The real anti-Semites
It takes chutzpah for President Donald Trump to suddenly posture as defender of the Jews and scourge of anti-Semites. This is the man who has promoted ethnic hatred more than any U.S. political leader in modern times. The man who said there were good people on both sides at the Unite the Right rally last year in Charlottesville, Virginia. Yet, only one side displayed Nazi symbols, only one side chanted “the Jews shall not replace us,” and only one side committed murder.
Anti-Semitism flows from a climate of racial hatred as naturally as water flows downhill. The man who committed mass murder in a Pittsburgh synagogue says he did it because he blamed the Jews for the recent surge in immigration from Central America. What is the connection?
Looking for a logic in anti-Semitism is a fool’s errand. The connection in the white-supremacist murderer’s mind is that a Jewish organization (with no ties with the synagogue attack) that has been helping refugees for a century, Jews and non-Jews alike, somehow was involved in the “caravans” which at the time of the killings were the main leitmotif in Trump’s anti-immigrant vitriol. There was also, at the time, a lie spreading within neo-Nazi and other anti-Semitic circles that the caravans were being financed by George Soros, a liberal Jewish billionaire and a champion of democracy and human rights in Eastern Europe. Soros had been the recipient of a bomb sent by a pro-Trump fanatic.
None of it was true, of course, but how convenient. In the atmosphere of lies and demonization of immigrants, it was predictable that a racist criminal would eventually zero in on the Jews as the source of all the troubles. It was not for nothing that Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist, warned Stephen Ross, the billionaire owner of the Miami Dolphins and a Jew, that he was playing with fire by holding a fundraiser for Donald Trump. Krugman wrote that in an environment deliberately charged with racist rhetoric, it would all come back to the Jews, the usual suspects, the perfect scapegoats in any crisis, from an epidemic like the Black Plague to an immigration “emergency.”
And, so, it had, and Pittsburgh was not the end of it. Anti-Semitic acts have multiplied, more murders of Jews have taken place since Pittsburgh, and just last week another Jew hater with a heavy arsenal and murder in his heart was prevented from carrying out another killing spree against Jews—by good luck, effective police work, and the grace of God, Allah, Yahweh, or fate.
These crimes were not committed or planned by Muslim female members of Congress with automatic rifles hidden under their hijabs. They were carried out by red-blooded, lily white, “true” Americans who share much of Donald Trump’s white nationalist ideology. These are the real anti-Semites, not Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) or Ilhan Omar, who Donald Trump wants to cast as the face of anti-Semitism in the United States.
These two women are supporters of the Palestinian right to statehood and critics of the Israeli government. But they are not therefore anti-Semitic. I have loathed anti-Semitism ever since high school when I spent an entire semester of study hall reading “Murderers Among Us,” serialized in Look Magazine and written by the formidable Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. But I do not find credible the charges of anti-Semitism against the pair. Their real crime is not anti-Semitism but being fierce and loud resisters against the President’s sadistic policies. Even Benjamin Netanyahu was not taken in and approved a visit to Israel by the two congresswomen. He was dragged kicking and screaming into rescinding that decision by Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, while smearing Tlaib and Omar as anti-Semitic, Donald Trump has failed to use his famous bully pulpit to confront the anti-Semitic murderers among us, in Charlottesville, Pittsburgh and beyond.
The fight against the real anti-Semites is outside his agenda. Those kinds of people generally support Trump. Tlaib and Omar decidedly do not. What better scapegoats could Trump offer his right-wing base brimming with Islamophobia and to deflect Trump’s own damnably feeble response to racist crimes in general and anti-Semitic murders in particular?
Anti-Semitism is too serious a subject to play political games with as Trump is doing. It is too serious a charge to use based on questionable or non-existing evidence. As I write this, news broke that Donald Trump has accused Jews who vote for Democrats of lacking knowledge or being disloyal. Disloyal? Ignorance? Jews? Is this not an anti-Semitic slur?
Surely, it is chutzpah times the velocity of light squared. Vintage Trump. Trump is no Einstein. He is the most ignorant president ever. A man who thinks there were airports in 1776, and that abolitionist Frederick Douglas is alive today and doing a great job.
In contrast to the ignoramus-in-chief, Jews are, on average, among the best-educated people in the United States. To call them ignorant or disloyal just because they disagree with his ideology and his politics is the same vile game he has been playing with the Democratic members of Congress known as the squad. They oppose him and therefore they are, by definition, disloyal to the United States, communists, anti-Semitic or whatever other insult occurs to him. Trump, the stable genius, seems to be ignorant of the fact that the majority of Jews vote Democrat and to paint them all therefore as either ignorant or disloyal is arguably anti-Semitic and as ignorant as it gets.
