Gary Willig is a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff
A Rubicon was crossed over the weekend when a Jewish politician openly called for Jews to sacrifice their own safety and security in order to support antisemites for the supposed “greater good."
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel called on Jewish Democrats to do just that, to put the lives of their children at risk to support Abdul El-Sayed, and in a bizarre appeal to Jewish history, cited the experience of Queen Esther to justify her support for her own community’s suicide.
“It is perhaps up to us now to follow in [Esther’s] path and sacrifice the comfort, safety and security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity," Nessel said. “What good is defending the historic homeland of our ancestors and demanding that candidates acknowledge its right to exist if the planet upon which it rests is no longer inhabitable?"
Because apparently electing El-Sayed will somehow lower global temperatures, lower sea levels, and save the polar bears. Who cares if Jewish children have to be blown up in the process?
What is perhaps the most remarkable thing is how completely wrong Nessel gets the story of Queen Esther, who could have acted like Nessel and fellow Jewish Democrat Chuck Schumer and done nothing as antisemites took over the nation and made Jew-hunting into a sport, but ultimately chose to risk her life for the sake of her people. She confronted the antisemites of her time, led by Haman, and we celebrate the holiday of Purim 2,500 years later because Esther prevented a genocide from being committed against the Jews of Persia.
What Nessel is proposing is the exact opposite. It is “Jews for Haman." It is that Jews support a man who refuses to support Iron Dome’s ability to save lives, who refuses to separate himself from antisemitic terror supporters like Hasan Piker, and who makes excuses for terrorists who try to blow up Jewish children at a Michigan synagogue and preschool because “hurt people hurt people."
Nessel knows better. She herself was forced to skip the Democratic Party’s Michigan convention because of the antisemitic abuse she knew she would have been subject to. But she has decided that sucking up to the Jew haters, the exact opposite of what Esther did, is the way to go.
This “Jews for Haman" mentality, and its consequences, was perfectly encapsulated by the abuse former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander received on Saturday from the anti-Israel mob he has given his full support to. In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Lander admitted that the current campaign against AIPAC relies on antisemitic tropes, but knowing the bigotry behind the cause he was supporting, he insisted that he “had to" support this bigotry against his own people.
Lander did everything “right." He supported Zohran Mamdani, a man who has done everything he can to make Jews as unsafe as possible in his city, and has taken the side of the genocidal Hamas terrorist organization over its would-be Israeli victims, deciding that Jewish survival in the face of attempted genocide is in fact genocide. And even this is not enough for the mob he courts, which continues to shout obscenities at him and call for his death, because there is no appeasing Haman when Haman seeks to murder all Jews, down to the last child.
The choice the “Jews for Haman" like Nessel and Lander present is a false binary. Not a single polar bear will be saved just because El Sayed sits in the Senate for 6 years. It isn’t hard to predict that he will spend more time worrying about “Zionists," meaning Jews, and trying to empower those who seek to kill them than he will fighting global warming. If the Jews of Michigan listen to the insane and suicidal advice of Nessel, they will be sacrificing the safety and security of their children for nothing. No one benefits but Jew-killers when Haman achieves power.
Collective suicide is not a Jewish value, especially suicide for vague promises of fighting climate change that won’t accomplish a single thing. The Jewish people are cursed to have “leaders" like Dana Nessel and Brad Lander in politics, cowards who throw their own people to the wolves for scraps, who lack the courage to stand up to true evil and who cheer as evil triumphs and good people are attacked for the ethnicity of their birth. They bring shame not only to the Jewish people, but to America as a whole.
American Jews must reject the “Jews for Haman," because despite what Dana Nessel claims, a world in which Jewish children are safer is a world in which all are safer, and not the other way around.