With so much anti-Semitic rhetoric on the Democratic side of the aisle lately and among progressives in general, it's hard to keep up, but this opinion from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow warranted a response. Maddow took aim at Steve Menashi, Trump's newest nominee to the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a lengthy segment on her program Thursday night.
Menashi served as a law clerk to Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Before that, he earned his B.A., magna cum laude, from Dartmouth College, and his J.D., with distinction, from Stanford Law School.
Yet, it was a law review article to which he contributed for the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law entitled "Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy" that gave Maddow pause about his nomination. In it, Menashi argued how a nation like Israel, dominated by one ethnicity, can be a successful democracy. Maddow interpreted the "blood curdling" document to mean the Jewish nominee was arguing that, "you can’t have a country that works if you’ve got all sorts of different people in it."
It is "a high-brow argument for racial purity," she maintained.
“It ends with a war cry,” Maddow explains, that suggests “democracy can’t work unless the county is defined by a unifying race.”
Conservative, Jewish, and legal groups did not like Maddow's interpretation of the paper, and are accusing her of going on an anti-Semitic rant. Judicial Crisis Network President Carrie Severino said the host should be "ashamed of herself," while others demanded she and the network apologize.
.@maddow should be ashamed of herself for the anti-Semitic rant she just launched against 2nd Circuit nominee Steven Menashi. Had she actually read his law-review article, she would know that Menashi says the exact opposite of what Maddow claims. Intentional distortion? https://t.co/Gz0oSqNKMJ
— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) August 16, 2019
This is unacceptable....at a minimum, @maddow and @MSNBC need to apologize for this anti-semitic attack. https://t.co/dZ1gaAUmRe
— Matt Brooks (@mbrooksrjc) August 16, 2019
Congressional liberals like Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) have also peddled anti-Semitism with their support of the BDS movement, which encourages the boycott of Israeli goods and services. It's for that reason they were recently banned from visiting the country.