Chuck Schumer and his daughter found themselves on the receiving end of pro-Hamas extremism on Friday evening. While the two ate dinner for Shabbat, "protesters" showed up at the apartment building shouting for a "ceasefire" and accusing Schumer of killing children.
The scene was a familiar one, with crazed Hamas supporters spending the months after the October 7th attack in Israel harassing people and shutting down infrastructure. All in the name of blood-thirsty terrorists who murdered babies, raped women, and beheaded people on camera because they are just so darn "oppressed."
My feelings about this specific situation involving Schumer are complicated. On the one hand, these spoiled children cosplaying as concerned revolutionaries are disgusting. What kind of deranged psychos picket the apartment of a Jewish woman, screaming for a ceasefire with genocidal lunatics, just because her father is a senator? There's nothing right and good about that, and the protesters themselves should be maligned and condemned.
On the other hand, Chuck Schumer wanted this. He has spent years excusing antisemitism in his own party, refusing to call out bigots like Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar. In lieu of that, he's blamed all the world's ills on nebulous, nearly non-existent "right-wing extremists" and "white supremacy."
When you feed the alligator, I'm not sure you deserve much sympathy when it bites your arm off. Schumer had a chance before October 7th to stand up for what was right and to speak the truth to the extremists in his midst. Instead, he coddled them and even promoted them, thinking he could hold the coalition together. Well, he can't. The pro-Hamas contingent was never going to give him a pass just because he's a man of the far left.
His chickens have come home to roost, and while I'm not supportive of those who went after his daughter's apartment, I understand why this stuff is happening. Schumer made his bed, and if he'd like to get out of it, he's going to need to say far more than the few meager, qualified denunciations of antisemitism on the left that he's given so far.