[guest post by JVW]

Another year, more ridiculous opinions from the Los Angeles Times. This one is all about the fact that key organizers of the Women’s March have been exposed as rank anti-semites. That ought to be an embarrassment to anyone of good will and common decency, but the Dog Trainer gives space to the always-delusional columnist Robin Abcarian to argue, hey, what’s the big deal about a little bit of Jew-hating among allies?

The original Women’s March national co-chairs are a varied group: white, black, Latina, Palestinian.

Last March, according to a detailed account in Tablet, an online magazine that reports on Jewish news and culture, three of the Women’s March founders praised Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan during a conference call with leaders of the group’s state chapters, despite his abysmal record of anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia and sexism.

Tablet reported that some women were offended that the group’s leaders did not denounce Farrakhan on the spot. His rhetoric, they felt, could not be reconciled with the inclusive principles of the Women’s March.

Personally, I find Farrakhan’s world view vile. Yet, I think it is possible to be repulsed by his hateful rhetoric about white people, especially Jews, and still appreciate some of the empowerment work that he has done in the black community, including leading the 1995 Million Man March to promote African American family unity.

Yeah. Rev. Jim Bakker stole money and fooled around with his young secretary, but he led a bunch of people to Jesus Christ so let’s not dwell on what a sleazebag he was and let’s totally give the benefit of the doubt to all the televangelists who admire and seek to emulate him. Do you think Ms. Abcarian attempted to draw an equivalence to Donald Trump supporters too? But of course:

How about all those Trump admirers who overlook his constant and casual expressions of racism, or his more pointedly racist call to execute five young men of color — later exonerated in the rape and beating of a Central Park jogger — whom he described in four full-page newspaper ads as “roving bands of wild criminals”?

And hey, it hardly matters if the organizers are bigots and hypocrites when they are empowering women!

In January 2017, I flew to Washington to cover the march in a plane jam packed with women and girls flaunting pink pussy hats. Three generations of women in my family converged for the demonstration.

It was one of the most inspiring public events I’d ever attended — on par with the inauguration of President Obama in 2009 — a torrential display of high spirits, patriotism and idealism.
In November, I daresay, we saw the fruits of the original Women’s March on Washington.

[. . .]

While organizers of the Women’s March battled over who said what to whom about Jewish people when, and the merits of a noted anti-Semite, American women stood up by the millions and changed the country.

For that, everyone involved in the Women’s March can take a bow.

And with that, Robin Abcarian declares that angry leftist women greatly outrank the Jewish people — by several steps it would seem — in the intersectionality sweepstakes, and we should all just give a pass to the open ugliness of that whole crew. What an awful column, what a sadly blinkered woman, and what a garbage newspaper the Los Angeles Times continues to be. Happy New Year to them. I have never regretted cancelling my subscription to that rag fifteen years ago.

– JVW