Linking Farrakhan to – Trump? ‘Tablet’ magazine tries to pin left-wing anti-Semitism on the president. Bruce Bawer
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/linking-farrakhan-trump-bruce-bawer/
EXCERPTS
In a recent editorial, Tablet, the 11-year-old online magazine that calls itself “a new read on Jewish life,” warned that Louis Farrakhan, the poisonously anti-Semitic head of the Nation of Islam, was being normalized by “irresponsible actors across the political spectrum,” including Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and the editors of the New York Times. Tablet‘s evidence for Trump’s participation in this nefarious activity was that he is “now partnering with rapper and Farrakhan fan Ice Cube.”
Yes, Trump has accepted the support of Ice Cube. Overwhelmingly, the mainstream media have responded to this fact not by criticizing Trump for associating with an anti-Semite and Farrakhan fan but by criticizing Ice Cube for associating with Trump. In any event, Ice Cube’s support for Trump aside, Trump’s record on Jews, unlike those of Obama and the Times, is nothing less than stellar. Long before he became president, he broke the ban on Jewish membership in Palm Beach clubs. As president, he’s been, to quote Netanyahu, “the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House.” His daughter is a Jewish convert and her children are Jewish. For Tablet to suggest that Trump’s extremely tenuous connection to Farrakhan is comparable to Obama’s long-term association with him – and with other prominent anti-Semites – is ridiculous. It’s especially ridiculous considering that Farrakhan himself has made no secret of his hostility to Trump. “If America elects Donald Trump,” Farrakhan said before the 2016 election, “it will head into the abyss of hell.” In a speech given last February, Farrakhan called Trump a “thug,” a “beast,” and a “terrorist.”
But then, this is Tablet. To be sure, as Jewish periodicals go, it’s not as consistently and outrageously leftist as, say, the Forward. But it does have a record of defending Obama and bashing Trump – even though the former has been the most anti-Jewish American president in history, and the latter the most philosemitic. Recall that Obama repeatedly presented Israel and the Palestinian Authority as morally equivalent; signed the Iran deal; sought “to thwart an Israeli operation to liquidate Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani”; and abstained on a December 2016 UN resolution against Israel. It was Obama whose first Secretary of State, John Kerry, thundered that Israel’s “pernicious” settlement policy made Mideast peace impossible.
In short, Obama gave any magazine about Jewish life plenty to criticize. And yet the criticism from Tablet was rare, and the apologias plentiful:
- After Obama, early in his presidency, was widely criticized for giving a speech in Cairo that shamelessly sugarcoated Islam, the Tablet ran a piece in his defense.
- Writing for Tablet in 2012, Matthew Ackerman acknowledged that Obama’s stance on Israel was imperfect, but Ackerman did so within the context of an article urging readers not to push this point with pro-Obama friends for fear of alienating them. Who is Matthew Ackerman? Well, at the time anyway, he was, according to his contributor’s note, “the media relations manager for The David Project, a nonprofit that positively shapes campus opinion on Israel.” Hence even a professional Israel-booster was, in effect, giving Obama a pass on his Israel policy.
- On November 21, 2012, noting pre-election predictions that Obama would “throw Israel under the bus” after his re-election, Tablet writer Adam Chandler declared, on scant evidence, that Obama had proved those forecasts wrong.
- In 2015, Tablet ‘s Yair Rosenberg praised Obama for an interview in which he not only joined other world leaders in defining “anti-Zionism… as anti-Semitism,” but also offered what Rosenberg characterized as a “far more eloquent and rich” articulation of this view than anyone else. Never mind that Obama’s deeds didn’t match his words.
These efforts by Tablet writers to vindicate Obama were pathetically feeble, especially given the dramatic contrast between his Israel policies and those of his successor, who moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, acknowledged the Golan Heights as part of Israel, and oversaw the Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain. To its credit, Tablet did run a piece last month calling the Abraham Accords “the most significant development in the Arab-Israeli conflict in the last 25 years.” Yet four months into Trump’s presidency, Tablet ran a piece by Yair Rosenberg complaining that he hadn’t yet moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. After Trump did move the Embassy, Rosenberg wrote another article on the subject. Did he celebrate the move? No, he warned that Trump, by moving the Embassy, had “opened the door” for a U.S. Embassy to Palestine.
But that’s not the worst of Tablet’s Trump coverage. During the run-up to the 2016 election, the publication ran a regular feature entitled TrumpWatch, which offered “the daily low-lights of Donald Trump’s attempt to use the dark forces of bigotry to become President.” Chillingly, the typeface of the TrumpWatch logo bore a strong resemblance to the typeface used to display the film title in the opening credits of Leni Riefenstahl’s Hitler homage Triumph des Willens. To be sure, one contributor to TrumpWatch made a point of saying that Trump is not Hitler: rather, he’s “more like the leader of the German American Bund.” Another sought to link him to the KKK. Before the 2016 election, Rosenberg wrote a piece entitled “Why a Vote for Trump Is a Vote for Mainstreaming Anti-Semites”; after Trump’s victory, Rosenberg wrote that the best-case scenario for the Trump presidency was that he’d delegate governing to “semi-competent people,” ignore his domestic promises, and stick with Obama’s foreign policy; the worst-case scenario would involve violent pro-Trump mobs and a shattered economy.
Admittedly, there’s nothing new or surprising about Tablet’s preference for an Israel-loathing Democrat over a Republic philo-Semite. Most Jewish Americans, after all, plan to vote for Biden, even though he’s plainly a puppet of Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and other anti-Semites in his party’s top ranks. But it’s just plain dishonest for Tablet , in an editorial about Farrakhan, to ignore the fact that it’s overwhelmingly on the left, not the right, that you can find friends, allies, and supporters of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. For Tablet, one can only conclude, it’s simply too much to call out Obama for his extensive Farrakhan connections without coming up with some way to bash Trump, too – despite the fact that he and Farrakhan quite obviously abhor each other.
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