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NY Times Op-Ed, July 19, 2019
Defenders of a Racist President Use Jews as Human Shields
By Michelle Goldberg
Sebastian Gorka, a onetime adviser to Donald Trump, wore a medal from
the Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian group historically aligned with Nazism, to
one of Trump’s inaugural balls. Gorka was reportedly a member of the
group, whose founder, the Hungarian autocrat Miklos Horthy, once said,
“For all my life, I have been an anti-Semite.”
Max Berger is a Jewish social justice activist who has long been deeply
involved in Jewish communal life. He’s the co-founder of IfNotNow, a
group of American Jews devoted to ending Israel’s occupation of
Palestinian territory, and recently joined Elizabeth Warren’s
presidential campaign.
In a tweet this month, one of these men tarred the other as an
anti-Semite. If you’ve been following the increasingly bizarre turn that
American discussion of anti-Semitism has taken, you can probably guess
which one.
That’s right, it was Gorka who called Berger an anti-Semite, for having
once joined in an internet in-joke about a nonexistent group called
“Friends of Hamas.” (Gorka’s tweet appears to have since been deleted.)
It wasn’t the only time this month that Gorka accused a Jew of
Jew-hating; he’s also charged the anti-Trump conservative writer Anne
Applebaum with “standing with the anti-Semites,” demanding that she
explain “how you justify this to the community.”
Such Christian appropriation of the fight against anti-Semitism reached
its grim nadir this week. As Trump’s racist invective against Ilhan Omar
and three other freshman Democratic congresswomen has dominated the
news, the president’s defenders have used Jews as human shields,
pretending that hatred of the quartet is rooted in abhorrence of
anti-Semitism. On Tuesday, an evangelical outfit called Proclaiming
Justice to the Nations accused the Anti-Defamation League — the
Anti-Defamation League! — of siding with anti-Semites after the ADL
called out Trump’s racism. The group even had the audacity to hurl a
Hebrew denunciation — “lashon hara,” or “evil tongue” — at the Jewish
civil rights organization.
Republicans are only a short step away from such shamelessness when they
try to deflect from the president’s racism by accusing his foes of
anti-Semitism. “Montanans are sick and tired of listening to
anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our
ideals,” Senator Steve Daines of Montana tweeted on Monday, proclaiming
his solidarity with Trump.
It’s true that Omar has said things that were freighted with
anti-Semitism, for which she has expressed regret. But it is grotesque
to argue that that excuses racism against her, or that Trump’s taunts
have anything to do with protecting Jews. This is a president who
regularly deploys anti-Semitic tropes and whose ex-wife said that he
slept with a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. When speaking to
American Jews, he’s called Israel “your country” and Benjamin Netanyahu
“your prime minister,” suggesting that in his mind, we don’t fully
belong here any more than Omar does.
When the right presents Trump as an enemy of anti-Semitism, it goes
beyond hypocrisy. Jews have thrived here as they have in few other
places in the world because America at least aspires to be a multiethnic
democracy, not an ethnostate. If Trump succeeds in making citizenship
racialized and contingent, that’s an existential threat to American Jews.
Trump and his accomplices are simultaneously assaulting the political
foundation of Jewish life in America and claiming they’re doing it on
the Jews’ behalf. As the Montana Association of Rabbis wrote in an open
letter to Daines on Wednesday, “We refuse to allow the real threat of
anti-Semitism to be weaponized and exploited by those who themselves
share a large part of the responsibility for the rise of white
nationalist and anti-Semitic violence in this country.”
It’s worth thinking about how we got to a point where anti-Semitism can
be exploited as it has been this week. What we’re seeing is the absurd
but logical endpoint of efforts to conflate anti-Semitism with
anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionism with opposition to Israel’s right-wing
government. Only if these concepts are interchangeable can Jewish
critics of Israel be the perpetrators of anti-Semitism and gentiles who
play footsie with fascism be allies of the Jewish people. Only if these
concepts are the same can an evangelical group claim that Jews are being
anti-Jewish when they protest Trump, because Trump loves Israel.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Zionist group J Street,
puts part of the blame for this rhetorical derangement at the feet of
the American Jewish establishment. Its leaders made an alliance of
convenience with right-wing Christian Zionists, who support the state of
Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and a bulwark of Western
values in the Middle East, but care little about pluralism in the United
States.
The Jewish leaders, said Ben-Ami, “made a deal with the devil. And what
they’ve done is they’ve laid down in bed with white nationalists and
racists and bigots.” Now white nationalists and racists and bigots — and
those politically aligned with them — feel entitled to use their backing
of Israel as an alibi when their leader indulges in racist incitement.
“When they start asking people to go back where they came from, that’s
the first line of attack on the Jewish people over centuries,” said
Ben-Ami. It’s terrifying enough to have a president who says such
things. It’s an almost incalculable insult for Trump and his enablers to
act as if he’s helping the Jews when he adopts the language of the pogrom.
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