Hamas War Splits Democrats’ Pro-Migration Alliance in Maryland

Pro-Palestinian rally and march in Chicago
Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images
Neil Munro

Pro-migration Democrat politicians in Maryland are denouncing their support group for illegal migrants — Casa de Maryland — because it tweeted woke-style support for the Hamas war against Jews.

MarylandMatters reported the split between the Democrats and the Hamas-backing CASA group:

CASA is now under intense scrutiny for its tactics, priorities and governing structure. A statement released Wednesday night by all nine of Montgomery County’s senators … was particularly unforgiving, and came with suggestions that the organization’s state funding could be in jeopardy. That’s a potential existential threat for CASA, which receives about two-thirds of its money from local, state and federal governments.

CASA’s November 6 tweets used woke themes about colonization and relative power to blame Israel for Hamas’s feral massacres, rapes, and burning of Jewish settlements alongside the Gaza Strip. One tweet said:

We support the struggle for decolonization, affirming the rights of indigenous peoples & historically colonized nations to reclaim their land. The Palestinian struggle mirrors our own; w/CASA members fleeing govts & countries wrecked by the damage of US econ & poli. intervention.

The tweet also showed CASA’s director at the pro-Hamas demonstration wearing a blue mask and displaying a clenched fist while surrounded by symbols of hostility to Israel and to Jews.

Source: CASAforall/X

The director, Gustavo Torres, is a college-trained radical Colombian immigrant who arrived in 1991. He issued CASA’s formal statement of support for Hamas, which said:

[W]e deeply acknowledge the interconnectedness of the struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people and Black and brown communities in the United States. Our shared and unwavering commitment is to foster humanity, safety, and lasting peace throughout the entire region while confronting the historical oppression that demands urgent redress.

Since roughly 2010, woke language used by CASA — interconnectedness, decolonization, oppression — has gradually replaced the Democrats’ 1930s solidarity-themed politics about Americans’ rights to decent wages and government support.

Woke Replaces Wages

The older 1930s politics of solidarity had endorsed a meritocratic elite in exchange for prosperity among the middle class and working class.

But that two-way civic bargain was ditched by the federal government in 1990. Instead, it pushed a top-down, anti-solidarity combination of affirmative action in colleges, enforced diversity in culture, Wall Street dominance in trade and business, and a mass inflow of migrant workers, consumers, and renters.

Over the next 30 years, that pro-libertarian switch simultaneously inflated Wall Street and fractured ordinary people’s wealth and communities. It also shrank the meritocratic elite’s willingness to support ordinary Americans — or the “irredeemable … deplorables” in Hillary Clinton’s language.

In 2016, the public tried to revive the old bargain by electing real-estate developer Donald Trump in place of elite champion Clinton. But that traditionalist revival has been blocked — so far — by massive, quasi-legal, and emotional resistance from the post-1990s meritocratic elites.

In 2023, the elite’s continued refusal to bargain with civic-minded voters has revived populist right-wing support for Trump.

On the left side of politics, millions of young, left-leaning people hate Trump and his populist movement. Yet they cannot get decent wages, buy homes, get married, or enjoy the middle-class prosperity that they glimpsed in their childhood.

Many of those alienated left-wing activists blame the meritocratic establishment for their failing circumstances. Now, the Hamas war has suddenly created a shared cause and common language for left-wing activists and foreign students in politics, sexual politics, minorities, racial identity groups, colleges, and the pro-migration movements.

Source: CASAforall/X

That outburst has surprised many comfortable progressives who expected young people, college students, migrants, and racial minorities to compliantly accept their meritocratic leadership.

The anti-meritocratic outburst has also shocked many Democrat-affiliated professionals and business leaders because antisemitic chants often accompany the anti-meritocratic rhetoric amid the wild campaign by Hamas to kill any Jews it can reach.

The New York Times reported on November 17:

Representative Jamaal Bowman, whose [New York] district encompasses several affluent Westchester County suburbs as well as a small part of the Bronx, last week planned a “healing breakfast” with Jewish constituents pained by his pro-Palestinian politics … now, with the conflict in the Middle East inflaming American politics, he seemed likely to face his own primary challenge in June, one that will test the coalition between liberal Jews and people of color that is key to the progressive movement both in his district and in the country more broadly.

….

“People like me are not being given much to work with when we go to some of our beleaguered, anxious and frightened Jewish friends, and they are saying that the left is so infested with antisemitism that they can no longer be part of it,” said Lisa Genn, a local progressive activist who is part of a group called Jews for Jamaal.

“There are signs that the party is fracturing over Israel,” the New York Times wrote:

According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, about three-quarters of Democrats want a cease-fire, but few in the Democratic establishment share their views. Last week, in a rare gesture of defiance, more than 100 congressional staffers walked out to demand that their bosses back a cease-fire. More than 500 alumni of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and Democratic Party staff members have signed a letter imploring Biden to call for a cease-fire, saying, “If you fail to act swiftly, your legacy will be complicity in the face of genocide.”

CASA’s Defection

CASA’s staffers were part of the young progressives’ drift into the woke movement.

One CASA tweet showed a Spanish-language placard saying, “Your Fight is My Fight.”

Source: CASAforall/X

As a group, CASA has grown by balancing its relationships with ordinary illegal migrants, other advocacy groups, Democrat legislators, progressive donors, and the top corporate groups that fund much pro-migration political activity.

For example, CASA has worked closely with Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us migration advocacy group for Wall Street investors. In 2021, FWD.us touted CASA’s membership in the “We Are Home” campaign for more migration:

For decades, immigrant communities have upheld American society, feeding our families, caring for our children, building our homes. Well overdue is the dignity and respect that our communities are owed for doing all of the work – with none of the recognition,” said Gustavo Torres, CASA Executive Director.

It has also closely allied with Maryland’s Democrat establishment, which wants to pull more migrants into the state’s economy and community. A November 14 letter by 19 Democrat politicians in the legislature said:

CASA’s primary mission is to provide services to immigrant communities in this country and to help address their struggles in obtaining housing, healthcare, financial services, and more. Many of us have worked closely with CASA in their advocacy for services and we wholeheartedly support its mission of making Maryland a welcoming state for immigrants … The struggles of being a new immigrant to this country are real and personal to us. That is why have each worked so closely with CSASA over the years.

The hard-earned political support has delivered much government funding and subsidies to CASA, including a favorable lease of a government building.

But CASA also echoes the concerns of the migrants as they service the county’s prosperous — and sometimes condescending — employers and upper-middle-class population. CASA’s website says:

CASA has come a long way from the church basement it started in. CASA was established by activists opposing U.S. interference in Latin America and the funding of military and paramilitary assaults on the communities of Central America. As the US continued to invest in the destabilization of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador in particular, refugees began flooding into the DC region escaping torture and death. Since those humble beginnings, CASA has grown, lifted by waves of activism led by day laborers and domestic workers, students and parents, co-conspirators for justice in labor, faith, and civil rights organizations.

So when slammed by its Democrat allies for apparently backing Hamas, CASA did not apologize. Instead, it zig-zagged:

“It’s a different organization than it was 15 or 20 years ago,” griped Andrew Friedson, one of several Jewish members of the Montgomery County Council. “People are grappling with that and I think it’s bigger than the moment,” he told MarylandMatters.org for a November 10 article.

But CASA’s anticolonialism language was invited into the United States by U.S. immigration laws.

In 2002, Torres was profiled in the Washington Post and described his 1991 arrival in the United States:

Torres said he believes that wars in Central America have been nurtured by the U.S. government investing money in conflicts rather than the economy. In Maryland, he said, he wants to use the system to level the playing field for immigrants who fled their countries only to find inequities in the United States.

“This is my passion – always,” he told the Post.

In mid-November, the Post ignored the state-wide scandal about CASA’s support for Hamas. CASA did not respond to emails from Breitbart News.

The Response to CASA

The elite split with CASA is exacerbated because many of the Democrat politicians in the district and state are part of the Jewish community. They valued CASA because of its ability to help migrants settle in Maryland but were shocked by its support for Hamas.

“The recent statement by the immigrant rights group CASA regarding the Israeli and Palestinian conflict has made an already emotional and horrific situation in our community worse,” said a November 7 statement from the two Latino members of the nine-member council:

CASA is an organization that we deeply respect and have both supported and worked with for decades to advance social justice and build bridges in our community. That’s why we denounce the statement and are so hurt by their recent divisive and ill-informed comments and actions.

The two Latino council members are Gabe Albornoz and Natali Fani-González.

Nineteen Jewish members of the Maryland General Assembly released a letter, saying, “We were deeply disappointed and hurt by the recent social media posts of CASA de Maryland … They displayed a profound misunderstanding of Middle East history, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and antisemitism.”

“I don’t think this can be forgiven. There’s no apology that’s sufficient,” said State Sen. Cheryl Kagan (D-Montgomery).

The Hamas attack “was a systematic slaughter of Jews,” Friedson said in a November 6 statement posted by MontgomeryPerspective.com, adding, “In the past, a pogrom of this magnitude would have likely begun an inevitable genocide of Jews. That’s why it has shaken virtually all of us to our core, regardless of religious observance, affiliation, or political views.”

CASA is also losing large charitable donations. For example, a donor group wrote to Torres at CASA, saying it would cut off donations. “As executive director, your decision to align CASA with the objective of those who promote the murder of the Jewish people, and the eradication of the State of Israel, is indefensible.”

Outside Maryland, a growing number of Democrats and their supporters are stepping back from their support for the diversity and migration policies that have helped to fuel antisemitism.

Jewish groups should unite against the establishment’s “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” woke policies that wreck the American ideals of merit, science, and debate, wrote Bari Weiss, a journalist who quit the New York Times because of woke policies.

In October, a poll for the New York Times showed that a majority of Jews in the state consider migration to be more of a burden than a benefit.

After the attack, Henry Kissinger told a reporter, “It was a grave mistake [for Europe] to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion and concepts, because it creates a pressure group inside each country.”

Former President Donald Trump — and his top aide, Stephen Miller — also connected the dots between migration and antisemitism. “The same people that attacked Israel are coming into our country, and there are a lot of them,” Trump told the annual meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition in October. “You know where they’re coming in from also … all over the Middle East.”

Still, there is no evidence that Democrats in Maryland are willing to roll back CASA’s woke project to import more migrants into the county’s jobs, schools, homes, and voter rolls.

“CASA is a notable provider of services that no one, at least among Democratic elected officials, wants to discontinue,”  MontgomeryPerspective.com wrote on November 14.

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