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Thanks for doing this interview Bari, and thank you Representative Torres for taking the most bullied and frightening position to have on the left in 2021: Israel is a country that's here to stay.

The past two weeks should terrify every single Jew in America. Here in my liberal, west coast city, Jews were beaten with Palestinian flagpoles for peacefully showing up for the other side. Jews. Beaten. With. Palestinian. Flagpoles. IN ONE OF THE MOST LIBERAL CITIES IN AMERICA. BY WOKE PROGRESSIVES!

Start escorting your older, vulnerable Jewish relatives around if they look obviously Jewish. Buy a concealed carry gun if you don't already have one. The people who staff your local gun ranges and armories are friendly people who want you to know your way around a gun and to exercise your second amendment rights.

I was a Democrat until about one week ago. I don't agree with the path the GOP is currently charting, but my distaste for Donald Trump was blinding me to how dangerous the Left has become. Hoping we can get back to a place where the Ritchie Torres' of the world represent the majority tone of the Democratic Party, but until then I'll put my chips in with the GOP.

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Can you be a Progressive and support Israel? Answer: Only if you're also a Zionist, or at least a empathetic human being who believes that in the aftermath of the Holocaust, when it was clear that a coordinated annihilation of 6 million Jews was methodically perpetrated throughout ALL of Europe and Scandinavia with the sanction of its central governments, and the help of its gentile citizenry, that the remainder of the world's Jewish people deserved a singular homeland, a safe haven from the ever present monster of antisemitism. There are 50 Muslim majority countries, 45 of which deem themselves to be Islamic States, where Jews are NOT welcome to live. After the collective wounds of WWII healed, we Jews just wanted/demanded one country to call our own.

I once read how the Jews of Greece, 43,000 who resided in Salonika, were rounded up and shipped off to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where almost all of them were murdered. Then I looked at a map and realized that you'd have needed the equivalent of a first class travel agency to move these poor souls the 1,000 miles to their life's terminus. Then I started measuring the distance from Paris to Auschwitz, Rome to Auschwitz, Oslo to Auschwitz...and then I studied the national railroad lines that had to have been used, the cities that the cattle cars full of starving, dehydrated Jews had to have crossed through, the rail stations where these death transports had to have stopped to refuel...and it was only then when the statement " We didn't know what was happening " revealed itself to be the great lie of the mid-20th Century.

When I was a boy, attending Hebrew school in the early 60's, a man came to our class with a movie projector and reels of black & white film. These were Allied military footages of the "liberation" of the concentration camps, featuring skeletal, dead Jewish bodies stacked up like cord wood, with empty shoes piled 20 feet high, and the revelation of (then) state-of-the-art ovens large enough to cremate countless Jewish corpses, 24 hours a day. The transport and killing of the Continent's Jews in the early to mid-1940's was elevated to a level of coordinated, concentrated efficiency rarely achieved by the current day European Union. As the last of the Holocaust survivors die, the desperate urge to revise the history of the slaughter, especially by the likes of Poland, my ancestral homeland, is strengthening.

I was invited to travel to Israel after the '67 War as part of a jamboree of Jewish American boys who would play basketball against the Israeli military in various gymnasiums around the country...a public relations stunt to boost morale, and as a means to show us the burnt out husks of Israeli tanks and Jeeps which had yet to be removed from their places of destruction. It was chilling to see men and women not much older then myself patrolling Israeli streets wearing a full compliment of battle gear.

In retrospect, the Jewish people should have been gifted a section of Bavaria, or Poland, or Belarus, or even Vichy France, as their safe haven homeland. But, Israel was the obvious historical choice, which meant that non-Jewish people would have to be displaced...just as in 1992 when Yugoslavian ethnic Serbians were displaced by ethnic Croatians to form the country of Croatia...with the same happening to ethnic Croatians who lived in what's now Serbia. Deconstructing Yugoslavia was supposedly for the greater good, just as displacing the Bedouin tribes of the Mandate for Palestine was determined to be for the greater good by the embarrassed, guilt ridden members of the United Nations.

At the same time that Muslim (Christian, Druze)-Arabs were being pushed out of the borders of modern day Israel, hundreds of thousands of Jewish-Arabs were being expelled from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, UAE, Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Egypt, and Tunisia. The Progressives seem to have forgotten that part of the unfortunate quid pro quo equation of ethnic cleansing which forever effected the "dark skinned" Jews who now make up the majority of modern day Israel...and have no right of return to their ancestral nations. The 80,000 displaced Jews of Egypt have no cheerleading squad of enraged Progressives howling indignantly on social media about the historic injustice of this particular ethnic cleansing.

I'm a bleeding heart American social liberal...and I have nothing in common with today's Democratic Progressives...nothing.

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Mr. Trump had a number of flaws, but I've never understood what the evidence for him being anti-Semitic is supposed to be. Unlike prior administrations he had the courage to move the US embassy from Tell Aviv to Jerusalem. He was much more supportive of Israel & it's security concerns than the Obama administration. Mr. Trump's daughter & son-in-law are Jewish. I think you should have asked Mr. Torres what evidence he had that Mr. Trump is anti-Semitic.

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I have been a liberal Democrat for the past 40 years and very much believed in the big tent. But now that big tent includes all but Jewish people. Today I become a Republican. I just hope more of show this hand so that we can build power within the Republican hallways. I live in midtown Manhattan and have seen things these past few days that are just so frighteningly Nazi, that I’ve now been thinking of how best to defend my family. And we all have to stand up and scream “never again” and fight back when the Palestinian troublemakers want to attack Jews. Never. Freaking. Again.

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I wish he had been willing to speak out against colleagues. That seemed like butt covering because he may need something from them in the future, rather than speaking truth to power. Other than that, good talk.

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To answer the question in the title one should first define the term progressive. This term is always misused when referring to US politics, especially when it comes to describing shallow self-serving, opportunists like AOC and others. It's important to make a distinction between actual progressives, and American "progressives" (I always use the word with quotations when talking about anything US related). Frankly, I use the term pejoratively, to describe someone that I'd, for example, run into at a park, a person wearing some virtue signaling shirt, but who would let their dog off leash despite millions of signs because in the mind of a "progressive" the only person that exists, and the only needs that should to be met in the world are their own. American "progressive" is someone who is almost pathologically self-centered and who sees the world and problems in it only as an opportunity to virtue signal and to promote their own perceived "moral superiority".

One can be a progressive and support Israel, but one should not want to be an American "progressive" because the latter is more of a condition.

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I feel like Bari is where I was 25 years ago. Maybe Torres is in the same position. You identify with a side that is lying about an issue you know and care about. You try to maintain the identification with the movement while separating on this one issue. Then the questions come up, what else are they lying about? Why are they lying? How could they get so it so wrong? And that is when a much more profound political reevaluation begins.

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I keep coming back to several points. I'll bring one of them up here.

In the recently cancelled Palestinian elections, the top 3 factions were one which calls for a holy war against Jews, one which pays people who murder Israeli Jews then calls the murderers holy and one whose leader is in prison for his role in murdering 5 Jews.

Each believes murder is not merely morally acceptable, but some higher calling. That is, as long as you murder people from 1 specific religion.

True progressives reject this. They reject murder and they reject hate crimes. Progressives advocate for voting rights, they advocate for government run health care, they advocate for LGBTQ rights and so on and so on and so on.

Nothing about any of the Palestinian leaders is consistent with any of this. Literally zero.

I find when people show this much hypocrisy, you find their true values. In this case, its back to history's tried and true. Things like scapegoating and using hate to intimidate others. Its pure BS, and even though society should be able to see thru this, it doesn't.

If the USA adopts Palestinians values, or even anything resembling them, we are done as a nation. And progressives wouldn't much care for it either. But hey, they really don't care.

Congressman Torres does see through this and good for him. Good for him.

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I used to love Jill Kargman, until she went off of the deep end during her TDS-induced delirium. She expresses utter surprise that the folks she thought she was simpatico with and were social justice warriors together turned out to be out and out antisemites. I had all of her books, watched her tv shows and when i lived in NYC, i lived her life. It seems that she wasn't paying attention and wasn't terribly smart. She says she supported the Womens March, but she failed to pay attention to who the leaders were and who they amplified. She proudly says that she had Black Lives Matter signs in her window, but paid zero attention once again, to the leaders and the other causes they were espousing. She proudly pronounces that she is SHOCKED about what is going on - as though this information wasn't crystal clear to people like me, who believe in equal rights, rights for everyone but broke with the liberal progressives when we all realized that they didn't believe those equal rights extended to jews or israel. I am still shocked that Jill felt so "in" with her progressive friends that she didn't realize that, to them, she was still just a filthy Jew.

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What this? A courageous thoughtful Democrat who speaks and acts with integrity and principle, who represents the interests of the rank and file working people of his District, and not the woke elite? I thought that was not possible in 2021 . . .

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I don’t agree with a lot of his politics but I could find common ground with this progressive representative and respect his knowledge and opinion

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The Palestinian “leaders” don’t want a solution. Their grift is dependent on continued strife.

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So if he is not willing to speak up/comment on Jihad Squad comments, what does he mean by speaking up exactly?

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I absolutely agree with what he says about Twitter. It amplifies outrage and nullifies nuance

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The more salient question is, why do Jews keep voting for a party that would (or at least a significant and apparently growing number of its constituents would) like to see nothing more than Israel driven into the sea? Modern progressivism is a grotesquerie, liberals and old lefties should feel no allegiance to it.

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First, I admire Congressman Torres' willingness to speak truth to others in power.

However, when we're talking about - as he himself later puts it - out and out anti-Semitic racism, than this little aside he offers Bari is cowardice: "First, I have a rule of never commenting on a lot of the opinions that colleagues expressed publicly for the sake of collegiality."

If your colleagues are expressing neo-Nazi nonsense, you need to comment on it. Publicly and to their faces. You don't want to get in a pissing match via a reporter - okay, I get that.

But these idiots are on Twitter and the floor of Congress. You need to call it for what it is: Racist garbage.

Otherwise your beloved political party is headed to the trash heap of history.

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