Trump-- Bad For America... Including The Jews

 

As I mentioned the other day, the Jewish Daily Forward (now just The Forward), used to be a mainstay of the Eugene Debs-era Socialist movement. It was gratitude and devotion to FDR and the New Deal that made them into Democrats and now, well they're more, umm... more "fair and balanced"... basically to accommodate the far right, primitive Hasidics and the pro-fascist Russian immigrants in Brooklyn and Philly. I might have been a fan in the 30's and 40's, less so now but that doesn't mean their editorial back and forth isn't sometimes interesting. Yesterday they sponsored a debate between Joel Swanson, a normal person, and an always deceitful Trumpist freak, Eli Steinberg: Is Trump Good For The Jews? It's a pun on the idea of how certain Jews measure everything by how it impacts Jews (or even Israel) over and above all other things. Most Jews laugh at the concept these days-- but not all of them.

Keep in mind that Hillary won the Jewish vote in a landslide-- albeit not the Hasidic or Russian immigrant vote-- but that polls show that on Tuesday more Jews will vote against Trump than they did in 2016-- probably over 75%. Jews who feel most comfortable distancing themselves from anyone not in their own sect-- building their own ghettos-- but not practicing social distancing and prohibiting internet usage will vote for Trump. The Forward values them as part of the community. That's nuts.

Joel Swanson: This week, the American Jewish Committee released a groundbreaking survey about antisemitism in America. The results were sobering: 82% of Jews think antisemitism has increased in the past five years. Nearly half of us feel less secure than we did a year ago. And seven out of 10 U.S. Jews think the Republican Party has a serious antisemitism problem, compared to only four out of ten who think that about the Democratic Party. And fully three-quarters of American Jews think the far-right poses a “very serious” or “moderately serious” threat to Jewish safety in the United States today, compared to only one-third who feel that way about the far-left.

So the facts are these: We’re living at a time when we have a United States president who dog whistles to white supremacist groups during nationally televised debates, energizing these groups through remarks that the Anti-Defamation League says “provide rhetorical aid and comfort to these groups.”

So my first point is this: If Trump is really good for the Jews, why is he opposed by the vast majority of American Jews, who also think that he and his party bear personal responsibility for dramatically rising antisemitism in the country?

Eli Steinberg: The question which lies before us is whether re-electing Donald Trump is good for Jews, not whether most Jews will be supporting him in the upcoming election. We can agree that they will not be voting Trump. The question is why, and the answer is that for most Jews, the issues most important to them have nothing to do with Judaism at all, as a 2012 Public Religion Research Institute found. 66% of Jews said the economy and income inequality were their top priorities. What’s more, 46% of Jews defined their actual Jewish identity as a commitment to social justice and equality, double those who defined their Jewishness in terms of religious observance (17%), cultural heritage and tradition (6%), or a general set of values (3%) combined.

So there needs to be a clear distinction here: Are we discussing whether Trump is good for progressives who happen to be ethnically Jewish? Or are we going to take a hard look at which one of the two tickets before us is better for Jews qua Jews? That is the question we are debating.

And on that, there is no question.

President Trump has made religious liberty a consistent priority, whereas his challenger, Joe Biden, has taken the opposite path, promising to go back to court with the nuns of the Little Sisters of the Poor to force them to do something they say will violate their sincerely held beliefs. And his VP pick, Kamala Harris, sponsored a law to water down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, essentially putting the government in charge of determining what legitimate exercise of religion is.

So which one of the two is good for the Jews?

Joel Swanson: It seems the heart of our disagreement here lies in two questions: What are Jewish values, and should we evaluate “Jewish values” in a normative, prescriptive sense, based on what they should be, or should we just look at what Jewish values among the overwhelming majority of American Jews actually are?

Because the fact is, data consistently shows that the overwhelming majority of American Jews do not define “Jewish values” in terms of halakhah or adherence to Jewish law. A major Pew poll found that only 19% of American Jews think that “observing Jewish law” is essential to being Jewish. But those values of “leading an ethical and moral life” and “working for justice and equality” that you so dismiss are essential to the way a lot more American Jews define our Jewishness. And here is where most of us disagree with President Trump so strongly.

I’m sure you would respond that those aren’t really “Jewish values” per se; that they’re just a way for ethnic Jews who no longer follow Jewish law to smuggle their own left-leaning politics into an ostensibly Jewish cultural framework. But here is where we fundamentally disagree: There’s a lot more to Jewish history and culture than just Jewish law and Jewish Orthopraxy.

In fact, most American Jews see Jewishness as an expression of a people’s culture and history as much as a “religion,” which is why fully two-thirds of us believe you can be Jewish without believing in God, and why growing numbers of millennial Jews describe ourselves as culturally but not religiously Jewish.

But, for those many American Jews who might identify with Jewish culture and history but not necessarily formal religious practice, I would argue that our overwhelming rejection of President Trump is no less rooted in an understanding of Jewish culture, history, and identity than is the Orthodox Jewish embrace of President Trump, even if it is a very different understanding of what “Jewishness” means. The single value that the largest number of American Jews cite as essential to being Jewish is “remembering the Holocaust.”

And there’s a reason why so many young Jews cite our collective memory of the trauma of persecution and the Holocaust as motivation to fight against the Trump administration’s cruel family separation and immigration policies. (And, by the way, polls show that the single issue that unites the largest number of American Jews politically, 78% of us, is opposition to the Trump administration’s family separation policies.)

Are those not “Jewish values” also?

So I think the question before us is this: What does it mean for a value to be “Jewish,” and might the overwhelming majority of American Jews who reject President Trump, also be voting based on the fact that, when the President of the United States shows support for violent far-right movements, it reminds us of lessons we take from Jewish history?

Eli Steinberg: I think what we are doing here is conflating the why with the what. You seem to be focused on the former instead of the latter.

There is undoubtedly a long list of justifications people might invoke as they oppose Trump, many of which you cite above. Many of these are justifications which, as you point out, are shared by many progressive Jews.

But a fundamental Jewish value-- in fact, the most fundamental-- is that might does not make right. Truth is not the province of, nor is it determined by, the majority alone. If it were, there would not be a Jewish nation to speak of at all. And do we think that stereotypes of Jews become real in the Middle East because 74% of people there believe them to be?

As a Haredi Jew, I am quite used to the minority within a minority status I’ve been assigned. I embrace it. Because I believe that truth, informed by 3,000 years of tradition in the Torah as transmitted from Sinai, is on my side. But that is not what we are debating here. I ask you, is it good for the Jews when a President-- any President-- sees government as the ultimate decider on what we, as Jews, are or are not allowed to do? Is it good for Jews when a President is determined to put religious institutions on unequal-- and even weaker-- footing than those which are not?

Joel Swanson: I think our fundamental disagreement here is about whether there is some sort of “objective” standpoint from which to judge what is best for “the Jews” as a community that goes beyond the facts of what the majority of us actually believe. You seem to think there is. But I would argue that ignoring the viewpoint of the vast, overwhelming majority of American Jews is actually less Jewish than listening to that majority voice and heeding it. I would point out that there is a long tradition of truth being determined by the majority in Jewish tradition, so much so that there’s the famous story in the Talmud of a majority of rabbis overruling God on a matter of rabbinic law.

But that principle aside, I would argue that the ultimate danger is dismissing the concerns of the majority of American Jews about President Trump in the name of some abstract principle that most of us do not believe in. Because the simple facts are these: Eight out of 10 American Jews think antisemitism in the United States has increased in the past five years, which is exactly the time frame during which Trump has been a major figure on the political scene. And more than half of American Jews think Trump and his party bear responsibility for that well-documented rise.

President Trump has openly signaled his support for the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, which polls shows fully half of his supporters now believe in, and which experts on far-right extremism say is becoming increasingly antisemitic.

Is it any wonder that that 60% of American Jews believe Trump “bears at least some responsibility” for rising antisemitic violence, and that survivors of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting feel that “Trump is definitely courting right-wing militias?”

Doesn’t the greatest danger lie in dismissing our community’s concrete concerns for our immediate safety in the name of some supposed higher abstract principle of “truth”?





Eli Steinberg: We seem to agree about what we disagree, if about nothing else: I believe Judaism inherently means something, while you contend being Jewish means nothing beyond what people want it to mean.

I certainly don’t dismiss the concerns they have for American Jewry’s safety, or for the safety of any Jew. That safety has been a real concern for visibly Orthodox Jews like myself living in so-called “blue states” of New York and New Jersey, where we’ve been experiencing violence and other sorts of bigotry and discrimination most overtly and consistently. We know all too well that antisemitism transcends political ideology, finding ways to manifest on both the right and the left.

So the question remains what it was when we began this exercise: Is Donald Trump good for Jews? If one assigns meaning to Judaism beyond progressive dogma, the answer is clearly yes.

He has indisputably made Jews around the world more safe physically through his work on the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements which Israel has signed with an ever-growing number of Arab states. He has made it much safer for Jews to, in the words of George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, “continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” He’s done this by positioning himself as a champion of those of us who have had our rights trampled on, and who are the ones actively being discriminated against.

It’s from this vantage point of someone who has an acute feeling of what it means to be stigmatized and attacked for being Jewish that I can say that Donald Trump is undoubtedly good for the Jews.

Joel Swanson: I find it interesting that you begin your description of how President Trump has supposedly made American Jews safer with the Abraham Accords, which by definition concern Israeli and not American Jews. There’s a reason why President Trump believes American Jews are basically displaced Israelis and should be loyal to Israel first and foremost. There’s also a reason why the overwhelming majority of American Jews do not prioritize Israel, a country where we intentionally choose not to live, when we cast our votes.

But that leads me to my final point, with which I’ll close. You seem to think, implicitly, that Orthodox Jewish opinions on President Trump should count for more than the American Jewish majority, because of adherence to Jewish law. I just fundamentally reject that premise, but I do not believe that means that Jewish identity means nothing for non-Orthodox Jews at all. After all, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history was not against Orthodox Jews, but against a Conservative synagogue, and it was motivated by the shooter’s fears that Jews are secretly pulling the strings behind immigration to the U.S., a conspiracy theory which, by the way, President Trump has repeated.

But for many Jews, support for immigrant rights and for organizations like HIAS are not ways of ignoring Jewish values, but of expressing our understanding of Jewish history and persecution through our politics today. The synagogue shooter hated Jews because we overwhelmingly support immigrant rights, and we do that because we know what happens when persecuted refugees are kept out of the US.

There are so many ways of being Jewish, and we can’t dismiss the majority of American Jews, whose politics are deeply informed by our history and culture, just because we don’t necessarily strictly follow Jewish law. And I’m making that argument, after all, in a publication that is historically culturally Jewish socialist.

Eli Steinberg: If you’ll notice, nowhere in making my point about the Abraham Accords or anywhere in this exchange did I say anything about the interests of the state of Israel. What I said was that Jews worldwide would be safer because of Trump. If the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Arab world makes Jews less safe, normalization makes us safer.

I’ll close this with: To me, to define what is good for Jews by looking at what a majority of ethnically Jewish Americans thinks is good for them strips the beauty and meaning of Judaism from itself, replacing it with a dark historical prism informed by “our understanding of Jewish history and persecution.” That idea makes me incredibly sad. Being a Jew is about so much more than that.

But if you define what is “good for Jews” as good for the physical safety of our Jewish brethren around the world, whether in this great country we are privileged to call home or abroad, if you define it as a leader who will stand up and make sure Jews can exercise the First Amendment without fear of reprisal, if you define it as someone who isn’t looking to disadvantage Jews because they adhere to their traditional values, then Donald Trump certainly is good for the Jews.

Who remembers Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf from the HBO adaptation of Philip Roth's brilliant book, The Plot Against America? Who needs a Bengelsdorf when you have an Eli Steinberg? Hasidism wasn't a thing in the U.S. back then, nor was pro-fascism, but they still had Jews from a pro-slavery, pro-Confederate background like the accursed Rabbi Bengelsdorf:

Trump Would be America’s Hitler

 

-by Harvey Wasserman

As The Donald unleashes his inner Adolf,  there must be no illusions about what we face.

Through his COVID/drug-induced madness (like Hitler's addiction to crystal meth) Trump’s  White Supremacism incites his violent fascist cadres. It’s all a terrifying re-run of Adolf’s rise to power in 1933 Germany.

The terror is escalating at the voting centers, inside and out. The Brown Shirts have blocked voter access at Alexandria, Virginia. Inside they pitch ballots on whatever pretext they can find.

This is  the most critical juncture of the election-- where an election board decides whether to disallow mailed-in ballots.

Prepare to see them gather when the votes are counted.

Trump’s fascist rhetoric has sunk to a whole new level in demanding the arrest of his electoral opponent, Joe Biden. No other major party candidate has done that, not even Dick Nixon. Given AG Barr’s sycophantic contempt for the rule of law, take this threat at face value. Terrified of any strong woman of color, Trump has called VP candidate Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) a “monster.”

Yelling at right-wing militia groups to “liberate Michigan,” he’s got nothing to say about the armed fascist alleged plan kidnap duly-elected governor Gretchen Whitmer. Got that? Kidnap the Governor of a major state!!

At the Mexican border, stealth sterilizations mirror what Hitler did to Jewish, Roma, and eastern European women.

Many of these refugees have come here fleeing Latin American dictatorships installed and maintained by US forces.  Some are U.S. citizens. Their children are held in cages.

All face Trump's COVID. None will get anything resembling his multi-million-dollar medical care we pay for. Death and disease rates are state secrets.

Hidden from the public and media, those who’ve seen the camps compare them compare them to Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and other Nazi concentration camps.

Journalists, labor organizers, feminists, LGBTQ individuals, and progressive activists might remember that Hitler used such camps to “settle scores” once he consolidated power, a virtual inevitability with Barr by Trump’s side.

Like his racist, anti-semitic, Klan-lovting father, The Donald openly touts the “good genes” of his white followers. He attacks African-American, Mexican-American, and other citizens and immigrants of color as “murderers” and “rapists.”

Trump openly lauds Hitler's “racehorse theory,” arguing that human beings can be selectively bred like animals to produce a Master Race.

Here’s what Trump seig-heiled to a virtually all-white crowd in Bemidji, Minnesota, on September 18:

“You have good genes, you know that, right? ou have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it? Don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

Says Rabbi Mark Diamond, a senior lecturer on Jewish studies at Loyola Marymount University: “To hear these remarks said at a rally in an election campaign for the presidency is beyond reprehensible...

“This is at the heart of Nazi ideology. This has brought so much tragedy and destruction to the Jewish people and to others. It’s actually hard to believe in 2020 we have to revisit these very dangerous theories.”

Steve Silberman, a best-selling New York Times author, adds: “As a historian who has written about the Holocaust, I’ll say bluntly: This is indistinguishable from the Nazi rhetoric that led to Jews, disabled people, LGBTQ, Romani and others being exterminated. This is America 2020. This is where the GOP has taken us.”

At Trump’s core is contempt for what Hitler called “Jewish values”: compassion, empathy, remorse-- democracy itself. As reported by his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen, Trump thinks such beliefs (like science) are for “losers” and “suckers.”  “You’re brutal people, not nice people at all,” he once told a room full of Israel supporters, referring to how Jews allegedly do business.

Trump’s backers love his ties to Jews like Cohen; his mobster mentor Roy Cohn; his son-in-law and fellow real estate grifter, Jared Kushner; consigliere Stephen Miller; and mega-backer Sheldon Adelson. His daughter has converted to Judaism, they say. His grandchildren are technically Jewish.

They might remember that Hitler personally signed waivers saving at least 77 Jewish officers who were useful to him while serving in the Nazi Army. Then he exterminated many of their families.

 

Some still dismiss Trump as a mere Mussolini, calling him a “clown,” as did many American journalists when they first encountered Hitler.

They ignore his utter lack of care for the 220,000-plus Americans who’ve died from his denial of the deadly realities of the coronavirus.

Trump’s hard-core followers suffer no such delusions. They proudly flaunt their swastika flags and Nazi tattoos. They happily salute him as der Fuhrer and loudly hate both Jews and people of color.

These are the “fine people,” who killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. This is the “hero” 17-year-old who killed two peaceful demonstrators in Wisconsin (imagine if that kid had been black, how quickly the cops would’ve shot him to pieces, and what Trump would be saying about him now).

Now he’s urged his Proud Boy storm troopers to “stand back and stand by” in anticipation of a coming coup.

Approaching humankind’s most consequential election since 1933, Yale historian Timothy Snyder warns: “That the next atrocity will be different than the last one is not a reason to let it happen. It will be ours, and we have been warned.”

Our Election Protection campaign has become a terminal life/death struggle for our nation and our species.

It will take every ounce of our collective solidarity and strength to defeat Trump’s Hitlerian madness. Our survival demands we shed all illusions about what we face.

Never Again!!

-------------


Harvey Wasserman co-convenes the Grassroots Election Protection Coalition Monday zoom (www.grassrootsep.org). His California Solartopia broadcasts at KPFK/Pacifica 90.7 fm Los Angeles; Green Power & Wellness podcasts at prn.fm. His People’s Spiral of US History awaits Trump’s departure at www.solartopia.org.

Not Even McConnell's Right-Wing Senate Majority Has The Stomach For Another Nominee From Trump's Overt Anti-Semitic Menagerie-- At Least Not This Close To November

Yesterday the (Jewish Daily) Forward asked, rhetorically if at a time when statues of racists in the U.S. Capitol are being unceremoniously removed, should an anti-Semite like Billy Graham have one of him put up?. "Last week," wrote PJ Grisar, "a North Carolina legislative committee approved a scale model of the 10-foot, 10-inch Graham statue, which would be placed at the Capitol sometime next year pending the approval of a congressional committee. If that approval comes through, Graham’s effigy will replace a statue of Charles Brantley Aycock, a North Carolina governor and white supremacist named in a House Appropriations bill calling for the removal of the likenesses of Confederates and white supremacists from the Statuary Hall... His record with regard to civil rights was mixed, as he accepted segregation at some of his crusades and critiqued the tactics of marches and sit-ins to end Jim Crow laws. Like many Evangelicals, he also believed homosexuality to be a sin, calling it a 'sinister form of perversion.' And while he had a reputation for building interfaith bridges, a major rift with his relationship with the Jewish community emerged in 1994, when Nixon Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman’s White House diaries became public. Haldeman wrote that Nixon and Graham, alone in the Oval Office after a prayer breakfast in February of 1972, discussed Jewish control of the media. Graham denied having this conversation, but in 2002, the tape was released by the National Archives. In the recording, Graham agreed with Nixon that liberal Jews had too much influence, saying, 'This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain.' Graham further accused Jews of 'putting out the pornographic stuff' in the culture and contended that, while he was friendly with Jews who 'swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel,' those Jews 'don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances.'"

OK, I hope that works out well. Meanwhile though, Trump has nominated another anti-Semite, Col. Douglas Macgregor (ret), this one as ambassador to, of all places, Germany. He has a lot going for him-- in Trump-world. He's anti-Merkel and pro-Putin for one thing, but he's also considered an anti-Semite by Jews. Remember reading about how Trump had a spat with Israeli super-donor Sheldon Adelson over the weekend? That was right around the time when the Times of Israel was publishing a story about Macgregory's problems with Jews. "Jewish groups," wrote Ron Kampeas, the paper's correspondent in DC, "are taking aim at President Donald Trump’s pick for ambassador to Germany for his past statements about Muslim immigrants and for downplaying the importance of Nazi history. The nomination of Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat veteran who now frequently appears on Fox News, made headlines this week after CNN’s K File unearthed a long history of the retired colonel’s comments. In 2018 he said 'There’s sort of a sick mentality that says that generations after generations must atone sins of what happened in 13 years of German history and ignore the other 1,500 years of Germany.' He also called Muslim immigrants “invaders” who want to turn Europe 'into an Islamic state' and called for martial law at the US-Mexico border, saying US authorities should 'shoot people' if necessary to prevent immigrants from entering the country."

Prior to the CNN report, B’nai B’rith International had already expressed concerns about Macgregor. In a July 28 release, it noted his past propensity to insinuate that “neocons” serving Israel’s interests were controlling US foreign policy.

“It is important that American diplomats not question the patriotism of other Americans who hold political views different from their own, especially given that questioning Jewish loyalty to America is an anti-Semitic trope,” B’nai B’rith said.

The American Jewish Committee on Friday urged Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to withdraw Macgregor’s nomination.

“It is because of our intensive engagement with Germany that we were so troubled by the reports of recent days regarding Col. Macgregor’s many incendiary comments over the years about the German government, Germany’s confrontation with its Nazi past, the NATO alliance, immigration policy, and other topics,” AJC CEO David Harris said in a letter to Pompeo.

The Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, said on Twitter that some of Macgregor’s past statements were “bigoted and abhorrent.” He also critiqued Macgregor’s comments on Nazi Germany.

J Street Vice President Dylan Williams on the same platform decried Macgregor’s “shameful record of expressing profoundly bigoted views.”

Republican Senate aides have been telling the press that Trump needs to withdraw the nomination immediately because Macgregor is unconformable and that a number of Republican senators have already indicated they will vote with the Democrats to reject him if it comes to a vote on the floor. "Trump should run from this one, blame it on Tucker Carlson or Lou Dobbs or someone," one GOP aide told me this morning. "This guy's a walking disaster... There are a number of senators eager to show the independent voters back home that they aren't Trump asskissers. Primaries are over; they won't hesitate to vote against him."

My Jewish Trumpist Friend Is Offended By Mobs Tearing Down Statues Of Notorious Racists

My old friend-- let's call him "Mordecai X"-- a Floridian Trump parrot, says he's not a racist because:

1- he has a black cousin he likes and
2- he donated $70 (it was supposed to be $35 but he couldn't navigate ActBlue efficiently) to Mondaire Jones, who is black and gay.

Yesterday he shared this: "My grandmother was very very progressive artist socialite and actually gave way more love to her black grandchildren then to us white ones. I think she thought they needed it more." see? Not a racist bone in his body.

Like Señor Trumpanzee, X freaks out daily when he reads about a statue being defaced, let alone torn down. It offends him no end and considers it left-wing censorship and insists "they're" banning books and plays as well, something I assume he gets from Reddit or 4chan, which is where he gets his news.

But X, who is Jewish, is also a rabid Zionist and Judeo-nationalist. I don't want to further stoke his statue-mania with another discussion of the topic but I nearly sent him the Aiden Pink story in The Forward yesterday: 8 American Monuments Celebrating Anti-Semites. I wonder if X would take part in tearing them down-- or perhaps just approve if it were to happen. "In the weeks since protests against racism began after the killing of George Floyd," wrote Pink, "activists around the world have been toppling statues, either by pressuring public officials or by tearing the monuments down themselves. Activists have naturally focused on memorials to Confederate leaders or others who enacted racist policies, and associate monuments to anti-Semites with Europe, where they are common."

We don't have to look to the cheesy statue of King Edward I in Burgh-le-Marsh, England, standing in memory (since 2007, when it was erected) of the 700th anniversary of his death. Edward, if you're not up on your history of notorious anti-Semites, issued the 1290 Edict of Expulsion, expelling Jews from England. But here in the U.S. we also have memorials to rabid anti-Semites.

General George Patton's diaries, posthumously published in 1996, "reveal," wrote Pink, "that his opinion of the Jewish prisoners he encountered was scarcely different than the Nazis he had just defeated. He described the Jewish displaced persons as 'locusts,' 'lower than animals,' 'lost to all decency,' and 'a subhuman species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our times.' A monument to Patton was unveiled at the United States Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. in 1950, and then rededicated in 2009-- 13 years after his diary was published."

Who knew? But one we all did know about was Nazi-sympathizer Henry Ford... who did more than write in his secret diary. He was the owner and publisher of the Nazi propaganda newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which were distributed in Ford auto dealerships nationwide. "The Independent," Pink reminds us, "frequently published screeds and conspiracy theories against Jews, including several under Ford’s own name, as well as copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic forgery. Ford was also frequently praised by Nazi leadership, which gave him a medal in 1938. Today, a statue of Ford is present at the Henry Ford Centennial Library in Dearborn, Mich. Another statue of him is found on the property of The Henry Ford, a history and science museum he founded."

You didn't have to watch The Plot Against America to know that Charles Lindbergh was a Jew-hating Nazi stooge. He was, after all the spokesperson for the MAGA-organization of his day, the America First Committee. "Lindbergh publicly claimed Jews were pushing the United States needlessly into World War II," wrote Pink. "He also was a close friend of Henry Ford, who said in 1940, 'When Charles comes out here, we only talk about the Jews.' Today, a statue of Lindbergh, depicting him both as a child and an adult, is found on the lawn of the state capitol complex in St. Paul, Minn., his home state. A bust of his face also graces the Lindbergh Terminal of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport."

Going back a little further, there is Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam before it was taken over by the British and renamed New York. Pink reminded his readers that "Stuyvesant initially refused to allow Jews to settle permanently in New Amsterdam, and while he later changed his mind, he made them pay a special tax. He also referred to Jews as 'the deceitful race, such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ.' Today, several New York City locations are named after him, including the Bed-Stuy neighborhood and Stuyvesant High School. Statues of him can be found at Stuyvesant Square in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Bergen Square in Jersey City, N.J. An Israeli legal advocacy group in 2017 called on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to remove the Stuyvesant Square statue, saying that the former governor was an 'extreme racist.'"

And what about Jew-hating fanatic Martin Luther whose virulent and deranged anti-Semitism influenced Europe for centuries. And although "the official Protestant organizations of Germany and Norway officially condemned Luther’s anti-Semitism in 2015, owing to his historical and theological significance, statues of Luther are still present at Protestant universities and seminaries across the United States. But there is one monument to him sitting on public lands: an 18-foot-tall statue in Baltimore administered by the city’s department of parks and recreation. The statue was erected in 1936 and had a rededication ceremony in 2011."

Last week, when his statue was pulled down in San Francisco, many of us learned that President Ulysses S. Grant, hero of the Civil War, once owned a slave. But did you know that as a conquering hero he expelled all Jews from Tennessee? The largest equestrian monument in the United States is a memorial to Grant in the nation's capital and isn't his visage on the $50 bill a monument to his memory we're all carrying around in our pockets from time to time?

And then there's notorious Kansas Jew-hater, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Actually, populist and suffragette Mary Elizabeth Lease-- upon who Dorothy was based-- has a statue standing in Wichita. While campaigning for women's and farmers' rights she was a crusader against the banksters, but "often veered into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories," wrote Pink. "People who were forced to take out bank loans were 'paying tribute to the Rothschilds of England, who are but the agent of the Jews,' claimed Lease."

A statue of former Georgia Senator Thomas Watson used to stand on the steps of the Georgia state capitol until it was moved to the park across the street in 2013. "Watson," wrote Pink, "was a Georgia congressman and newspaper publisher who served as a vice-presidential nominee for William Jennings Bryan’s Populist Party in 1896. During the 1913 trial of Leo Frank, a Jewish man falsely accused of murdering a 13-year-old Christian girl, Watson’s paper whipped up anti-Semitic sentiment. After Frank was convicted and his sentence was commuted, Watson advocated for Frank to be lynched, which he eventually was. Watson was elected to the Senate in 1922 but died in office a year later. In addition to his anti-Semitism, Watson was also a white supremacist and anti-Catholic."

Just sayin'. But GovExec.com also noted yesterday that it isn't just military bases named for disgraced figures but that civilian federal buildings are also named after confederates, KKK members and segregationists. Eric Katz wrote that "In recent weeks as protesters nationwide have demanded new steps to promote racial justice, pressure has mounted for the U.S. military to rename its bases that honor Confederate leaders and for local governments to remove monuments. A review of civilian federal buildings shows a number of offices and federal courthouses named after Americans with racist histories as well... Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), who oversees GSA and federal buildings as chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s panel on Government Operations, called for a change. 'The federal government must be a beacon of inclusivity,' Connolly said. 'Having federal buildings named after Confederate generals and members of the KKK is shameful and they must be renamed.'"

Here are a few from Katz's list of buildings named for notorious racists:

• John A. Campbell U.S. Courthouse; Mobile, Ala.: Campbell resigned from the U.S. Supreme Court at the outbreak of the Civil War to accept a role as Confederate assistant secretary of war. After the war, Campbell fought as an attorney against reconstruction in the South.

• Clifford Davis - Odell Horton Federal Building; Memphis, Tenn.: Davis served as a Democratic congressman in Tennessee for 25 years. He first rose to political power with the support of the Ku Klux Klan, a group in which he was actively a member. Davis went on to become a signatory to the Southern Manifesto in 1956, a resolution introduced in Congress to decry Brown v. Board of Education’s mandate that states end segregation in schools.

• William M. Colmer Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse; Hattiesburg, Miss.: Colmer, a Democratic congressman, helped spearhead what became the Southern Manifesto, a document that implored southerners to use all "lawful means" to resist the "chaos and confusion" that school integration would cause. It was signed by 82 House members and 19 senators. He fought “tooth and nail” to block the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s, according to the New York Times. Of early court rulings against segregation, Colmer lamented there would be "an even increasing intermingling of negroes and whites in public places." Colmer went on to author a second manifesto in Congress that warned of “grave” dangers of federal legislation protecting civil rights.

• Thomas G. Abernethy Federal Building; Aberdeen, Miss.: Abernethy also signed the Southern Manifesto, as well as a letter to the administrator of Veterans Affairs in 1957 requesting VA segregate its medical facilities. A Democratic House member for 30 years, Abernethy left a significant trail of racist speeches and writings. In one such address on the House floor, Abernethy said, “There can be no dispute that a negro problem does exist in our country; that it exists in each and every section where negroes have collected in number; and that the problem is in proportion to the number in each area or city,” adding that, “for nearly 200 years we have lived in peace with our Black brethren of the South.” He went on to say God supported segregation. “Had he intended us to all be alike-- an amalgamated, mulattoed mixture of man-- surely he would have so created us.” Abernethy suggested the push for civil rights was part of a Zionist and communist conspiracy.

• Strom Thurmond Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse; Columbia, S.C.: Thurmond served in the Senate for 48 years and was one of the leading voices against desegregation and civil rights. He ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948 on a pro-segregation platform and vehemently opposed all civil rights legislation, launching the longest-ever speaking filibuster in an attempt to defeat the 1957 Civil Rights Act. When running for president, Thurmond said at one event, “There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.” While he served in the Senate through 2000, he never publicly renounced his segregationist views.

• J.L. McMillan Federal Building and Courthouse; Florence, S.C.: McMillan served in the House for more than 30 years. He spent two decades as head of the District of Columbia Committee, and “made little attempt to hide his contempt for the capital’s African-American majority,” according to John Lawrence, a long-time congressional staffer and author of "The Class of '74: Congress after Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship." When Washington’s black mayor sent the district’s first budget to Congress as it pushed for autonomous rule, McMillan responded by sending a truckload of watermelons to the mayor. McMillan was a signatory to the Southern Manifesto.

• Richard B. Russell Federal Building; Atlanta, Ga.: Russell, a senator for nearly 40 years, co-authored the Southern Manifesto. He led a boycott of the 1964 Democratic convention after President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, calling the landmark legislation, “shortsighted and disastrous.” Gilbert Fite, a historian who wrote a biography of Russell, said, “White supremacy and racial segregation were to him cardinal principles for good and workable human relationships. He had a deep emotional commitment to preserving the kind of South in which his ancestors had lived. No sacrifice was too great for him to make if it would prevent the extension of full equality to blacks.” One of the Senate office buildings next to the Capitol Building is also named after Russell.

Morty did have a good point, though: who decides? Also, where do you draw the line? I'm all for renaming bases and removing statues of Robert E. Lee and other traitors to the country, but, at the same time, toppling a statue of George Washington offends me. But who exactly should be the judge of the balance of history? Yesterday I got a press release entitled "Teddy Roosevelt supporter to offer to spend $1 million to save statue at American Museum of Natural History." Frank Scurlock, public masturbator, founder of Scurlock Entertainment Global, Positive Sky and Air World Enterprises, and the owner of Space Walk Inc, a company specializing in bounce houses, ran for mayor of New Orleans in 2017 and came in 9th in the crowded field, garnering 385 votes (0.47%). He has now "announced a rally to save the statue and has offered $1 million to purchase the statue if it was to be taken down. Scurlock announced a rally of local residents this week. Scurlock says taking down this iconic monument defames the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt and believes that the history of our first environmentalist president should be preserved for future generations to learn from. Scurlock has been a controversial figure in fighting for statues that memorialize history and was arrested attempting to preserve the Jefferson Monument in New Orleans."

Anti-Semitism And The Far Right

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and education organization and on Friday Daniel Greenberg rote up one of their surveys about what single word people associate with Señor Trumpanzee. "More than six in ten (62%) responded with a negative term, while one in four (26%) provided a positive word and 12% were neutral. Looking among Americans who are negative to Trump, they can be categorized into four separate groups. One-third (33%) criticized Trump’s intellect, maturity, and preparedness for the office of the presidency. A similar amount (28%) were especially harsh toward Trump by describing him as bigoted, corrupt, criminal, and dictatorial. Nearly one in four (23%) spoke negatively about Trump’s personality and conduct with others), while less than one in five (15%) critiqued his ego.

Another PRRI survey showed that nearly half the country--48%-- believe the Republican Party "has been taken over by racists... Democrats overwhelmingly view the Republican Party as being controlled by racists (80%), a view shared by 48% of independents and only five percent of Republicans." Just sayin'. Now let's keep that in the backs of our minds and skill over to a report from last week by Joel Swanson for the Jewish Daily Forward-- The Right Owns Anti-Semitism in America. He wrote that "A survey conducted by the American Jewish Committee last October found that fully 84% of American Jews think anti-Semitism in the United States has increased in the past five years, while 42% believe that the status of Jews in the US is less secure than it was just a year ago. And now we have the concrete numbers to back up our fears: The Anti-Defamation League just released its annual audit of anti-Semitic incidents for the year 2019, and the numbers are as grim as you would imagine... In 2019, the ADL recorded 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, a 12% increase from just a year earlier in 2018, and the highest number on record since the ADL began collecting annual data on American anti-Semitism in 1979. Instances of harassment were up by six percent, vandalism was up by 19%, and anti-Semitic assaults rose by a terrifying 56% since 2018. There’s no denying it: The numbers are bad. But in addition to the horror at these numbers, there’s also a political lesson here for the American Jewish community, if we are open enough to learn it. The majority of anti-Semitic incidents in 2019 seem to have been random attacks motivated by personal hatred, not linked to any identifiable political ideology. But the ADL also recorded 270 anti-Semitic incidents inspired by extremist ideology. And out of these identified extremist incidents, one side of the political spectrum was a lot more culpable than the other."

[O]f the three deadliest anti-Semitic attacks committed in 2019, in Poway, Calif., Jersey City, N.J., and Monsey, N.Y., the ADL found that one attack, the Poway attack, was motivated by far-right white nationalism.

...Whatever our community leadership may say, American Jews simply do not hold both sides of the political spectrum equally to blame for rising anti-Semitism. Polling last year found that more than three-quarters of American Jews consider the extreme political right to pose a “very serious” or “moderately serious” threat to the safety of American Jews today, compared to only one-third who believe that about the extreme left.

And when we have a US president who says that neo-Nazis who chant “Jews will not replace us” include some “very fine people” among them, and who shares the very same conspiracy theories about George Soros funding migration to the US from Central America that are cited by synagogue shooters, it’s no wonder that more than half of American Jews place substantial responsibility on the Republican Party for rising anti-Semitism in the US today. (By comparison, fewer than one in five American Jews consider the Democratic Party to be equally culpable for anti-Semitism.)

Despite these findings, the ADL has gone to great lengths to conceal the political implications of its new anti-Semitism audit. In the past, the ADL has called on Congress to avoid the “politicization of anti-Semitism” and the ADL’s press release about its new audit seemed to deliberately avoid using the words “left” or “right,” instead referring only to “extremism.” You have to spend more time digging into the ADL’s findings to learn what the ideological source of most of this non-specified “extremism” actually was.

So, if the ADL’s findings about the main source of anti-Semitism in the US are as clear as they are, and if most American Jews ourselves know that at some level, then why are our community institutions so insistent that “American Jews affiliated with both parties view the far right, the hard left and extremism in the name of Islam as anti-Semitic threats,” in the words of Avi Mayer of the American Jewish Committee?

Why not call out the most significant ideological source of anti-Semitism in the United States for what it is? Why is the ADL’s messaging downplaying what its own findings uncovered?

Some of it no doubt has to do with the disproportionate influence of right-wing Jews in the Jewish institutional community in the US, who have enough power to delay the nomination of the former leader of immigrant aid-organization HIAS to chair the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, despite the fact that HIAS is much closer to the median American Jewish opinion on immigration than its critics are.

And some of it no doubt has to do with a desire to maintain good relations with the Netanyahu government, whose growing ties with the international far-right led Netanyahu to publicly contradict a report by his own government researchers finding that the far-right posed the greatest threat to Jews in Europe. (This finding was recently confirmed by a German anti-Semitism monitor.)

But I suspect the Jewish institutional community’s refusal to call out the ideological source of most American anti-Semitism is not entirely about the influence of right-wing Jews, or about Israel. I suspect some of it has to do with a deeper sense that the work of the American Jewish establishment ought to be above the fray of politics, to operate in the sphere of what historian of American Judaism Lila Corwin Berman terms “depoliticized politics.” In Berman’s words, instead of identifying themselves as partisan, American Jewish organizations “characterized their work as reflecting consensus and nonpartisan communal interests.”

And now this studied insistence on remaining above partisan politics has left us in the odd position where the ADL is refusing to be forthright about its own findings in its public messaging about the 2019 anti-Semitism audit, for fear of being accused of partisanship. The ADL is burying the lede on its own story.

So yes, we should continue to call out anti-Semitism wherever we see it, right and left. But these are scary times to be an American Jew, and refusing to be honest about the biggest source of the threats we face will not make us safer.

Anti-Semitism is not somehow above partisan politics. It is political, and it’s long past time for us to say so.

There Were Very Fine People On Both Sides, Said Donald J. Trump

If you say anything mean about Trump's core supporters, he will come right to their defense-- as long as he thinks he can get away with it. I wonder if anyone will ask him about the neo-Nazi strategy that ABC News is reporting. The pandemic fits right into their insane agenda.

Racist extremist groups, including neo-Nazis and other white supremacists, are encouraging members who contract novel coronavirus disease to spread the contagion to cops and Jews, according to intelligence gathered by the FBI.

In an alert obtained by ABC News, the FBI’s New York office reports that "members of extremist groups are encouraging one another to spread the virus, if contracted, through bodily fluids and personal interactions."

The FBI alert, which went out on Thursday, told local police agencies that extremists want their followers to try to use spray bottles to spread bodily fluids to cops on the street. The extremists are also directing followers to spread the disease to Jews by going "any place they may be congregated, to include markets, political offices, businesses and places of worship."

The FBI declined to comment on the alert, but issued a statement saying: "FBI field offices routinely share information with their local law enforcement partners to assist in protecting the communities they serve. These products are intended to be informative in nature, and as such, they contain appropriate caveats to describe the confidence in the sourcing of information and the likelihood of the assessment. Additionally, when written at a local level, these products will note that the perspective offered may be limited to the field office’s area of responsibility."

"Anti-government folks in America love to target law enforcement as a symbol of America’s authority," said Don Mihalek, the executive vice president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association Foundation and an ABC News contributor. "It’s just sad that that's their focus at a time of crisis in the nation."

Organizations that monitor the internet for white supremacist messaging have been seeing chatter for weeks that blames Jews and Jewish leaders for both the coronavirus and the global response, including the shut down of all but essential government functions in places like New York, New Jersey and California.

"From pushing the idea that Jews created the coronavirus virus to sell vaccines to encouraging infected followers to try to spread the illness to the Jewish community and law enforcement, as the coronavirus has spread, we have observed how white-supremacists, neo-Nazis and others have used this to drive their own conspiracy theories, spread disinformation and incite violence on their online platforms," said Michael Masters, the head of Secure Communities Network, an umbrella group that coordinates security for Jewish organizations and synagogues around the country.

"While the world faces a deadly pandemic, it’s a stark reminder that certain groups-- notably the Jewish community and law enforcement-- must also continue the battle against those who wish to hurt or kill them," Masters continued. "As the economic situation remains fragile and civil society disrupted, the potential for the followers of hate to act becomes more likely... and more deadly."

"The coronavirus crisis has exposed America as lacking a true health care system," Oklahoma progressive congressional candidate Tom Guild told me today. "The current for-profit system lurches from one drug to another to maximize profits and from one fashionable and expensive treatment to another to add to their bottom line. If we ever needed universal health care achieved through Medicare for All, now is the time. The national emergency also has ripped a gigantic hole in the so-called best economy ever and shredded beyond recognition our already tenuous safety net. This exposes how unstable the financial bottom line is for millions of American families. Everything from the crashing stock market to unprecedented growth in unemployment to the growing insecurity of Americans and their families are flashing red lights. To add hate groups with plans to exploit the health crisis and foment their racist and toxic anti-Semitic agenda further poisons an already dangerous and toxic brew. Hopefully our republic can withstand the many serious systemic problems facing America at this difficult and perilous moment in our country’s history."

Anti-Semitism In America? In New York City? A Guest Post By Playwright Gary Morganstein

America may be about to elect its first Jewish president and I was buoyed yesterday to read that Bernie has gained tremendous ground among African-American voters. According to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Bernie is now basically tied with Obama's former vice president. Before voters were made aware of Biden's record (other than what people already knew, namely that he served as Obama's VP), he led Bernie by as much as 30 points. Now Biden and Bernie are within the margin of error of each other's support in black communities.

I asked a fellow graduate of Stony Brook, Gary Morgenstein, author of the new Off-Broadway play, A Black and White Cookie, to give us some insight into the provocative new drama about racial harmony-- which opens at the Theater for the New City on March 26-- especially since Beigel's Bakery, which has made more than 100 million black-and-white cookies since opening their first store in 1949, just announced that it is pairing up with a A Black and White Cookie, "by handing out hundreds of their signature black and white cookies in an effort to raise visibility of the timely new show and its important and unifying subject matter."

Performances are on Wednesdays to Saturdays at 8:00pm, Saturdays and Sundays at 3:00pm. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased online-- or at TNC's box office (155 1st Avenue, NYC) prior to each performance.


A Black And White Cookie
by Gary Morgenstein

As the old joke goes, a train in Russia at the end of the 19th Century has been stranded for hours. A Cossack officer stomps about the car, shouting darkly that it’s all the fault of the Jews. An elderly religious Jew approaches him and asks respectfully, "Excuse me, Captain, but I am also stuck on this train with no heat or food, just like you. Why would you blame the Jews?"

The Captain shrugs and asks, "Why not?"

I set out to write my new play A Black and White Cookie, about a conservative African American newsstand owner and a Jewish Communist who must overcome anti-Semitism to confront corporate greed and their own mortality, to explore that most ancient of bigotries. You’d be hard-pressed to recall the last play that focused on Jew hatred without referencing the Holocaust.

There’s no single reason why there’s a dearth of theater or even general entertainment about this particular hatred. Since Israel won the 1967 Six Day War, Jews moved out of the underdog category. They’re considered part of the white privileged class as many discriminatory barriers are long gone. The BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement and unsettling leap in college campus anti-Semitism further eats away at sympathy for Jews through attacks on Israel. Hollywood has a long history of ignoring anti-Semitism dating back to the original movie moguls who didn’t want Gentile America to know that Jews were creating their cultural myths. The media really doesn’t much care unless Jews are attacked by far right extremists.

As the great Paddy Chayefsky said, "All Jews keep a packed bag in the hall closet." That once seemed a quaint phrase from a bygone paranoid era. But now, Jew hatred is surging world-wide, including here in the United States, home of the planet’s second-largest Jewish population. According to the FBI, anti-Semitic hate crimes rose 40 percent nationwide from 2014-2018. In 2019, New York recorded the most anti-Jewish hate crimes since 1992, reported the Center for the Study of Extremism and Hate at California State University, San Bernadino (nbcnews.com, 1/3/20).

What I wanted to examine in my play is contemporary anti-Semitism through the prejudices of decent people. Sadly that’s not an oxymoron. Apologies to the gifted Spike Lee and his fine film BlacKk Klansman, but it’s easy to portray pure hate. Violence, name calling, evil vs. good. Forgive the pun, but that’s all so black and white. As a Jew, I’m not particularly worried about the hate mongers. As history has taught those who are willing to study it, the extremists aren’t the ones who pose the real threat, but the good people. They’re the ones who look away, who don’t speak up and let the hatred flourish in their name.

But how to show that? We live in a polarized society where increasingly it’s difficult to explain why something happened. An historical event, a political choice; if you dare try, you’re as often as not hit with accusations that you’re agreeing with that point of view. If you can’t explain, you can’t reason or think and you’re certainly not listening, and very soon our society degrades its simple ability to understand.

What I did in A Black and White Cookie is flip Jew hatred upside down through the prejudices of two African Americans, leaning into the recent spate of violence against Orthodox Jews in major cities and underscoring the sad reality that the strong historic alliance between Jews and blacks in the fight for equal rights has frayed. While there’s a long list of contestants for this title, Jews and blacks have been screwed the most by the world.

In the play, Harold Wilson is a gruff, no nonsense Republican and Vietnam Vet in his late 60s, who must close his newsstand in the East Village after 30 years because of an exorbitant rent increase. His 30-something smart and very protective niece Carol Wilson owns a toy store in Clearwater, Florida, where she’s going to move her uncle once they’ve sold his house.

Hate doesn’t spring from nowhere. It has its own twisted logic. Both Harold and Carol Wilson had a tragic situation involving the death of a loved one which they blame on the Jews, who didn’t act because they were racist but greedy and duplicitous. Now they believe all Jews are that way.

The precarious balance I walk is showing the rationale for hate without justifying the hate, while still portraying Harold and Carol as otherwise sympathetic and good people. The irony is the target of their prejudice is Albie Sands, a non-practicing atheistic Jewish Communist. If you want a picture of Albie, imagine that Bernie Sanders fell on hard times early in his life and ultimately became homeless, while still preaching his political philosophy.

But A Black and White is about more than anti-Semitism. It’s a window into all hatred. There’s no difference between hating a Jew or any other minority except the reason and the pejorative names. Hate is hate and wrong no matter where it comes from and no matter whom is the target.

When a person becomes one of "those people," they’re suddenly not like us. And if they’re not like us, they can be treated differently. They don’t have quite the claim to their place in society. They’re somewhat delegitimized. A person so devalued becomes fair game to any manner of assaults and deprecations, physical, emotional and political. The good and decent people with odious views of “those people” will certainly not raise a hand against them, figuratively or literally, but nor will they raise their voice.

After all, it’s one of "those people" lying on the street, bleeding.

At the end of the day, the play about a theme is just about people. A writer can imagine themselves as Thomas Paine, rousing a rebellion against the Crown, but there are no speeches in my play. I leave that to the politicians. A Black and White Cookie is about two older guys who are superficially strikingly different, yet develop a powerful friendship because neither will go quietly into that good night.

It’s also very much about faith. Not faith in an organized religion or even faith in God. It’s about faith in ourselves and each other as human beings, a simple concept that if we care about each other and get past all the slogans and stereotypes, we might actually like what we find. Another human being.

Guest Post By Tim Russo: How To Fght Anti-Semitism Smears Against Bernie-- Scorched Earth

I’m probably the only American on earth, quite literally, who’s followed every single deployment of the antisemitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party, and the radical left since the day Corbyn decided to run for Labour leader in 2015. All of them-- click around my site. Fight me. As such, I’ve been waiting for the now building tsunami of these same smears against Bernie Sanders like a kitty kat tapping my wee wittle feeties for a few years. Now that this tsunami has begun to arrive, and will never stop, here’s my advice for whenever you hear someone claim, or insinuate, or wonder (just wondering!) that Bernie Sanders, a Jew, is antisemitic. This advice is for anyone, Jew or Gentile. Equally useful.

1. Fuck. You. The only way this smear works is to assume that a Jew must hate themselves so much as to hate all Jews, an assumption which itself is of course antisemitism to its stinking core. Bernie must hate himself, a Jew, because everyone hates Jews, riiiiggghhhtttt?????? Thus, the person confronting you with the smear that Bernie Sanders is somehow antisemitic hates Jews themselves, deeply, whether they know it or not. Thus, you are staring vicious hate straight in the face. What an opportunity, then, to fight the best of fights. If it is a close friend bringing this hideous pile of shit to you, be strong, and be prepared to end that friendship in a blaze of glory, because you should not be friends with antisemites happy to prance around with it in public. Put your dukes up, for the Lord works in mysterious ways, and let them fucking have it. You’ve always wanted to burn a bridge or two, admit it, so, flame on! Channel Sherman marching to the sea through Atlanta. Burn it to dust.

2. No quarter. None. The gravest error the Labour Party made in the face of these endless smears was to take them seriously. Upon becoming Labour leader, Corbyn launched “investigations,” convened “committees,” created a “process” for “discipline,” thereby chaining Labour to the smear like a stone around their neck. MP after MP was hauled before these idiotic collections of brain dead apparatchiks to answer for every single coarse word they ever uttered about anything, but most of all, Israel, (we’ll get to that), and every person they ever so much as shared a bus stop with. It wasn’t just MPs-- random people online, children, grannies-- the whole internet was scoured for sacrificial lambs to tie to the stake, then lather rinse repeat. It remains ongoing and will never end. Never, ever, go down that road-- someone asks you for “proof” or demands anything at all, you tell them you will fuck their ass so hard they’ll shit the proof out their own mouths.

3. Unleash it all. You took notes in 2016, remember? You saw how every single concern troll bait and switch worked against Bernie. You took them all seriously, earnestly debating, playing nice. Remember where that got you? Nowhere. (then President Her lost to an orange billionaire shitting into golden toilets tossing babies in cages. Hear Her Roar!) This smear is your opportunity to stop playing nice, and let it all fly like the wind. Spread your wings, channel your anger into righteousness, and set phaser on blast, comrade. Rejoice in it. Revel in it. Shine on you crazy fucking diamond.

4. Fuck Israel. The paper trail of these smears leads directly to lobbyists literally on the Israeli government’s payroll, every single time (google Luke Akehurst). The point of the smear is to protect western military aid to Israel and perpetuate Palestinian oppression. FACT-- the state of Israel is not Judaism. To boot, for my entire lifetime, the state of Israel has jacked America up in more horseshit than any other nation state on earth, to the point that now they are inserting themselves into our political processes to smear an actual Jew. (election interference! oh bloody hell never mind) Thus, Israel can go fuck themselves. You’ve always wanted to let fly on Israel, now is your chance. Fuck them and the horse they fucking road in on, I am so sick of this piddly ass little country the size of god damned Rhode Fucking Island dragging us around by our short and curlies just so a bunch of Rapture Awaiting Holy Fucks can rub their AR-15 on their pencil dicks to jack off imagining every Jew incinerated by the end of days. Blow me.

5. Keep going. The good news is that deployment of this smear against Bernie Sanders means he’s winning. As the saying goes, you are seeing the whites of their eyes. Ready, aim, fire. At will. Delight in it. If you’re in public, make a scene. Wave your arms around wildly like you’re Groucho Marx or some shit. Leave an indelible warning that if you hear a single utterance of this type one more time, you will crawl up that person’s ass with a microscope and display their entrails across the interwebs for all to see, then put the kettle on, take a rest, and do it again. You’ll enjoy it tremendously. Trust me.

6. Magnify the backfire. Deploying this smear against an actual Jew is so disgusting, the bigger your blowback, the better. It will all benefit Bernie, and already is. Thank whatever god you pray to for this opportunity to be an instrument of his or her will. Then do it again.