ethnic or religious grounds — exist in the world? It certainly does.
Does criticizing this lady meet the threshold for antisemitism? Not for anyone willing to be mildly rational.
The central, highly absorbable lesson of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” — which I had taken as an article of faith was read to every child at a young age and subsequently instilled valuable life lessons — was that repeatedly lying about any given issue for petty personal reasons has a way of diluting the potency of future claims.
So, then the question becomes, if false claims of antisemitism cause all claims of antisemitism to be met with skepticism: who’s the real anti-Semite, Randi?
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