OPINION:
Is there a connection between Democrats’ growing animosity toward Israel and their rejection of God?
Back in the day, Democrats were the party of pious immigrants, including Irish and Italian Catholics and blue-collar workers who filled the pews on Sunday mornings when Republicans were off playing golf.
Democrats were once the backbone of U.S. support for Israel. President Truman was the first to recognize the modern state of Israel in 1948. President Kennedy had nothing but praise for the Jewish state.
However, this is no longer your father’s Democratic Party.
On July 16, a slim majority of Democrats in the House voted to cut off all aid to Israel, humanitarian and military. These included former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, and the second-ranking Democrat in House leadership, Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts.
Anti-Zionism has come to define the Democratic Party even more than support for abortion and hysteria over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Democrats are competing to see who can take the most deranged position on Israel. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani ran on arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the next time the Jewish leader visited the Big Apple — only to discover that he lacked the authority.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, accuses Israel of genocide. Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate for the Michigan Democratic nomination for Senate, says he does not know whether Israel has a right to exist.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, who recently won the Democratic nomination for Congress in a New York district by defeating the head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, attended a pro-Palestinian rally the day after Hamas’ 2023 massacre of 1,200 Israelis. Ms. Chevalier is a convert to Islam.
What about the God of Israel?
At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, delegates booed putting God back into their party’s platform.
The platform of the 2008 convention acknowledged Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and made an innocuous reference to God in the form of a call to help individuals “reach their God-given potential” — not exactly the stuff of the Rev. Franklin Graham.
Initially, both positions were removed from the 2012 platform. They were put back in at the insistence of President Obama, who thought it might hurt his chances of reelection.
Today, Democrats have nothing but contempt for traditional religion.
James Talarico, the Texas Democratic nominee for Senate, slams public school displays of the Ten Commandments, says God is nonbinary and calls himself a Christian who “hates Christianity.”
President Biden, who claims to be a Catholic, designated Easter Sunday 2024 as “Transgender Day of Visibility.” Was this a calculated insult to Christians, or did cognitive-decline Joe just forget the date of Christianity’s most important holiday?
In 2025, every Democrat in the House of Representatives save one voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would have required physicians to render life-giving care to babies who survived abortion. Let us be clear: They did not vote for abortion. They voted for infanticide.
In 2023, the FBI’s Virginia office put out a memo, since withdrawn, warning of the danger posed by those it designated “radical traditional Catholics” — a group that, according to the memo, includes White supremacists.
If something is not done soon, they may force us to attend Latin Masses at gunpoint.
The latest obscene Democratic gesture to people of faith is the Equality Act, the so-called transgender bill of rights. It would force people of faith to violate their deeply held beliefs on gender by allowing the mutilation of minors and accepting men in women’s sports and spaces.
Democrats are offended by the idea of a God whose commandments disallow their ideology, including abortion on demand, the notion that one can choose a gender and taxpayer-funded depravity.
Democrats believe that rights come from the omnipotent state, not what they consider a mythical supreme being. Forget that “endowed by their Creator” stuff in the Declaration of Independence.
By eliminating Israel, Democrats hope to kill the idea of the God of Israel.
Israel is a sign of God’s presence in the world. How else can you explain the reemergence of a nation after its people spent almost 2,000 years in exile — in a region that could not be more hostile to them? How else to explain a nation that transformed a wasteland, survived eight wars and ended up with one of the strongest armies in the world?
It cannot all be a coincidence.
Being on the wrong side of history is one thing, but being on the wrong side of heaven is something else entirely.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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