James Zogby has caused furor before with his Tweets on matters such as Israel’s “culinary genocide,” but this is merely one Twitter example of his hard left and radical pro-Palestinian views. This Arab American Institute founder, longtime Democratic Party leader, and prominent Bernie Sanders presidential campaign supporter thus raises disturbing questions about growing extremism among Democrats.
For example, Zogby had jumped into the leftist media frenzy to denounce Nicholas Sandmann at the January 2019 March for Life on the mall in Washington, DC. A confusing video had suggested to some that this Covington Catholic School student from Kentucky had racially harassed a Native American man. More extensive analysis later exposed such charges as completely baseless, and Sandmann’s lawyers have successfully sued media outlets including the Washington Post and CNN for defamation, and are continuing with other lawsuits.
Zogby had unfairly assumed the worst of the pro-Donald Trump Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat wearer Sandmann in a January 19, 2019, tweet. With halfcocked righteous indignation, this Lebanese-American Maronite Catholic intoned that:
Not enough for #CovingtonCatholicSchool to expel & apologize. They need to do so much more. They need to shut down the school for a week & engage in self-criticism. How did this happen? How did they fail? How does this fit their Christian faith? What would Jesus do?
More recently, Zogby promoted Seattle, Washington’s crime-ridden Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), later renamed Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP). This is one of many violence-prone protests nationwide that erupted following the May 25 Minneapolis, Minnesota, police killing of George Floyd. On June 15, he tweeted that “What[‘s] happening in #CHAZ sounds a lot like the progressive-led Tharir Square protests that challenged Egypt’s military in 2011.”
During the rest of June following Zogby’s tweet, six shootings occurred in the CHAZ/CHOP area from which Seattle police had withdrawn, two of them fatal. Accordingly, police finally cleared the area on July 1. His “progressive-led” politics had proven no more successful in Seattle than the short-lived Muslim Brotherhood-led takeover of Egypt in 2011-2013.
The antisemitism of leftist Democratic “Squad” members, Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, has done nothing to diminish Zogby’s affection for them. He has praised Omar last November 12 and Tlaib July 28 for, respectively, “principled progressive politics” and a commitment to “social & racial justice.” Criticism of Omar he dismissed July 10 as “bigotry & intolerance.”
The group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is even more radical than Omar in anti-Semitic Israel-hatred, yet Zogby rose to SJP’s defense on July 28. He condemned as a “damn shame” an ongoing legal controversy over Fordham University’s denial of student group recognition for a local SJP chapter. The university’s Jesuit “tradition should support social justice & opposition to repression—the goals advocated by this Palestinian group.”
Any American recognition of Israeli sovereignty over historic Jewish territories including Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria has brought merely rants from Zogby. He tweeted on February 3 that “Palestinians aren’t an arrogant imperial power that can give away land that’s not theirs to give, ignore international law, & decide winners & losers based on racism.” Among other things, he ignored that Arab Palestinians owe their existence to past Arab/Islamic imperialism.
“Denying the existence of Palestinians is bigotry,” Zogby pronounced on July 10. He did not explain how a cohesive Palestinian national identity is any more substantial than in conflict-torn Arab countries such as Lebanon, Iraq, or Syria. His histrionics came in response to Instagram taking down an image of the passport of Los Angeles star real estate developer Mohamed Hadid. Instagram policy prohibits revealing confidential numbers, but Instagram later conceded that his passport number was blurred and reinstated the image.
In perhaps Zogby’s most extreme tweet, he condemned on April 21 a “threat to Islamic heritage in Hebron” on the basis of a Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) declaration against an unilateral Israeli use of eminent domain. After the Palestinian Authority had refused to cooperate with Israeli authorities, they confiscated a small piece of land next to Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs for the construction of a handicapped-access elevator. At this site venerated by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, such an elevator would benefit all handicapped visitors, who currently may only access the tomb by being laboriously carried up steep stairs. By contrast, he chastised that this project “is as important as similar violations condemned by the US Commission on International #ReligiousFreedom.”
Unsurprisingly, Zogby is a blinkered devotee of the fraudulent, late Columbia University professor Edward Said, who had fabricated much of his “Palestinian” biography. Zogby lashed out on July 9 at an insightful Newsweek article by Israeli-American commentator Caroline Glick as a “demented slanderous attack on Edward Said.” Contrastingly, Glick is “not fit to tie his shoes, yet accuses him of terrorism & inspiring political violence in US,” even with “Israeli sources.”
Zogby’s powerbroker status in the Democratic Party should concern all Americans. He is thereby mainstreaming groups such as SJP and canards including his Hebron slander. The level of his influence among Democrats is just one more concerning indicator of whether this party can responsibly wield power.