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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE JEWISH
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/202615/some-of-my-best-friends-are-jewishIn mid September 2015, Donald Trump prepared to give what had been billed as his first foreign policy address, aboard a battleship docked in Los Angeles. Supporters of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination pricked up their ears. Trump had by then made some striking remarks about global affairs, suggesting painful tax increases for U.S. trading partners, and proposing that allies be made to pay more dearly for military protection. He had implied that many illegal immigrants from Mexico were drug dealers and rapists, and spoken approvingly of Russia’s despotic president, Vladimir Putin. But his statements didn’t add up to a cogent worldview, which supporters of Trump’s competitors could counter. Perhaps, they thought, this speech would provide some red meat.
One prominent Jewish Republican, a lawyer and a fellow at a conservative think tank, was working for Marco Rubio’s campaign. He asked a colleague to watch Trump’s speech and report back on its content. But after the speech, the lawyer didn’t hear anything. “There was nothing in my inbox,” he recalled recently. “I pinged the guy and asked, ‘Can you tell me what [Trump] said?’ ” He received a one-word reply: “Nothing.” The lawyer pressed further, but his colleague insisted: “I’m telling you, Trump said absolutely nothing.” The lawyer remembered, “What was supposed to be this big foreign policy speech was just circumlocution—a lot of adjectives, not actually modifying any particular statement. That was a concern.”
It was to this iteration of Trump—alarming, offensive, but maddeningly vague about particulars—that a bloc of influential Republicans was responding early last March, when they signed an open letter opposing his candidacy. Made up of professionals from the foreign policy and national security communities, the letter’s 121 signatories were largely neoconservatives—members of the hawkish movement that has characterized mainstream Republican foreign policy thinking for the last three decades. Many were Jewish academics and strategists who’d held high-level posts in the Reagan and Bush Administrations. Google a handful—Michael Chertoff, Max Boot, Philip Zelikow, Dov Zakheim, and Robert Kagan, say—and you will turn up non-negligible roles in the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, executive positions at hard-right political consultancies, bylines at The Weekly Standard, and prestigious university appointments. (You will also get bilious blog posts authored by paranoid anti-Semites and Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists denouncing these men.) For these career ideologues who had relied for their influence on sharp wits and a rigidly defined weltanschauung, Trump’s erratic, unprincipled pronouncements were anathema.
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Most of the people I talked to said that their Jewishness did not motivate their opposition to Trump. Several, however, expressed concern that the bigotry Trump has so far directed at Muslims and Mexicans—tempting the worst impulses of the same voters who could once be counted on to cast their ballots for the “Party of Lincoln”—might also be turned on American Jews. “I find it difficult to see how some Jewish voters don’t recognize the danger in someone like this,” Aaron Friedberg said. “If you pay attention not so much to what he’s saying, but to the people and attitudes that he’s brought to the surface—I think there’s a lot of racism and anti-Semitism there.”
That supposition was borne out in April when the journalist Julia Ioffe became the target of anti-Semitic abuse after she published a not-entirely-flattering portrait of Trump’s wife, Melania, in GQ. Dov Zakheim shares Friedberg’s uneasiness. “Once you start that ball rolling toward racism, at some point, Jewish Americans will be caught in that avalanche,” he said. I pointed out that Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and his son-in-law, the New York real-estate developer Jared Kushner, were Jewish. “Sure,” Zakheim said. “But what’s the favorite slogan of many anti-Semites? ‘Some of my best friends are Jewish.’ ”
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Behind the Aegis
(53,961 posts)As one DU'er discovered this morning, after 10 years of anti-Semitic remarks, over 4500 posts, he finally was banned from DU as an anti-Semite and even his "Jewish friends" couldn't save him (he loved using the "some of my best friends are Jews" trope). Most of the time when someone starts with "some of my best friends are..." or "the X people I know think..." or some variation therein, it is usually dismissed out of hand as the mark of someone about to say some fucked up, bigoted bullshit or is a bigot trying to "hide" it by claiming kinship with the affected group. But when it comes to anti-Semitism, it simply isn't so! People suddenly 'can't be anti-Semitic' because they had a Jewish relative, somewhere in their family tree, are currently sleeping with a Jew, or once brushed up against one whilst walking the streets and they have been imbued with all there is to know about Jews and anti-Semitism and become experts, even without staying in a Holiday Inn Express.
I would not, nor will I be, surprised to see the Republican party turn on the Jews. Just as I will not be surprised to see those on the opposite side condemn it, while doing the same damn thing on the left. It will come down to "degrees" of "who wore it better (or worse, as the case may be)" as to how forcefully the anti-Jewish bigotry is condemned or even acknowledged.
Given that much of Trump's base have several strains of bigotry in one form or another, anti-Semitism will undoubtedly get more and more popular with some. Excuses will be made as to why it isn't actually anti-Semitism or why the person saying isn't actually an anti-Semite. Some things never fucking change.
cali
(114,904 posts)
TacoD
(581 posts)It was "wilt the stilt." http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=profile&uid=197337&sub=trans
nadinbrzezinski
(154,021 posts)
RogueTrooper
(4,665 posts)It seems so clinical now 
TacoD
(581 posts)
REP
(21,691 posts)I've seen it here, too. Another serial offender has reappeared after a hiatus. I wish I believed it was the primaries bringing out the worst of the worst, but that nasty undercurrent has been flowing here for quite some time.
Behind the Aegis
(53,961 posts)That's funny! Even more so because I hate, hate rye bread! But, yes, it is a problem we face often, my "favorite" is the non-Jewish person who constantly tells me and other Jews, there is NO anti-Semitism at DU and bemoans any discussion of anti-Semitism with squeaks of "but other minorities..." or "anti-Semitism is no better or worse than other bigotries" though no one has ever claimed such an absurdity. Though a bit petty, I really get irritated by peoples use (often misuse) of Yiddish.
REP
(21,691 posts)I don't which is worse; people who knows what it means and use it anyway or people who think it just means "Gentile woman."
RogueTrooper
(4,665 posts)is my favorite term for that sort of behavior. I should warn you though - it does not calm the situation down 
leftynyc
(26,060 posts)There's a bakery not far from me that will let you go in the back and take it off the racks where it's cooling. With a schmear and maybe some lox - HEAVEN. But it HAS to be toasted.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)So, yeah.
Jeffersons Ghost
(15,235 posts)I have old friends who are Jewish too. I think that I might have made some online friends, who are Muslim recently with these words: قُلْ الله قُلْ Read the short previous Opening Post
leftynyc
(26,060 posts)that donnie scares the crap out of me. His ban on Muslims, his "Mexicans are all rapists" nonsense sends chills down my spine. His repulsive wife saying that the editor of whatever magazine she was interviewed in brought the disgustingly anti-semitic attacks on herself by being provocative. I honestly don't know which of them is worse, the mr or mrs trump - they're both repulsive in their bigotry.
libodem
(19,288 posts)Trump is a bigot and a menace to society.
RogueTrooper
(4,665 posts)The link is to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch blog. It's not just the Don with his history of racism and mysoginy it's the tolerance and, in some casess, encouragement of anti-Semitims in his ranks.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/05/06/right-wing-extremists-hail-ascension-%E2%80%98emperor-trump%E2%80%99-gop-nominee
Hekate
(90,714 posts)....are high on Trump's list of people he wants to expel; as a consequence he's quite prepared to vote for Hillary. BIL is more tuned in to politics than I gave him credit for, given that he always has FOX on -- but let me tell you, he is passionately against Donald Trump.