Any gardener knows if you don’t tear out weeds root and stem, they’re just going to keep coming back. Most weeds are aggressive, seeming to at times spring up overnight. They crowd out beautiful plants and steal the nutrients away from the rest of your garden, and due to their aggressive nature, there are really no halfway measures with weeds: it's either eradicate them or damage the plants' health.

Unfortunately, some particularly nasty ideologies are taking root in the Democratic Party, but apparently, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and her allies in leadership are afraid to get their hands dirty because of political expediency.

Anti-Semitism is alive and growing inside the Democratic Party and it almost feels like it’s becoming the official policy. in the last several months, Democrats have gone from condemning anti-Semitic statements, to blaming Republicans, to now defending the statements, as House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., did regarding Rep. Rashida Tlaib's newest comments regarding the Holocaust.

ILHAN OMAR DEFENDS RASHIDA TLAIB, SAYS CRITICISM 'DESIGNED' TO 'SILENCE' MUSLIM VOICES

Democrats have a choice: either snuff the anti-Semitism out or let it take them over completely. Allowing anti-Semitism and claiming to be a center-left party cannot both exist at the same time.

As Democratic leaders have taken to defending their members' anti-Semitic comments, it is fascinating to observe the legitimacy being bestowed on such abhorrent views by the “cultured left.” This is a major difference between the right and the left here in America.

Sadly, anti-Semitism is evidenced in both the far left and right, but when it rears its ugly head in the center-right, it is immediately disavowed and crushed.

Currently, this is not the case with the center-left. People espousing such anti-Semitic ideas as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, more commonly referred to as BDS, are not disavowed. Instead, they are tenured and allowed to still be considered respectable.

This anti-Israel mindset has become so prevalent among the left that The New York Times could somehow in the editorial process approve and then print not one, but two anti-Semitic cartoons within days of each other.

How has it come to this? By degrees, as these things inevitably do.

The BDS campaign has been making inroads, primarily on college campuses, for years, convincing college presidents, student governments, and even faculty to boycott and divest from Israel, by canceling speakers, study abroad programs, and even changing the investments in the schools’ endowments. Their plan is to not only boycott products from Israel, but also to harass companies, universities, and individuals in an effort to force divestment from Israeli enterprises, and ultimately impose sanctions on the people of Israel.

This attempt to normalize economic attacks against Israel is bound to accelerate. The goal of those behind this movement is not really a better accommodation for Palestinians or even a two-state solution. No, they’re looking to end, by economic strangulation, the nation of Israel.

This is all happening behind the facade of such claims as “we are merely criticizing the government of Israel” or “we can be anti-Zionist and not be anti-Semitic.”

These arguments are illogical and disingenuous. When you are attempting to end the existence of the only Jewish state in the world -- as BDS does -- you are being anti-Semitic. I know that this is a hard concept to grasp for those who want to debate the difference between "surveillance" and "spying," but shielding oneself behind semantic games doesn't remove the fact of what is true in reality.

The BDS movement has ingrained itself into the hard left, the real grassroots power of the Democratic Party.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., is the de facto face of this “movement” using any opportunity she has to attack Israel and often the Jewish people.

As I have said before, Omar is a liability to her party. Recently she threw a fit during an interview claiming the U.S. was “bullying” Venezuela by sanctioning the despotic, socialist leaders of that nation. Of course, Omar is fine and happy with using even harsher, more wide-ranging strategies against the Israeli people.

Targeting specific, tyrannical socialists in Venezuela who destroyed their nation's economy and have left their people impoverished and going hungry is too much for Omar. She’s more interested in broad attacks against Israel and its people and destroying the only democracy in the Middle East.

Now we see Tlaib attempting to rewrite history in regards to the Holocaust and her claim that the Palestinians helped create a safe haven for the Jewish people in Israel. Either Tlaib is deeply ignorant or she is deeply disingenuous.

The reality of what took place is that the Palestinian leader at the time, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, was a collaborator and ally of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. He wanted nothing to do with Jewish people, and certainly nothing to do with creating a “safe haven” for them.

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Through violence and murder, he did his best to prevent the birth of the nation of Israel. And when Israel did become a state, the response of the grand mufti and the Arab world was to attempt to eradicate the new nation. The grand mufti would have found Tlaib’s comments in great variance to what he actually wanted and did.

It’s hard to not conclude with all of this behavior from elected officials and leftist institutions, and the deafening silence of Pelosi on the matter, that our nation’s leftist elites are somewhat smitten with anti-Semitism. It is at a minimum being tolerated because of political expediency, which should be to the shame of the Democratic Party if Democrats actually had any dignity and decency left.

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