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Can Josh Shapiro's Party Forgive Him for Telling the Truth?
(Wall Street Journal) Ruth R. Wisse - Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro wrote an opinion piece in his college newspaper when he was 20 after the 1993 Oslo accords, which put Yasser Arafat in charge of the Palestinian Authority in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Recalling Neville Chamberlain's proclamation of "peace for our time" after meeting with Hitler in 1938, Shapiro found it "extremely difficult to trust a man with as much blood on his hands as Arafat, who was also on both the Israeli and American lists of international terrorists." Shapiro ended with hope for a peace that can come only when the children of Ishmael agree to coexist with the children of Isaac. When Germans spread fascist antisemitism in the 1920s and '30s, they found no American allies among liberals in the universities, media or government. Today, Islamists have penetrated all these institutions and seek control over the Democratic Party. The military war against Israel is being fought as a political war in America. The ideology that blames Israel as "racist oppressor" has been enthusiastically welcomed by homegrown intersectional coalitions of disaffected minorities, delighted to put a Jewish face on their otherwise abstract targets. People whose forebears found refuge in the U.S. now burn its flag on campuses that welcome them as students. Mr. Shapiro in 1993 felt free to tell the truth about the enemies of freedom, hoping for Middle Eastern reform while valuing Israel as America's own fighting front line. We can only hope that today's college students will, like him, become "advocates of realism" rather than the kind of Islamist appeasers his party is pressing him to become. The writer is professor emerita of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard.