Tag Archives: anti-Semitism

I Told You So

Who really hates America?

In the run-up to No Kings Day, Republican leaders hysterically described participants as terrorists–as people who “hate America.” Those charges were never particularly effective; the first No Kings protest had brought out a cross-section of citizens who very clearly loved the America of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and who were prepared to defend it against the real “enemy within.” Grandmothers and veterans joined young and middle-aged people in an affirmance of genuine patriotism.

If there was any confusion about who loves and who hates the America envisioned by the Founders, it came just a couple of days before the second No Kings Day, in an expose from Politico.

Here’s the lede:

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

Politico obtained 2,900 pages of Telegram chats–representing 28,000 messages– reflecting conversations among the leaders of national Young Republican groups. The chats  spanned more than seven months, and included Young Republicans from New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont. As the report summed up the discovery, the contents offered “an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.”

And the way they talk is both horrifying and profoundly unAmerican.

Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders…

The group chat members spoke freely about the pressure to cow to Trump to avoid being called a RINO, the love of Nazis within their party’s right wing and the president’s alleged work to suppress documents related to wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex crimes.

As Politico pointed out, the disgusting rhetoric employed by these Young Republican “leaders” reflects a widespread coarsening of political discourse and the increasing use of incendiary and racially offensive tropes. That coarsening comes straight from the top. The article referenced Trump’s post of an artificial intelligence-generated video portraying House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero, while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer proposed trading free health care for immigrant votes. Offensive as that post was, it was only the latest of a long string of repellant social media outbursts from the senile and wildly unPresidential occupant of the Oval Office.

In his 2024 campaign, Trump spread false reports of Haitian migrants eating pets and, at one of his rallies, welcomed comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and joked about Black people “carving watermelons” on Halloween.

As the article quite accurately notes, the chat rhetoric, which spared few minority groups, essentially mirrored a number of popular conservative political commentators, podcasters and comedians, all of whom have participated in the erosion of what was previously considered acceptable discourse. It quoted a political science professor who attributed the increasing use of racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric to Trump’s “persistent use of hostile, often inflammatory language.”

In one astonishing exchange, a suggestion that they tie an opponent to neo-Nazi groups was discarded because participants noted that it might hurt more than help–because such ties would be viewed positively by their own voters. 

There is much, much more in the linked article, and it is sickening. It is also profoundly inconsistent with what I call the American Idea–the philosophy that permeates the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It is an example–as if one were needed–of what the participants in protests like No Kings oppose.

Compare the disgusting, hateful, pro-Nazi comments in the chat (including one that “loved Hitler”) with the sentiments on the signs at the No Kings events, and draw your own conclusions about who the patriots truly are.

The Young Republicans who participated in this disgusting chat truly do hate the America that is trying to live up to its original ideals. And despite the pro-forma claims of elected Republicans trying to distance themselves from this filth, we know where they learned both the language and the sentiments.

 

Comments

Let’s Talk About Anti-Semitism

I think it’s time to address the subject of anti-Semitism–and to distinguish it from opposition to Israeli activities.

It is entirely possible to be horrified by Bibi Netanyahu and the Israeli war in Gaza–to consider what Israel is doing there to be indistinguishable from genocide–and not to be even slightly anti-Semitic. (Indeed, a significant percentage of American Jews fall into that horrified category, including this one.) But that negative opinion slides over into anti-Semitism when people attribute actions taken by Israel to “the Jews.”

A recent book review in the New Yorker began with a reminder of the long history of the anti-Jewish animus we see re-emerging.

Exactly who the Jews are—often a fraught question—has rarely been a mystery to their enemies. Stalin cast them as “rootless cosmopolitans” colluding with “American imperialists” to undermine the Soviet Union. In Hitler’s fevered imagination, they were bacilli infecting the healthy “Aryan” race. They have been denounced as lecherous predators and as omnipotent conspirators, as arch-Bolsheviks and arch-capitalists. Increasingly, these days, “Jew” is conflated with “Zionist,” which, as a term of opprobrium, can mean anything from “settler colonialist” to “fascist” to “racist.” The older sense of Zionism—establishing a Jewish state to shield Jews from persecution—has largely slipped from view.

The article reminded readers why the Trump administration’s pretense that its assault on universities is an effort to eradicate anti-Semitism is so ludicrous: among other things, Trump has dined with outspoken Holocaust deniers, and famously said that neo-Nazi marchers chanting “Jews shall not replace us” included “some very fine people.” As the article noted, claims by a hard-right government full of blood-and-soil nationalists that it is a protector of Jews ought to strike us as very peculiar.

It is important to note that the administration’s own clear anti-Semitism is only one aspect of its increasingly open animus toward anyone and everyone that White Christian Nationalist males consider “other”–Jews, Muslims, Black and Brown folks, women, immigrants. Trump’s MAGA base is primarily composed of those who find living in a multi-ethnic, multi-racial society intolerable. Trump and MAGA intentionally encourage those bigotries, and in the process, blur the lines between acceptable criticism and broad condemnations of whole categories of people.

The New Yorker was reviewing Mark Mazower’s recent and timely book “On Antisemitism,” which it noted is an effort “to restore historical context to a word that has become a generic term of condemnation.” As the article pointed out, labeling all critics of Israel as anti-Semites is no different from the critics who assume that all Jews are Zionists and believe all Zionists are racists.

I think that observation captures the essential anti-Americanism of all bigotries, whether of Left or Right. In our system–aspirational as American philosophy has admittedly been–people are treated as individuals. As I’ve previously written, in the American constitutional perspective, so long as you obey the laws, pay your taxes and refrain from harming others, you are entitled to be considered an equal member of the polity. Your skin color, gender, religion and other group affiliations are legally and civically irrelevant.

Bigotry rejects individuality. It ascribes certain “essential characteristics” to entire groups of people, based upon their identities. So we have the historic slurs of Blacks as lazy, Jews as “sharp,” women as emotional, gay men as sissies, and so forth–as if our human variety doesn’t exist.

I want to reiterate–there is nothing more anti-American than that intellectually-lazy approach to our fellow humans.

Are there greedy Jews? Lazy Black folks? Emotional women? Sure. And there are greedy, lazy, emotional White Christians. There are also wonderful, caring, productive people in every category. There are no traits–positive or negative–that inhere in every member of every human tribe.

One of the aspects of American history that the Trumpers want to obscure is the enormous damage done by these racist tropes–damage that the DEI programs they detest were established to counter.

When people who are being criticised for some behavior or other, it is rarely appropriate to attach their group identities to those criticisms. That crime wasn’t committed by “a Black.” A particular man was responsible. The Twin Towers weren’t attacked by “the Muslims.” They were targeted by a subset of Jihadists. “The Jews” aren’t committing war crimes in Gaza; the government of Israel is–and the broader Jewish community isn’t responsible for the Jews being singled out on social media and in comments to this blog as supporting that government.

In the United States, our rights and responsibilities are individual. Because we are.

Comments

Dropping The Pretense

So disappointing! A friend recently sent me a copy of a post that has been making the rounds: it shows the letter that Education Secretary Linda McMahon recently sent to Harvard–a letter filled with vitriol and announcing the cut-off of any further grants to that University–with copious red mark-ups correcting its numerous grammatical and spelling errors. The post suggested that Harvard had returned the letter with those mark-ups to the Education Secretary.

Unfortunately, it turned out not to be true. (Granted, had Harvard done so, it would have been petty and unnecessarily provocative.) As it was, the circulation of the post simply underlined the fact that McMahon–like all of Trump’s appointees–is massively unfit for her role.

One thing the letter did accomplish–probably accidentally–was the abandonment of what has always been a phony motive for Trump’s assaults on higher education: his purported concerns about anti-Semitism on the nation’s campuses.

As an article in the Atlantic recently observed,

What you will not find in the McMahon letter is any mention of the original justification for the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on elite universities: anti-Semitism. As a legal pretext for trying to financially hobble the Ivy League, anti-Semitism had some strategic merit. Many students and faculty justifiably feel that these schools failed to take harassment of Jews seriously enough during the protests that erupted after the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. By centering its critique on that issue, the administration was cannily appropriating for its own ends one of the progressive left’s highest priorities: protecting a minority from hostile acts.

Now, however, the mask is off. Aside from one oblique reference to congressional hearings about anti-Semitism (“the great work of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik”), the letter is silent on the subject. The administration is no longer pretending that it is standing up for Jewish students. The project has been revealed for what it is: an effort to punish liberal institutions for the crime of being liberal.

As the article noted, McMahon’s letter contained a “disconnected grab bag of grievances.”

The original reason given for the assaults on academia–concern about anti-Semitism–was always laughable, especially given Donald Trump’s own amply documented history of anti-Jewish bias. Wikipedia even has an entry detailing that history. It includes everything from his constant use of anti-Semitic tropes, to his weird accusation that Jews who support Democrats are “disloyal to Israel” and that Jews who are Democrats “hate their religion.” (I assume this accusation follows his acceptance of the old canard that America’s Jews have “dual loyalties”– loyalties that mean we are supposed to favor Israel over other countries, no matter what Israel is doing at any given time and no matter how many of us see its government’s actions as grossly inconsistent with time-honored Jewish values.)

A gratifying number of Jewish organizations have issued denunciations of Trump’s efforts to pretend that his assaults on universities have anything to do with legitimate concern for the Jewish students on those campuses. These “not in our name” statements reject what they’ve accurately labeled as Trump’s effort to use Jews as pawns masking an overtly political agenda.

Trump’s animus toward universities–especially Ivy League universities–is undoubtedly rooted in his festering and well-documented resentment over his failure to be accepted by the graduates of those institutions who dominated elite society in New York, and who dismissed him as the needy and pretentious buffoon he was.

MAGA’s rage at institutions of higher education, however, has more ideological roots, as displayed in a 2021 speech by JD Vance, titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” As the article in the Atlantic noted,

Then–Senate candidate J. D. Vance declared that universities, as left-wing gatekeepers of truth and knowledge, “make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.” The solution, Vance said, was to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” We’ve been seeing the aggressive part of that formula for two months. With the McMahon letter, the administration has gotten much closer to honesty.

I think Vance has confused “conservative ideas” with reactionary ones. Conservatives typically seek to preserve an existing social and economic order, while reactionaries typically want to return to a perceived golden age, and to reverse the current direction of society. Project 2025 is an excellent example of a reactionary document.

There’s a reason so many actual conservatives are “never-Trumpers.”

Trump himself is neither conservative nor reactionary–he’s the useful fool being used by the reactionary forces behind Project 2025. JD Vance is right about one thing: universities are enemies to ignorance and reaction.

The attack on them has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

Comments

Trump’s Phony War On Anti-Semitism

If there is any aspect of Donald Trump’s “character,” (note quotes) that has been amply documented, it has been his bigotries. (Extensive research has also confirmed that agreement with his racial animus is a characteristic of the vast majority of his supporters.) Trump’s own virulent anti-Semitism has been consistently displayed by his numerous reported comments and social media posts, and by his ongoing relationships with, and support from, various neo-Nazi figures.

So the administration’s assertion that its war on universities is an effort to stamp out anti-Semitism is ludicrous. What he wants to “stamp out” is intellectual inquiry and free speech. And plenty of Jewish academics are having none of it.

On Indiana University’s Bloomington campus, thirty-eight current and former Jewish professors delivered a letter to President Pamela Whitten, Provost Rahul Shrivastav and Board of Trustees Chair Quinn Buckner, urging them not to invoke their names or Jewish students’ names as justification for limiting free speech at IU.

Jeffrey C. Isaac, James H. Rudy professor of political science, signed the letter. Isaac said the group opposes antisemitism, and he’s been involved in activism against antisemitism.

Isaac said existing laws and the university’s regulations and policies already protect Jewish people from antisemitism. He’s never felt afraid on campus, and his students haven’t said they’re afraid either.

“I don’t mean to question every person who says they’re afraid,” Isaac said. “We need to listen to them. But that’s different than saying we need to shut down anything that disturbs them, and that’s what’s going on in this country now.”

In the letter, with which I entirely agree, the professors declined  to be used as “justification for any action that further limits academic autonomy or freedom of expression at IU.”

We, the undersigned, have all been “Jewish students on campus” somewhere. Our children have been Jewish students on campus somewhere. We teach Jewish students on this campus. And we—unlike Gov. Braun or Education Secretary Linda McMahon—have known antisemitism firsthand. But we also know that our identities, both as Jewish Americans and as public university employees, require respect for free speech and tolerance of opposing viewpoints.

Those values lead us to remind you that IU has a responsibility to stand firmly for freedom of speech.

In coming months, Secretary McMahon and Governor Braun will seek your compliance in enforcing their vaguely defined prohibitions against “antisemitic harassment and discrimination” from “radical organizations and individuals.” The lessons of last year’s overreaction to the protests on Dunn Meadow, withdrawal of Samia Halaby’s Eskenazi Museum retrospective, suspension of Prof. Abulkader Sinno, and imposition of an overbroad expressive activity policy are clear: censoring legal expression—even in the name of bringing us together—only tears us apart.

The letter concluded,

These are fraught times for universities and other American institutions asserting their commitments to the protection of the First Amendment. Still, we recall the words of Hillel: “If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I?” This university’s best means to protect the well-being of all of its students will be to affirm its commitment to civil liberties and to protect its academic programs from political interference. We count on you to do so.

Although it remains to be seen, it is unlikely that President Whitten–a politically-connected appointee who has thus far survived several faculty votes of no confidence, and whose response to previous student protests has ranged from unsatisfactory to appalling–will defend civil liberties against the assaults by Trump and Braun. But those who signed the letter, and the many others of us who endorse its sentiments, have made it clear that they do not consent to be cynically used by the blatant hypocrisy of Rightwing partisans who have a long history of actual anti-Semitism. We recognize this ploy as an obvious and thinly-veiled smokescreen for their consistent assaults on basic American civil liberties.

We know our history, and its lessons.

And if there is one lesson Jews all over the world have learned the hard way, it is that–like all marginalized minorities–we can only thrive in an open society that respects the civil liberties and free speech rights of all citizens, whether we agree with them or not.

Comments

Out Of The Closet

And so it begins. 

LGBTQ+ folks weren’t the only people hiding in closets. There were plenty of people with white sheets in those closets, and those people are emerging–this time, without the sheets. 

I recently posted that Trump’s rhetoric was received as permission, even encouragement, for the expression of bigotry and hatred. Friends who are nicer than I am remonstrated, insisting that not all Trump voters were motivated by racism and misogyny. (That may be true, although there’s a current Facebook meme that speaks to that protest: Question: What do we call the Germans who supported Hitler for reasons other than hatred of Jews? Answer: Nazis.)

The primary motivation for Trumpism is becoming very clear, and voters protesting that they based their choice on “the economy” (which is currently the best in the world) or who offer other, less reprehensible reasons need to face up to the fact that–like the businesspeople who once “went along” with the Klan in Indiana because it was dangerous or inconvenient to oppose it–have enabled the forces of bigotry Those few racists who were still closeted are now coming out in force.

Just a couple of headlines from a day or so ago underscore the point.

The Washington Post has reported on racist texts nationwide.

The FBI and authorities in several states are investigating racist text messages sent to Black people nationwide this week saying they would be brought to plantations to work as enslaved people and pick cotton.
 
People in at least a dozen states and D.C. have received the messages according to authorities and local media. The texts have spread alarm in the aftermath of a presidential election marked by President-elect Donald Trump and his campaign’s use of inflammatory language against minorities.
 
The origin of the messages is unknown, and it is unclear how many people received them. Reports from some states said the messages arrived Wednesday and appeared to target Black students at universities. Some, though not all, of the messages claimed to be from a Trump supporter or “the Trump administration,” according to screenshots shared on social media and local news.

Black people all across the country have reported receiving these messages, which evidently varied a bit in wording. All of them, however, ordered recipients to “report to a plantation and work in slavery.” Several claimed to have been from Trump supporters or Donald Trump or the Trump campaign.

It bears noting that these messages targeting Black people were facilitated by a worrisome lack of privacy protections, and the sharing of personal information–some in the form of lists, and others enabled by the broadcast messaging ability of cellphone carriers.

Closer to home, IU Students reported receipt of similar messages.

Not that it is comforting–far from it– but it is undeniable that the wave of fascism sweeping this country is part and parcel of a global phenomenon.

In Amsterdam, Israeli soccer fans were recently attacked. At least 62 people were arrested in conjunction with football contests, according to police, as a result of clashes that erupted overnight after a Europa League football match.

“In several places in the city, supporters were attacked, abused and pelted with fireworks. Riot police had to intervene several times, protect Israeli supporters and escort them to hotels,” said Amsterdam officials.

Social media platforms were flooded with unverified images purported to be of the violence, but confirmed details of the clashes were few, according to AFP.

The UN called the violence “very troubling” while Germany foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said it was “terrible” and “deeply shameful.”

Although nothing excuses the violence, the Israeli fans were hardly innocent victims: unverified video on social media appeared to show some Maccabi Tel Aviv fans chanting in Hebrew: “Finish the Arabs! We’re going to win!”

The human family appears to be devolving into a tribalism that many of us had thought was waning. The prevalence of global populism, the widespread rejection of civilized and humane behavior and the unleashing of old and ugly hatreds threatens to engulf us at a time when the existential threat posed by climate change requires a unified global response. 

To call these times perilous is a serious understatement.

Comments