Individual Jews may consider him a “mensch” in personal interactions, but his willingness to work with and promote the policy preferences of his party’s extremists is something American Jews cannot afford to overlook
August 14, 2024 14:39
The US far left was thrilled when Kamala Harris announced Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. After all, he’d been their preference, and the Jewish community needs to understand why.
Walz was a fairly moderate Democrat while representing his right-leaning Congressional district for 12 years. For example, Walz called Israel “our truest and closest ally in the region” as part of his speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) back in 2010.
As Walz’s party moved leftward on Israel, though, so did he. Like most Democrats, Walz voted for President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal in 2015. Meanwhile, AIPAC and other American Jewish organisations opposed it over concerns about regional instability.
When Walz won Minnesota’s governorship in 2018, his leftward trajectory continued, both in his actions and his choice of red-green allies. In January 2019, he publicly applauded Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a notorious member of “The Squad”. Walz told an audience that “on a tough day,” thinking about Omar’s being in Congress “just brightens you up”.
In 2019, Walz addressed a conference of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), where he rubbed shoulders with a scholar who launched “Students for Justice in Palestine”, the group behind many of the pro-Hamas and antisemitic rallies across college campuses in the wake of the October 7 attacks.
On at least five occasions as governor Walz has also hosted an imam who has shared official Hamas press releases on Facebook, along with blog posts on hate-filled websites.
Walz’s administration additionally granted over $100,000 to the Muslim American Society Minnesota, this imam’s group, whose national umbrella organisation responded to October 7 by expressing “solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli attacks”.
In touch with the anti-Israel segment of the Democratic base, Walz urged a Middle East ceasefire in March. And when 18 per cent of Minnesota Democrats cast protest votes against President Biden over Israel policy, Walz reacted respectfully: “Take them seriously. Their message is clear, that they think this is an intolerable situation and we can do more, and I think the president is hearing that.”
Walz’s boosters point to his speaking up for Jewish students harassed on their campuses, saying in an April interview, “I think when Jewish students are telling us they feel unsafe in that, we need to believe them, and I do believe them.” Notably, though, Walz didn’t specify that those harassing Jews are primarily leftists.
Finally, Walz, a former high school social studies teacher, is aligned with the far left on school curricula. Last year, he signed into law a new requirement that students learn “about the Holocaust, along with other genocides”. He believes the “Jewish Holocaust” should be taught “in the greater context of human rights abuses”, rather than as a unique historical anomaly or as part of a larger unit on the Second World War.
Harvard professor emerita Ruth Wisse addressed such policy judgments in a 2020 essay for National Affairs, noting that “the potential for corruption begins with the impulse to make the Holocaust a universal symbol of evil, Nazism synonymous with ‘hatred,’ and Holocaust education a redemptive American pursuit”. Universalising the Holocaust disregards millennia of antisemitism and related harms. “Intentionally or not, this ‘opposition to hate’ feeds the hideous ideology it pretends to resist.”
That “hideous ideology” is further taught to Minnesota students through ethnic studies, another Walz policy that Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has characterised as “race-based neo-Marxism… a kind of anti-civics in which students are taught to reject and replace America’s system of government.”
Ethnic Studies is mandatory in Minnesota, and Kurtz argues, Minnesota’s version is more radical than progressive California’s.
“And do Minnesota’s ethnic-studies advocates follow California by coming down on Israel?,” Kurtz asks rhetorically. “You bet they do...Minnesota ethnic-studies advocates helped spark anti-Israel student walkouts in the immediate aftermath of October 7.”
Such things matter. While individual Jews may consider Walz a “mensch” in personal interactions, his willingness to work with and promote the policy preferences of his party’s extremists is something American Jews cannot afford to overlook.
