On Wednesday, during a call ostensibly about the upcoming Jewish High Holidays with leading members of the American Jewish community, President Charlottesville said this: “We love your country.” He wasn’t talking about the United States.
This is not the first time Donald Trump has assumed that Israel, not America, is the place where American Jews assign their primary loyalty. He has previously told an audience of Jews that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “your prime minister,” and, at a White House Hanukkah party in 2018, regaled the audience of American Jews with the following head-scratcher: “[Mike and Karen Pence] love your country. They love your country. And they love this country.” Again, he told American Jews that Israel, not America, is “your country.” As Shayna Weiss, associate director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, aptly put it on Twitter after the Hanukkah celebration comments: “Just a nice reminder that the line between antisemitism and philosemitism is so, so thin.”
What Trump said about Israel is both deeply offensive and flat out incorrect. A wide array of American Jews have set him straight, including a couple of Senators.
What Trump said this week is a perfect bookend to what he said after neo-Nazis—people who chanted “Jews will not replace us”—marched in Charlottesville, Virginia three years ago, namely that there were “very fine people on both sides.” That march resulted in the murder of anti-fascist protestor Heather Heyer, mowed down by one of those “very fine” neo-Nazis. So Trump, don’t you dare speak about loving anything that has to do with Jews after giving comfort to people like that.
Of course, as a member of the Jewish community, I care about the safety and security of Jews as a whole. That means, by definition, I care about what goes on in Israel. In a world where a great military power, not that long ago, set out to murder every Jew on the planet—and succeeded in killing 6 million (a fact about which two-thirds of Americans between 18 and 39-years-old are ignorant, apparently)—the existence of Israel provides reassurance that there is a place that will take us in if a similar threat arises in the future. That’s something we didn’t have during the Holocaust, when Jewish refugees were repeatedly turned away and sent back to Hitler, including by our country.
Please note that when I say “our country,” I’m talking about the place where I was born, the place that took my ancestors in—during a different time—the place I call home, and the place where my loyalty lies. I’m talking about the country that I love above all others. I’m talking about the United States of America.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)
from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/32Lt9Xe
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