Sunday, March 20, 2016

Donald Trump and the Jews

I just noticed a paragraph in Peter Wehner's latest opinion article for the New York Times, "The Man the Founders Feared":
Max Boot, a Republican Trump critic who was a foreign policy adviser to Marco Rubio’s campaign, says that he has never experienced as much anti-Semitism as he has since the start of the Trump campaign. There are no filters anymore, no restraints, no cultural guardrails. Now, under the sway of Trumpism, what was once considered shameful asserts itself openly. As we contemplate this, it is worth recalling that the membrane separating what the Scottish novelist John Buchan called “the graces of civilization” from ”the rawness of barbarism” is thinner and more fragile than we sometimes imagine.
Boot considers Trump to be a "fascist demagogue." He considers Trump to be a direct descendant of Charles Lindbergh, Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, and Pat Buchanan. (My observation:) And let's remember - Charles Lindbergh and Pat Buchanan were both open antisemites. Boot said in an interview, "His impulses are derived from the same well that people like the America First Committee and Joe McCarthy tapped into, which is essentially a form of isolationism, xenophobia, and racism." He makes the following excellent point:
And all of those movements had internal enemies that they focused on. The America First movement, along with the Nazis, tended to see the Jews as the internal enemy. McCarthy tended to see this communist fifth column as the enemy. George Wallace saw African Americans and civil rights as the internal enemy. And Trump identifies Mexicans and Muslims as the internal enemy.
In a column at USAToday, Boot wrote:
Trump’s most extreme supporters go even further than their candidate. Just in the past few days on Twitter I’ve been called on Twitter “a traitor to america” and told that “Jews want Whites to think… Ethnic identity’s a vice.” It’s not hard to see why bigots are drawn to Trump: He says what they think. The mystery is why more ordinary, decent Americans are not appalled by Trump’s loathsome statements.
Here's one of the Twitter posts that Boot is talking about:
And another, addressed to Yair Rosenberg:
Here's another disgusting one:
Sasha Abramsky wrote in Haaretz:
When Trump is criticized, his supporters whip up a storm of vitriol in cyberspace. Essayists like Bethany Mandel, who has been tracking Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric since the summer, have been ruthlessly attacked, often with deeply anti-Semitic language. 
“Trump’s round-them-up-and-deport-them mindset, along with his aspersions cast on Mexican immigrants, is disturbingly similar to the slurs historically hurled at Jews and other newcomers. Jews were labeled con artists and thieves; Mexicans are, according to Trump, “rapists” and violent criminals,” Mandel wrote in the Forward in August.  
She has been labeled a “slimy Jewess,” and has been told she deserves the oven. Mandel just announced she was buying a gun for protection in the wake of the abuse that she fears might become physical threats 
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan recently praised Trump for refusing to accept money from Jewish donors. The Ku Klux Klan has wholeheartedly endorsed the man. The neo-Nazi Daily Sturmer website has enthused about him.
Some responses to Max Boot's statement on Twitter:



On top of the open antisemitism from some of Trump's followers, we also find that a pastor who introduced one of his speeches called for Bernie Sanders to convert to Christianity:

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