NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

[H]e was unable to squeeze in a stop at the monument to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, sending his daughter Ivanka to lay flowers there instead.

With that decision, Trump became the first U.S. president in nearly 30 years not pay his respects at the monument on his first state visit to Poland. Leaders of the Jewish community there expressed disappointment in his decision to skip it. [...]

In his Warsaw speech, Trump referred frequently to "the West" and to "our civilization," going so far as to state grandiosely: "The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive." This claim, Peiter Beinart observes at the Atlantic, "only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia":

The "south" and "east" only threaten the West's "survival" if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders. They only threaten the West's "survival" if by "West" you mean white, Christian hegemony. ... So when Trump says being Western is the essence of America's identity, he's in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people. He's not speaking as the president of the entire United States. He's speaking as the head of a tribe.

What makes this language particularly notable in this context is that the crowd Poland's government bussed in to cheer Trump on may have an even more circumscribed view of who does and does not belong in the West. While the Law and Justice party is not overtly anti-Semitic, the same cannot be said for all of its supporters, and its perspective on history betrays a certain resentment of the prominence given to the Jewish experience in the Holocaust. Bolstered by the government's right-wing populism and xenophobia, anti-Semitism has come into vogue again in the home of Auschwitz and Sobibor in recent years, just as it has in other European countries.

Hungary's right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, for instance, may insist that his latest campaign of posters depicting George Soros as a sinister caricature of the laughing Jew is just about Soros, the individual -- but it's not convincing. Not incidentally, the Orban and Trump administrations are disturbingly friendly. Orban welcomed Trump's inauguration as "the end of multilateralism" and has praised his heavy-handed approach to controlling immigration, and Trump's Islamophobic counterterrorism advisor Sebastian Gorka was once an advisor to Orban.

Trump may be drawn to European nationalists like Orban by nothing more than their shared suspicion of Islam, but he is apparently blind to the anti-Semitism that tends to coexist with that variety of Islamophobia.

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