Last week, Chuck Schumer called for regime change in Israel. Using language reserved for petty despots around the world, he called for the removal from office not of the bloody, orgiastic Hamas thugocracy, not of Prime Minister Barbecue, not the blood-soaked mullahs of Iran, whose coffers he collaborated in filling, but of a constitutionally chosen prime minister who leads a wartime coalition whose policies enjoy supermajority support of a country united by the hellish atrocities of Oct. 7. 

Schumer is responding to the looming disaster of Biden’s incoherent Israel policy. Both Schumer’s and Biden’s first instincts were to throw their full support behind Israel, heeding the better angels of their souls. 

But even before they spoke, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was chumming up with Turkey’s would-be sultan, accomplished despot and kleptocrat, Recip Erdogan. Before one Israeli set foot in Gaza, before the blood of the raped and dismembered women had dried, the two issued a call for a ceasefire.

A ceasefire? Israel hadn’t begun cleaning out the 400 miles of top-grade military tunnels under the hospitals, schools, and mosques of Gaza, tunnels which Hamas denied the citizens for whom it was responsible use for shelter, so what Blinken meant was that Israel had to pound sand. The atrocities were condign punishment for having the gall to refuse to offer endless concessions to those who seek its total elimination. Or in the words of an inexcusably honest member of this administration, a “final solution.”

The Democrats are instigators of the disastrous Obama turn to Iran, by which, slice by slice, the Israel alliance is being severed. Obama guaranteed economic relief for the mullahs, enabling them to fully fund their violent clients, from Gaza to Yemen to Syria. Only a few Democrats were brave enough to buck Obama, Alan Dershowitz, being the most eloquent. (Look out for your back, Dr. D.) Schumer hung tight. Giving cover, he kept a reputation as a friend of Israel, helped in no small part by the loyalty of so many American Jews to a party that used to share their concerns before it went full woke.

As the betrayal of Israel gathers steam, propelled by Biden’s fear of losing the River to the Sea vote, Jews are being trotted out to try to make this all seem kosher. That man of unparalleled integrity, Adam Schiff, oozed gravitas before the cameras as he declared that Schumer’s will affect Israel like an earthquake. A suitably violent image, indeed, for a verbally violent assault on America’s bona fides as an ally and on respect for the choices of a working democracy.

Meanwhile, Biden was opening up the funding firehose, blasting a stream of billions more dollars to Iran. Why not? We saw what happened with the first billions he sent: Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis were fully funded. Obama term three — the end of American influence realized through the betrayal of our allies and active aid to those sworn to our destruction.

And now, the Democrats trot out their Jews to try to stop the bleeding of Jewish votes from the party that has made its peace with any kind of antisemitism that its sophistry can disguise. 

It’s not new that people will throw their own under the bus for selfish advantage.

Around 1500, a Jew convicted as a burglar, known to history as Johannes Pfefferkorn, opened up a new life for himself by converting to Christianity, and so escaping the oppressive laws confining Jews to the ghetto and severely limiting their opportunities. Pfefferkorn took his get-out-of-jail-free card and began a new life in which he took on the persona of those who had been his persecutors and became the leader of a movement to compel Jews to convert by taking away their books, forcing them to attend conversionary preaching, and further restricting their economic activities to allow only manual labor.

Pfefferkorn went at it with gusto. By 1509, he had prevailed on the Holy Roman emperor, Maximilian, to issue a decree to confiscate all religious books in Jews’ possession except for the Bible.

A great Christian scholar, Johann Reuchlin, pleaded the case of the Talmud before the emperor. Reuchlin had gone to Italy, befriended and studied under the great Italian rabbi and biblical commentator Ovadia Sforno, and spent time with the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola, who shared with Reuchlin his love of the teachings of Jewish mysticism. He was a man exemplifying the best of his religious tradition. Reuchlin eventually prevailed in stopping the Talmud seizure and also succeeded in seeing that study of Hebrew literature in the original became common in European universities. It is due in some part to his effort that, by the time of America’s founding, most of our (once) great universities taught Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; one features Hebrew on its seal.

All peoples have their weak men as well as their greats. There are always those who further themselves by betraying their own people. America had its Benedict Arnold, after all; Britain, its Guy Fawkes. In more recent days, America had its Aldrich Ames, Britain its Kim Philby.

But there are those who sincerely believed that what they were doing good for their people. These cases of those whose aims seem to be loftier than mere selfishness are more difficult to judge. Faced with the violent threat of Nazism, Pope Pius XI signed a concordat with Hitler and his Reich, ending Catholic political opposition to the Nazis and pulling the rug out from under the Catholic party that had been a strong voice in the Weimar Republic. Pius XI came to regret what he had done and issued a stunning condemnation of Nazism that many brave priests read from their pulpits, denouncing the new barbarism in passionate language. But by then, Hitler’s power was firmly established.

Neville Chamberlain thought for many reasons that his policy of appeasement was brave, moral, and effective. Instead, it opened the door and sped ahead Hitler’s program of world domination and his Final Solution.

Life poses us tough decisions. When we are in the thick of it, things can seem evenly balanced, and only in retrospect does the distinction between the two paths become clear.

But we must make decisions in the haze and fog of the moment.

Churchill spoke of this when memorializing Neville Chamberlain before the House of Commons:

The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes, and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.

But of Chamberlain’s predecessor, Stanley Baldwin, a Conservative, who refused to respond to Germany’s rearming and thereby made sure that the Nazis would nearly run the table in 1940 and 1941— of Baldwin, Churchill said “it would have been much better” had he never been born.

Among those who have hurt their country and their people, of which sort is Schumer? Is he really motivated by honor and conscience as Churchill granted Chamberlain, disastrous as he was? Or was he motivated more basely, serving power rather than G-d and conscience?

In the early days of Communist Russia, there was a special group in the party called the Yevsektzia, newspeak for Yevreskaya Sektzia, the Jewish Section of the Communist party. It was filled with Jews whose first allegiance was to the Communist state. They used their knowledge of Jews and Jewish life to help Lenin and Stalin and their secret police to pull down all traditional Jewish institutions and undermine the continuity of Jewish life and culture. Thousands were executed; thousands more disappeared into the Gulags. Jewish life was driven down and suppressed, kept alive only by incredibly brave people who often didn’t survive.

But Jews and Judaism survived the Communists. Millions left the Soviet Union and became productive citizens in Israel, America, and many other places. Truth outlives tyranny.

Whatever their motivations, Schumer and Schiff have bet on the wrong pony. As the Democrats have lurched far to the left, they have developed their own version of the Yevsektzia, on shameful display on TV screens all over the world.

America isn’t buying what they sell – and perhaps, deep down, even Schumer isn’t easy. Even in compromised people, there is still a soul, though in a deep state of exile. But there is no telling when it may awaken and turn their darkness to light. It would brighten up our world, especially the corners of it they themselves have darkened. 

One ought to pray for such an awakening.