Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on December 20, 2019

Could President Donald Trump be charged under his own executive order?

I had to ask myself that after he signed an executive order to crack down on anti-Semitism on college campuses, only a few days after insulting his audience in a recent speech to a national Jewish organization in Florida.

What else can you say about a guy who pats you on the head with one hand and slaps you in the face with the other?

A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well, Trump told attendees at the Israeli American Councils 2019 national summit in Hollywood, Fla., according to a transcript posted on the White House website. Youre brutal killers. Not nice people at all, but you have to vote for me, you have no choice.

Youre not going to vote for the wealth tax, he also said. Yeah, lets take 100 percent of your wealth away. No, no. Even if you dont like me; some of you dont. Some of you I dont like at all, actually. (Laughter.) And youre going to be my biggest supporters because youll be out of business in about 15 minutes, if they get it.

It should come as no surprise that some other Jewish groups condemned the presidents remarks with such uncomplimentary terms as deeply offensive and vile.

Jewish Democratic Council of America Executive Director Halie Soifer said in a statement Dec. 8 that Trump used anti-Semitic stereotypes to characterize Jews as driven by money and insufficiently loyal to Israel. Jewish advocacy group J Street tweeted that the president is incapable of addressing Jewish audiences without dipping into the deep well of anti-Semitic tropes that shape his worldview.

Well, this is just Trump being Trump, say Trump apologists, and that much is spot-on accurate. Most of his speech talked about his gestures of strong support for Israel, including his decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem.

And what could be more Trumpian than to sign an executive order Dec. 11 targeting what his administration describes as a growing problem with anti-Semitic harassment on college campuses.

Thats a worthy and unfortunately necessary goal. Over the last decade, anti-Semitic incidents have grown annually and dramatically to 1,986 incidents in 2017 from 751 in 2013, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which welcomed Trumps executive order.

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the league, praised Trumps new order for giving police and campus officials a new tool in fighting anti-Semitism.

Members of both parties have proposed similar actions in Congress. But Trumps executive order also poses hazards for those who care about preserving something that is necessary yet regrettably embattled these days: free speech.

For example, the order comes as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the Israeli government has been rising up on some campuses. The movement began as a protest against the Israeli governments treatment of Palestinians. But over time that legitimate political issue has become intermixed in too many minds to mean opposition to the Jewish state itself.

A more technical but still intriguing sticking point raised by the presidents order is its use of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to withhold federal money from schools that fail to act against discrimination against Jews.

Can Jews, besides being a religion or an ethnic group, be considered a race and therefore a protected class under Title VI? Experts speak eloquently on both sides of that issue, so I dont expect that question to go away soon.

But our president, as he has shown many times, isnt into nuance. If you want to accept the tremendous amount of federal dollars that you get every year, you must reject anti-Semitism, he said. Its very simple.

No, nothing about race, ethnicity and fighting discrimination is simple. Meanwhile the plague of anti-Semitism appears still to be rising, with campuses hardly topping the list of terror threats.

The day before Trumps signing ceremony, two shooters, including one said to have published anti-Semitic posts and to have been a follower of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, which is hostile to Jews, killed four people in a rampage in Jersey City, N.J., that appears to have targeted a kosher market before the shooters also were killed.

The Department of Homeland Security recently shifted its strategy to focus on domestic racial terrorism, including white terrorists. Thats a welcome move. So would leadership, not just provocation, from the White House.

Read the original post:
Trump fights anti-Semitism one day, fuels it the next - Bowling Green Daily News

Category: Anti-Defamation League
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