{Originally posted to the author’s website, The Lid}
During the campaign, and again since the Tuesday’s press conference about Charlottesville, there have been claims that President Trump is an anti-Semite. All over the MSM there are claims (usually made by Gentiles) that Trump made a moral equivalence between the alt-Right haters, and the alt-left ones. They also claim that Jews supporting Trump are inching away from the POTUS, because he’s proven his hatred of the Jewish people. This morning Congressman Nadler (D-NY) submitted a bill that between all the “Whereases,” he accused the president of siding with the neo-nazis and “surrounding himself with, and cultivated the influence of, senior advisors and spokespeople who have long histories of promoting white nationalist, alt-Right, racist and anti-Semitic principles and policies within the country.” Sorry folks but those claims are what we call in the “mamma loshen” (mother tongue/Yiddish) “dreck” (which means trash or sh*t, take your pick).
Just as important is the fact that the MSM and Democrats, who are projecting the opinion that President Trump has a problem with the Jews, said nothing when President Obama said or did things which can be interpreted as anti-Semitic, and shy away from giving Obama and other people who deserve such labels like Al Sharpton, Keith Ellison, Linda Sarsour and the leaders of the “women’s march,” their appropriate Anti-Semitic titles. It’s almost if someone wandered into an ancient cave and discovered a term they never knew existed, and the term was found in an envelope labeled, do not use unless it damages Donald Trump. Can’t you hear anti-Trump newscasters like Shepard Smith exclaiming, “Wow, Anti-Semitism…Who’d have thought it!”
I am a Jew who is active in Jewish causes and has personally had to fight Antisemitism, especially since I started writing and self-identified as a conservative. Recognizing the dangers of Antisemitism and the growing problems with anti-Jewish bigotry in the world, IMHO one of the worst things someone can do is make false charges of Antisemitism. Not only does it dilute the effects of real charges of Antisemitism, but it goes against Jewish law dictating how people should talk to each other.
Throughout the campaign Trump faced false charges of Antisemitism:
There was the infamous Jewish Star tweet that Trump thought was a sheriff’s badge picture. The picture was insensitive because somebody in the campaign should have been smart enough to know it would cause problems. But the badge was not in the least anti-Semitic (unless of course, one is a liberal). If this Trump picture is anti-Semitic, so is every member of the Sheriff’s department in Suffolk County where I live, whose badges are the same shape (and I can assure you they aren’t). Taos New Mexico and San Francisco sheriffs use the exact same shape to name a few.
There were cases of Antisemitism by some of Trump’s alt-right supporters, I faced them as well as others, but not one of those attacks were condoned by the candidate.
Two weeks before the election Peter Drier of the Huffington Post made his false and ridiculous charges of anti-Semitism. Dreier claimed:
Trump’s most recent anti-Semitic remarks were in a speech, and a tweet, last week that included this line: “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors.” He didn’t need to use the word “Jew.” This imagery of a global banking cabal will be familiar to anyone who has read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Semitic forgery that has fueled anti-Jewish violence for over a century. These are well-known anti-Semitic code words. The speech — typical of Trump’s paranoid conspiracy theories — was designed to fire up Trump’s white nationalist, anti-Semitic base
PUULEESE! So It was OK when Bernie Sanders campaigned on the basis that Hillary was beholden to the big banks? Guess what? The reason Trump didn’t use the word “Jew” was that he wasn’t talking about Jews. Perhaps he was thinking about Occupy Wall Street which used the anti-Semitic imagery that Dreier referred to. That same Occupy Wall Street was supported by President Obama and other prominent Democrats.
And no one during the campaign mention all the anti-Semites who support Clinton, people like Al Sharpton who led TWO anti-Semitic pogroms in NYC, or the Center for American Progress which was labeled anti-Semitic by the respected Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Some said that when Jews were left off the press release for Holocaust Memorial day, it was a display of Trump’s Antisemitism. As I wrote at the time, leaving out Jews was insensitive and ignorant, but it wasn’t anti-Semitic.
Putting aside for a moment, that for Trump to be an anti-Semite he would have to hate his daughter Ivanka who is a Shabbos-observant Jew, as is his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and their three children. The president’s son Eric’s wife, Lara Yunaskav, is Jewish according to Jewish law (because her mom is Jewish), and when the child, she is carrying is born, it will be considered Jewish also.
Trump has been very generous in donating to Jewish Organizations, and that’s how he earned the honor of being grand marshal of the Israel Day parade. In Jewish charities, typically the highest honors go to the biggest donors.
Trump counts Jews among his circle of friends, including Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (something that was very obvious when he visited Israel in May) and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
What’s really amazing is the fact that the MSM makes-up charges of Antisemitism against President Trump — but ignored eight years of very real anti-Semitic acts by his predecessor, Barack Obama.
Beginning with his first campaign for president, Obama surrounded himself with anti-Semites like General Merrel McPeak, 2008 Obama for President Co-Chair who had an impressive resume of blaming our foreign policy on the “Jewish Lobby.” Perhaps the best example of McPeak’s anti-Semitism was when he was asked during an interview why there isn’t peace in the Middle East and he said, “New York City. Miami. We have a large vote — vote, here in favor of Israel. And no politician wants to run against it.” (in other words, those pesky Jews, who control America’s policy on the Middle East).
One of his first presidential appointments was the anti-Semitic Chas Freeman who blamed his resignation on the evil Israel lobby (a nicer way of saying Jewish lobby). Actually, Chas, it was a lot less than an evil Israel lobby, much of it was the work of a few Jewish bloggers — one of whom was named The Lid.
Obama’s first presidential Medal of Freedom honorees were both Jew-haters, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson. The nicest thing Bishop Desmond Tutu ever said about Jews was “People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful.” He also once said, that “the Jews thought they had a monopoly on God.”
Tutu’s co-honoree Mary Robinson presided over the “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” that turned into a non-stop hate-fest against Jews and Israel. The conference was so anti-Semitic that Colin Powell, the Secretary of State at the time, walked out.
During his presidency, Obama has allied himself with Al Sharpton who started the anti-Semitic pogrom in Crown Heights and incited the anti-Semitic fire bombing of Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem. He sent his closest adviser, Valerie Jarrett, to keynote an anti-Semitic ISNA conference whose discussions included: how key Obama aides are “Israeli,” proving Jews “have control of the world,” or how the Holocaust is a punishment of Jews for being “serially disobedient to Allah.”
Remember Occupy Wall Street? They talked about how “Jewish bankers” were destroying the world. Of the anti-Semitic Occupy Wall Street movement the President said, “We are on their side.”
Radical Islamists attacked the Kosher supermarket Hyper-Cacher (French for Super Kosher) in Paris on a Friday afternoon. The attack happened just before the Jewish Sabbath when they knew it would be crowded with Jews. Obama first insisted it was a random act and not an anti-Semitic act. And when the world leaders came together to march in Paris as a protest against the Charlie Hebdo shooting and the anti-Semitic Hyper-Cacher attack Obama was conspicuous in his absence.
President Obama’s July 31, 2015, phone call, organized by the anti-Israel group J Street and other progressive Jewish groups, also exposed Obama’s feeling about Jews.
During the 20-minute phone call Obama said over and over that opponent of the Iran deal come from the same “array of forces that got us into the Iraq war,” he said a “bunch of billionaires who happily finance super PACs” are “putting the squeeze on members of Congress.”
The message was clear to the Jewish participants, William Daroff Senior Vice President for Public Policy and Director of the Washington office of The Jewish Federations of North America tweeted during the meeting “Jews are leading effort to kill #Irandeal. ‘Same people opposing the deal led us into Iraq war,’” and followed with “Canard: Jews got us into Iraq War.” During the call, Lee Rosenberg of AIPAC questioned the President’s statement comparing people who object to the Iran deal with those who supported the invasion of Iraq. He pointed out that many anti-Semites falsely claim the Jews pushed Bush into invading Iraq. Obama explained that Netanyahu supported the Iraq invasion (true). But Bibi wasn’t the premier at the time — he was a private citizen.
The prime minister, Ariel Sharon, strongly urged Bush not to invade Iraq, arguing correctly that if Saddam were removed, “Iran, a far more dangerous player, will be rid of its principal enemy and free to pursue its ambitions of regional hegemony.”
Of course, that didn’t matter to President Obama, he needed to find a Jewish scapegoat so he used private-citizen Netanyahu who was strongly for the war. Also for the war was his V.P. Joe Biden, both of his secretaries of state Kerry and Clinton, and his biggest ally in the Senate, Minority Leader Harry Reid, all of whom voted for the invasion of Iraq in Congress.
During his last month as president, Obama’s State Department condemned Israel for allowing people to build houses on land on the western side of the Jordan River. The land was legally purchased in 2009 by Dr. Irving and Cherna Moskowitz from a US Presbyterian Church. There were no complaints when the Presbyterian Church owned it. Team Obama wasn’t objecting to the fact that houses were being built on that land. If the homes were intended for Christian or Muslim families there would have been no issue. As it is was with so many other cases during the Obama administration, the objection was based on the fact that Jews were going to live in those buildings.
NOT ONCE! Not once in all those (and other) cases where Obama and his team seemed to step over the line into anti-Semitism territory were there questions from the media asking Obama if he had an issue with Jews. Not once did any of the mainstream media point out Obama’s possible anti-Semitism (and there are many more examples not pointed out here).
The media was all over that Trump issued picture of Hillary with Sheriff’s badges, but they were awfully quiet when she said Orthodox Jews were like the religious fanatics in Iran because the IDF allowed Orthodox Soldiers to leave a concert when women were singing. They were all over every unsubstantiated claim of a Trump bias, but ignored the report that came out during the 2016 campaign that when Bubba lost the 1974 election for the US House of Representatives from Arkansas, she turned to her then boyfriend’s campaign manager Paul Fray and called him a ”f**king Jew b*stard.” Frey not only reported the incident but took a lie detector test to prove he wasn’t lying. Even if they didn’t want to report the incident as reported by the Guardian, why didn’t they try to investigate the story to see if it was true? It would have been huge. But of course, it wouldn’t have hurt Trump.
In his book American Evita on page 50, Christopher Anderson writes relates a 1973 anti-Semitic incident where Hillary Clinton refused to enter a home because it had a menorah on its door. Understand, the guy didn’t have an Israeli flag on his door but a symbol of his Jewishness. It was okay to look into Trump’s background and get second-hand reports about bigotry…but they would never investigate Hillary.
When the media talks about Al Sharpton they call him a civil rights leader, rather than an anti-Semitic bigot. They never mentioned that the leaders of the “Day Without Woman” were anti-Semites. They didn’t care about anti-Semitism.
But because he pointed out that there were bad people on both sides of the Charlottesville violence, Donald Trump, a man with Jewish grandchildren, Jewish friends, and a man who is a huge (or yuge) donor to Jewish causes is accused of Antisemitism despite the fact that he has never done anything anti-Semitic.
Just more proof of the bias of mainstream media. They don’t give a rat’s arse about anti-Semitism–even violent attacks on Jews are ignored. To the MSM Jewish blood is cheap and threats against Jews do not matter…unless of course, they can help their fake narrative that President and his administration are bigots.