Tom Gross: For Some, the Only Real Culprit is Donald Trump
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001803.html
GQ writer Julia Ioffe was one of several prominent left-wing journalists to blame Donald Trump and/or Benjamin Netanyahu for the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre within minutes of it happening on Saturday.
In a tweet dismissed by others as “repulsive,” Ioffe appeared to claimed that the fault for the actions of the neo-Nazi in Pittsburgh lay with Jews (a majority) who supported the move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
BLAMING TRUMP
[Note by Tom Gross]
Predictably, many journalists rushed to blame Donald Trump for the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.
“Trump didn’t pull the trigger on Jews in Pittsburgh, but he certainly prepped the shooter,” ran the Haaretz headline of a piece by the former editor of the American magazine Foreign Policy.
Similar accusations were made in publications including The Atlantic, The Forward, The New Republic and The Washington Post – and they were made before the bodies of the murdered Jews, which included a 97-year-old woman, had even been removed from the floor of the synagogue where they were executed.
I attach two pieces below from writers that beg to differ (both are subscribers to this list).
Brendan O’Neill, the editor in chief of Spiked, writes:
Bowers’ own social-media output suggests he was more influenced by the shared left / right / Islamist conspiracy theory about Jewish power than he was by Trump’s divisive commentary. He was critical of Trump, on the basis that the president was granting Jews too much influence and presence in the US. This, worryingly, is now a mainstream view. You see it in Guardian cartoons showing Israeli leaders puppeteering Western politicians. You hear it in leftish panic about an all-powerful Israel Lobby. You see it in Press TV headlines about the US being ‘completely under the thumb’ of Zionists. Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the UK Labour Party, worked for Press TV. For years.
Jonathan S. Tobin, the editor on chief of the Jewish News Syndicate writes:
For some, the only real culprit here is US President Donald Trump. … but Bowers was a critic of Trump, specifically because of his sympathy with Jews, the presence of many Jews in key administration posts and his support for Israel, which exceeds that of all of his recent predecessors. He viewed Trump as an ally of Jews – not someone who had encouraged him to attack them…
The attempt to shoehorn Pittsburgh into the “resistance” narrative, in which Trump is seen as unleashing a wave of persecution against Jews and other minorities in America, misunderstands the nature of the anti-Semitism that Bowers espoused…
A world in which we can’t neatly place the blame for Pittsburgh on a political foe who many Jews despise is less frightening than the complex reality…
If we acknowledge that despite his flaws, Trump is neither an anti-Semite nor the reason for anti-Semitic violence here – or anywhere else in a world in which a rising tide of Jew hatred continues to surge – then we are forced to confront the same frustrating truth about this virus that previous generations struggled with. It’s easy to see why putting this in a political context is of some comfort, but those who do so in the course of a futile search for meaning in anti-Semitic hate crimes do neither the Jews nor the cause of civilization any service.
MISLEADING PRESENTATION OF STATISTICS
Tom Gross adds:
When providing statistics for a rise in anti-Semitism in their reports of Pittsburgh, many media fail to mention that most of the bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers in America since Trump became president, threats that form the bulk of these statistics, were not made by Trump supporters. The vast majority were made by two people: a deranged young Jew in one case, and in another case by far-left journalist Juan Thompson who worked for the online publication The Intercept, a publication set up in 2014 by a journalist for the British paper, The Guardian.
ATTACKS DURING THE TERMS OF CLINTON, BUSH AND OBAMA TOO
And in dozens of articles I have read about Pittsburgh and Donald Trump over the last two days I haven’t seen any mention that there were also anti-Semitic shootings when President Obama was president. For example, three persons (including a 14-year-old boy and an elderly woman) were shot dead at two Jewish-related locations in Kansas City, on April 13, 2014.
There were also attacks on Jews during the terms of President Bush (for example, the 2006 murder at the Seattle Jewish Federation) and President Clinton (for example, the 1999 fire bombings on synagogues in Sacramento, California). And many people may have died during the gun attack on the US Holocaust museum in Washington DC during Obama’s first year in office in 2009, had the brave actions of security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns not thwarted the gunman. Tragically, Johns was shot dead in preventing a massacre.
None of this is to say that Donald Trump shouldn’t severely tone done his populist rhetoric (he should) but it is misleading to suggest that anti-Semitism wasn’t there before he assumed office. We need to look dispassionately at the facts and at the incidents of anti-Semitism, in order to combat it.
Comments are closed.
