"Jews will not replace us," demonstrators chanted at the Unite the Right rally organized by armed white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, to stop the removal of a statue dedicated to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
A few days after the rally, Donald Trump was asked by reporters about the protests, to which he responded that there were "very fine people on both sides."
This is the same Trump who said Monday, “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel and they should be ashamed of themselves.”
Ironic coming from the anti-Semite-in-chief.
How does Trump get to decide who is Jewish enough?
Trump's penchant for anti-Semitic slurs goes back to well before this campaign.
He has repeatedly suggested that Jews are greedy or money-grubbing and use their wealth to control politics.
In a 1991 book, the former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino wrote that Trump had told him: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump praised Republican Jewish Committee members as great “negotiators” and openly declared that Jewish donors wanted a candidate they could buy: “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money,” he said. “That’s okay, you want to control your own politician.”
Trump is the defining example of how loyalty to Israel and anti-Semitism are linked.
If a Jew (like me) calls for a ceasefire and protests Israeli occupation and the war on Gaza then Trump says we are self-hating Jews.
And the scandal is that pro-Israeli Jews say the same thing.
My substack posts opposing the war on Gaza and the American supply of arms are regularly attacked, calling me a self-hating Jew.
All you have to do is see the vitriol directed at Oscar winner Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech at the Academy Awards last week.
Glazer, a Jew, had the courage to go before a global television audience to denounce Israel’s use of our Jewishness to justify war and occupation.
“We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaustbeing hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”
In response, the Anti-Defamation League posted a message on social media attacking Glazer’s comments as “reprehensible”, saying: “Israel is not hijacking Judaism or the Holocaust by defending itself against genocidal terrorists. Glazer’s comments at the Oscars are both factually incorrect and morally reprehensible. They minimise the Shoah and excuse terrorism of the most heinous kind.”
Which, of course, is nonsense.
Glazer has also received widespread support for his comments, including from Israeli military veterans’ organisation Breaking the Silence, which posted a statement on social media saying “[Glazer] took an unequivocal stance against the cynical utilisation of Judaism and the Holocaust in the name of justifying the occupation … we refuse to accept the ease with which the blood and lives of civilians is used as a justification for political ideologies, or as a bargaining chip. Empathy is not a zero-sum game.”
Still it is odd to find the anti-Semite Trump and so-called progressive Jews who defend Israel’s war finding common ground like this.