WarSclerotic

The 45th President’s Anti Semitism Problem, The Jewish Press, Rabbi YY Rubinstein, June 30, 2017

Given the Left’s growing animosity toward Israel, it is hardly a surprise that Jared Kushner, the president’s Jewish son-in-law, is someone the Left has firmly in its sights.

Claims of sinister Jewish control of governments used to come from the extreme Right and the extreme Left. Now they seem to be coming from the mainstream Left as well.

And that leads me to conclude that the 45^th president of the United States – half German, half Scottish, and so hated by the media and the Left – far from exhibiting any symptoms of anti-Semitism is, in fact, the victim of that oldest of all hatreds.

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Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan earlier this year urged President Trump to “extricate” himself from what he claimed was Jewish influence in the White House, starting with Jared Kushner.

“Ask any Jew, even your son-in-law, America is never first, Israel is always first,” said Farrakhan. “Mr. Trump, you have to extricate yourself from being controlled by any one of these.”

Art Jones, a neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier, agrees with Farrakhan and in April spoke at a rally in Kentucky accusing Trump of having betrayed him.

“The white majority are fed up of this Two Party… Jew Party… Queer Party system. Now President Trump; he has surrounded himself with hordes of Jews, including a Jew in his own family…”

But if you thought it was just the crazies who see Trump as having been caught in the nefarious web of “International Jewry,” you would be wrong.

Politico – considered a mainstream news outlet with a strong establishment bias – ran a piece in April suggesting the true source of Russia’s alleged infiltration of the Trump campaign.

I would suggest you read the piece for yourself in full, but save it for a dull rainy day, when you need cheering up (assuming your I.Q. is slightly above that of a mushroom), as it is guaranteed to give you a good laugh.

The piece is titled: “The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That Connects Trump and Putin: Where Trump’s Real Estate World Meets a Top Religious Ally of the Kremlin, since there are many types of real estate in the US and Canada; from selling houses to burnaby condos for sale and many other kind of property.

The writer, demonstrating that he may have experimented with certain kinds of mushrooms himself, alleges the whole thing is the fault of…Lubavitch!

Well! I knew that…and also the Hobbits…and Elvis.

And just let me repeat that Politico is a serious media outlet whose journalists are invited to comment on programs like WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show (well, maybe it’s not so serious after all.)

But that led me to thinking: Could the all-out war against Trump by the Left and its media enablers – like The New York Times and the remnant of a once great newspaper called The Washington Post – possibly have anything to do with Trump’s having sent out pro-Jewish and pro-Israel vibes?

And that reference to all-out war is more than mere hyperbole.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal on May 26^, Holman W Jenkins Jr. observed:

The Trump-Russia business is finally coming into clearer, more rational focus. Former Obama CIA chief John Brennan, in testimony this week, offered no evidence of Trump campaign cooperation with Russian intelligence.

In fact, despite the desperate efforts of several agencies to find proof, it seems not to be there.

But as Newt Gingrich says, the “Deep State” seems to be determined to bring Trump down at all costs and Russia is the way it thinks it can succeed.

Given the Left’s growing animosity toward Israel, it is hardly a surprise that Jared Kushner, the president’s Jewish son-in-law, is someone the Left has firmly in its sights.

Kushner is as different from his father-in-law as two men can be. One is bawdy, loud, and brash. The other is quiet, intellectual, and refined. One simply cannot stop tweeting and the other has had a Twitter account since 2009 but not used it to issue even one teeny tweet.

Forbes magazine informs us that Donald Trump’s New York office is covered in wall-to-wall memorabilia and tributes to…Donald Trump!

Jared Kushner’s office is three blocks south of Trump Tower. A leather-bound copy of Pirkei Avot sits on a wooden pedestal in the reception room, and identical silver mezuzahs adorn the side of each office door. The only decoration in his large, terraced boardroom is an oil painting of his grandparents, Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the U.S. after World War II.

Forbes also informs us that Kushner is widely credited for creating the winning formula that got Trump the White House.

No less a Trump foe than the BBC reported early in the Trump presidency that a pattern had been detected in that Trump’s most glaring gaffes occurred over the weekend. That, the BBC explained, is when his son-in-law and daughter were away from the White House because of Shabbat. Other voices, notably that of Trump administration chief strategist Steve Bannon, had the president’s ear then and the tweets betrayed the lack of Jared’s steady and calming influence.

Little wonder that Trump’s many enemies would view it as a smart move to target the person who brings out the best in the president.

So The New York Times, BBC, and the remnant of a once great newspaper called The Washington Post eagerly reported that Jared Kushner was being investigated for possible “collusion” with Russia.

Holman Jenkins commented on this in a June 6 Wall Street Journal piece:

If the Trump campaign directed or cooperated in illegal acts by Russia, that would be collusion in the sense of contributing to a crime.

If Mr. Flynn promised privately what Trump was saying publicly, that he would seek better relations with Russia, as a deliberate inducement to encourage Russian meddling in the race, most of us would consider that an impeachable offense.

But unable to substantiate any such allegation, the media reach for an error so bad it has a name – the equivocation fallacy.

Thus Jared Kushner is accused of, after the election, trying to, “collude” with Russia in settling the Syrian war – the ad absurdum case of trying to make those seven letters c-o-l-l-u-d-e substitute for proof of something nefarious.

Kushner is, in other words, accused of performing the very natural functions of someone on the president’s team, exploring the possibilities of finding common ground with an adversary to defeat a common threat.

I suppose George Washington had people reach out to the British to see if they would concede the war and end the bloodshed. If today’s liberal media had been around back then, that would, in their eyes, have made Washington a British spy.

And since Abraham Lincoln explored ending the Civil War in a letter to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Lincoln must have been a slaver.

Surely too, today’s New York Times would have branded Woodrow Wilson pro-German for discussing with British Prime Minister David Lloyd George how they could bring the First World War to an end.

At the start of Trump’s presidency, the Left (which naturally means the Jewish Left too, including the Forward and, increasingly, the Anti-Defamation League) allied themselves with the absurd claims that Trump and his adviser Bannon were anti-Semitic.

When the Bannon canard collapsed in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Forward published a piece that exploded the lie. The Forward’s editors, however, did not see fit to apologize for publishing the lie in the first place.

Claims of sinister Jewish control of governments used to come from the extreme Right and the extreme Left. Now they seem to be coming from the mainstream Left as well.

And that leads me to conclude that the 45^th president of the United States – half German, half Scottish, and so hated by the media and the Left – far from exhibiting any symptoms of anti-Semitism is, in fact, the victim of that oldest of all hatreds.