August 28, 2019
NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:
Trump's Statements on Jews Align--Dangerously--With His Conspiracy Dabbling (BENJAMIN PARKER AUGUST 28, 2019, The Bulwark)
In the Washington Post, the astute observer of anti-Semitism and bane of Twitter neo-Nazis Yair Rosenberg makes a good case that the president, the self-proclaimed "best President for Israel in the history of the world... the King of Israel," is better understood as a morally confused anti-Semite. "Trump believes all the anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews," Rosenberg argues, "But he sees those traits as admirable."In short, Rosenberg's argument is that Trump thinks Jews are more loyal to each other than to their own countries -- conniving, cheap, money-grubbing Scrooges. But to Trump, these are traits worth emulating. "He prioritizes his needs ahead of the national interest, and so he sees the idea that Jews might do the same with themselves or with Israel as entirely natural," Rosenberg explains. But if his stereotype-fueled philo-Semitism ever becomes a liability, it could easily flip to become stereotype-fueled anti-Semitism.Rosenberg should have gone further. If Trump does believe in anti-Semitic tropes as Rosenberg argues he does, Trump's relations with Jewish people are much less important than his relationship with facts, truth, and conspiracy theories.As Batya Ungar-Sargon put it on an episode of the Bulwark podcast, "Anti-Semitism is a form of racism because it's hatred for Jews based on the fact that we're different. However, it's crucially different from racism because typical racism is a kind of punching down, whereas anti-Semitism is really a conspiracy theory. It's this idea that Jews have secret power..." If Trump believes that Jews have some sort of midi-chlorian bond that binds them more tightly and more inseparably together than other peoples, he's liable to believe any number of tall tales and conspiracy theories.
To the Right, Jews are just Nationalists par excellence--they can never be American but their treatment of Muslims/Arabs is justified.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 28, 2019 12:00 AM
