On July 16, 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives disgraced itself, and Donald Trump became America’s first “Jewish president.”
Both occurred when every Democrat in the House voted to declare the president a racist – with zero cause. Their flimsy excuse was a series of tweets Trump had addressed to Progressive Democrat congresswomen – hardly a racial descriptor – who had defamed American enforcement agents, spread Holocaust denial, and proudly marketed in vile anti-Semitic tropes.
The specific offense was supposedly the suggestion that these congresswomen “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” and then “come back and show us how it is done.” Entirely lost in the faux outrage was that all of the congresswomen in question represent relatively poor, high crime districts.
The Democrats simply presumed that as members of ethnic minorities, these congresswomen qualify – not as “Americans” – but as “others,” ripe to be stripped of their citizenship and sent back to some other country. That Democrat presumption, however, represents little more than projection.
Trump has a long history of sparring with individuals of all races whose words or actions – as individuals – offended his sensibilities. Anyone possessing even a cursory understanding of racism knows that racists blame all members of a group for attributes they associate with that group. Blaming individuals for their behavior is not racist – no matter who those individuals might be.
Far from tweeting anything racist, the President called out four racist progressive House Democrats:
* Ilhan Omar has repeatedly raised the specter of Jewish dual loyalty, Jewish control, and the corrupting influence of Jewish money – explicit attempts to hold the Jewish collective culpable for these defamatory stereotypes.
* Rashida Tlaib has positioned herself as America’s foremost, and most powerful, advocate for BDS – a movement that nearly every Jewish organization across the political spectrum regards as anti-Semitic.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has engaged in Holocaust denial and embraced the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn – the man who turned Britain’s Labour Party into the most anti-Semitic major Western European political party since WWII.
* Ayanna Pressley gave a speech insisting that all “black,” “brown,” and “Muslim,” people must agree with her views; those who don’t are inauthentic, and should remain silent.
The House Democrats, however, voted to declare these four racists into victims and the colorblind president who took them to task into a racist.
This outrageous vote evokes memories of an earlier chilling defamation: the UN General Assembly vote to equate Zionism with racism. On that occasion, UN Representative Daniel Patrick Moynihan, rose to declare: “This is a lie. But it is a lie which the United Nations has now declared to be a truth – and so the actual truth must be restated…. Whatever else Zionism may be, it is not and cannot be ‘a form of racism.’”
The same is true here. Whatever else Trump’s tweets may have been, they were not racist.
Moynihan’s deeper point is also worth reiterating. A body that votes a lie to be truth discredits itself. The U.S. House of Representatives’ choice to defame the president was merely the latest in the stream of lies it has generated to protect the four hatemongering newcomers now known as “The Squad.” It may be years before the stench wears off the House – or at least its Democrats.
President Trump now shares a status with the State of Israel and every Zionist – Jewish or otherwise. He has been voted a racist without exhibiting racism. Donald Trump became America’s “first Jewish president” by receiving treatment and judgment that the world typically reserves for the Jews.
The unique constant of Jewish history – and identity – is a commitment to a difficult moral code in the face of near-universal opprobrium. Zionism is the least racist nationalist movement ever launched; the UN therefore voted it uniquely racist. The IDF risks its own soldiers to save enemy civilians; the global media therefore vilifies it for every casualty.
Similarly, as HUD Secretary Ben Carson noted in response to the Democrat defamation, President Trump’s policies have made truly remarkable improvements to the welfare of America’s minority communities. So Trump is deemed a racist.
Therein lies the Jewish experience in a nutshell. The man who came to town championing all Americans, who has never differentiated among Americans, and who works overtime to improve the lot of disadvantaged Americans, is the man whom the House – in violation of its own rules –chose to vote into racist status. Why? Because he was willing to call out anti-Semites and racists as the hatemongers they are.
President Trump is indeed our first “Jewish president.” It’s a title he should wear with great pride – and with more than a touch of sadness.