In the wake of the massacre of 11 Jewish temple congregants in their place of worship, America has been snapped back to the reality of what true antisemitism looks like.
Or at least it should have.
For while Americans apparently can agree that Nazis murdering Jews is bad, that’s incredibly sadly about the end of it; as drones who appear to genuinely be unable to parcel any aspect of existence from partisan dogma, flock to craft any attack they can from the corpses of the victims to denounce ‘the other team’.
Predictably, the main leftist narrative has manifested into ‘Trump caused this.’ But while that narrative could be foreseen, the sheer audacity and blatant disrespect of the affair could not.
The BBC reports,
about 2,000 demonstrators who held a protest, according to Reuters news agency.
As the president was driven through Pittsburgh, some bystanders made obscene gestures to his motorcade and thumbs-down gestures, reports AP news agency.
As Mr. Trump arrived at the synagogue, demonstrators chanted “President Hate, leave our state” and “Words have meaning.”
They held signs with such slogans as “We build bridges, not walls”; “Trump, Renounce White Nationalism Now”; and “Trump’s lies kill.”
During the presidential visit, one protester holding a baby was seen by reporters calling out: “We didn’t invite you here.”
While President Trump and his Jewish daughter and family- as well as his Jewish treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin – paid their respects to shrines to the fallen protests could be heard in the background. For while the shooter, now released from the hospital and held by US marshals, was vocally anti-Trump for this exact unusual Presidential relation to Jews, those who dislike him have seen fit to blame his ‘fiery rhetoric’ for the hate crime.
Ultimately to me, as a Jew, all this reveals to is that those protesting’s only interest in supporting the Jewish community is out of political expediency. If anything, being unable to stifle complaints regarding ‘the bad orange tweet man’ for even a brief moment of rumination and respect to the fallen, epitomizes this underlying set of motivations.
And after all, linking Trump to Nazism… and more focally Hitler, despite the president’s descendants literally destined to Judaism (after all he already has Jewish grandchildren) has been a jaded tactic of his detractors for some time now.
For though most decent people seem to have come to consensus by now that Hitler was not the best of fellows, they’re apparently amicable enough to his memory to believe that their current posh and privileged modern existence under President Trump is even remotely relevant to the hellscape of the absolute depths of human depravity that was the Nazi Regime’s rule over Europe under Adolf Hitler.
Of course, it is this very devaluation of the utter evil that is true anti-Semitic Nazism that lends itself to its proliferation and pulls the ire of society off of true candidates, like the Pittsburg shooter, in favor of pursuing the fulfillment of Godwin’s law.
While there are certainly other Jews who may disagree, for myself as the descendant of those who suffered and were murdered by actual Nazi’s (not Republicans), the progressive dilution of the concept of Nazism to ‘you who I dislike’ is the most dangerous catalyst for allowing it to fester as we forget that it actually means ‘you who engage in the industrial genocide of millions’.
Jews as large seem to realize this. Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett has strongly defended US President Donald Trump from accusations that he bears any responsibility with word worthy of leaving for final consideration,
“antisemites do not ask if you are a Republican or Democrat. They do not ask if you are Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform.
They only act because of their hatred of Jews.”