He called it genocide. He swore off AIPAC’s money and voted against aid. The crowd ran him out of the park anyway — because what it wants from him isn’t a position he can change. It’s a person he can’t stop being.

Last week, Scott Wiener — California state senator, the front-runner to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress, openly gay, one of the most prominent champions of transgender rights in the country — walked into Dolores Park on his way to a Pride Shabbat service led by a trans rabbi. He never made it. A man with a phone, half a dozen people at his back, surrounded him and ran him out of San Francisco’s annual Trans March. It was the first one he had skipped since the march began in 2004.

You can watch it; about nine million people already have. “You do not belong here anymore, Scott,” the man shouts. “I want to support someone who’s so positive on trans rights, but you’re a piece of s*** on Gaza.” Behind him a chant starts up: F*** you and your Zionist handlers. F*** you and your Israeli handlers. Another voice: “You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel.” And then, from a crowd that has cast itself as the good guys, the line that needs no translation in any decade: Everybody hates you. Everybody hates you. Everybody f***ing hates you.

He Did Everything They Asked

What makes the clip worth more than a wince is the backstory. Wiener is not a man who held the line on Israel and got punished for it. He is a man who handed the activists every concession they asked for, one after another, and got marched out of the park regardless.

Walk the receipts. Wiener has gone after Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for years, well before October 7. Running for Congress, he moved left and pledged to vote against US military aid to Israel. For a while, he held a single line: at a primary debate in January, he wouldn’t call the war a genocide, saying the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians were “an absolute moral stain,” but that the word itself had been twisted and was traumatic for Jews to hear. Then the pressure arrived — his own communications director came out publicly for the label — and he caved. He released a video: “The Israeli government has tried to destroy Gaza and to push Palestinians out, and that qualifies as genocide.”

California’s Jewish organizations rebuked him, and he stepped down as co-chair of the state........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)