(CNN) Donald Trump on Saturday deleted a tweet critical of Hillary Clinton after he came under fire for evoking anti-Semitic stereotypes with a graphic that included dollar bills and a six-pointed star.
Before deleting the original tweet, which also contained the words “most corrupt candidate ever,” the presumptive Republican nominee tweeted the same graphic with a tweak: a circle instead of a six-pointed star, which evokes the Jewish Star of David.
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment about the decision to use a six-pointed star and whether they were concerned about the potential for the imagery to evoke anti-Semitic undertones…
Abe Foxman, the director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League, called the tweet “insensitive” but said he was reassured by the campaign’s decision to delete the tweet within a few hours.
“They realized it was edgy and could be abused. I’m not sure the intentions were there but there was certainly a lack of sensitivity,” Foxman said.
Obviously, Trump is using the red star to subliminally point out the fact that, as everybody knows, Hillary Rodham Clinton is Jewish!
Everybody does know that, right?
What? … Hillary’s not Jewish? … Really? …
Okay, never mind …
Hey! But what about red being the Jewish color?
Oh. I see.
Well … But what else could a six-pointed star signify?
John Rivers tweets: “Jews are the richest group in America.
Is there Jewish Privilege? Or just White Privilege?”
“Jews are 2% of America, but less than 0.3% of the US military.
Generally speaking, they don’t volunteer to fight.”
“Once we ban six-pointed stars, equilateral triangles, and the color yellow – the world will finally be free of Anti-semitism. Huzzah!”
“Since a Star of David is made from two intersecting triangles, we should probably ban them, too. Just to be safe.”
* Our 6th Infantry Division used the red, 6 pointed star as their shoulder patch from WW1 until 1994, when they were deactivated following the Cold War.
BTW, Trump’s twitter feed has replaced the star with a big red circle. So Trump backed down. He is better when he doesn’t back down.
* I laughed earlier today seeing the breathless Huffington Post on this. Just can’t get excited about these silly scandals any more, life’s short. My reaction was like yours, temporarily stunned that maybe had I missed the revelation this year that Hillary had Jewish ancestry? (Kerry had one of those in ’04.) Cuz that would be pretty sweet timing.
* In 1983 or 1984, all of us on the Procter & Gamble account got notified that P&G’s man-in-the-moon logo had nothing to do with Satanism (which none of us had ever heard before) and we.had.better.not.joke.about.it.
* It’s a six-pointed star on a background of money. The words in the star say “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” and this charge is based on claims that she has taken money from “special interests”, wealthy political donors, Goldman Sachs, etc. You don’t have to be a paranoid Jew to notice the imagery and connotations here.
* Any other candidate, Democrat or Republican, and I’d buy the (((antisemitic dog whistle))) charge. Trump? Nah. He had no clue.
That’s really the beauty of Trump’s campaign: He’s immune to the crypto-Nazi charge that usually bedevils Republicans, because anybody who’s watched more than five minutes of a Trump speech can see that if the guy really wanted to trash Jews, he’d just come right out and do so. There are no subtexts or codes or dog whistles with this guy.
The very idea of Trump sitting around like Lee Atwater or Karl Rove trying to cook up some sotto voce race- or Jew-baiting angle is comical.
* I remember a few years ago a clothing manufacturer made a line of T-shirts for children, with horizontal stripes, and a yellow star-shaped sheriff’s badge. They were caught in a shitstorm of publicity claiming they were imitating (or mocking?) the striped pajamas and yellow star worn by Jews in concentration camps. Despite the fact that the stripes looked nothing like the vertical stripes of the camp uniform, and the T-shirt star actually had ‘Sheriff’ written across it! But the company nevertheless withdraw the shirts from sale.
* Huffpo hasn’t twigged this sort of thing is counterproductive. I suspect more Jews will vote for Trump than voted for Romney, because they realise that mo Muslims, mo problems.
* A person who has 50/50 chance of being the next President tweeting an anti-Jewish image created by an alt-right message board should indeed be our new normal. Why would anyone question it?
Alt-righters are people, after all (well, sort of).
* The image originated at 4chan /pol, and is pretty clearly intended to say she’s bought by the Jews. Trump probably didn’t see it that way when he tweeted it, of course.
* So what?
The left is blatantly, explicitly, unambiguously anti-white.
And the right is supposed to bend over backwards to not even give the appearance of possible anti-”Semitism”?
Are the few hundred openly anti-Jewish anonymous NEET /pol/tards living in their parents’ basements throughout the Anglosphere the single greatest threat we face as a civilization?
Will they come to dominate the earth if anyone retweets an ambiguous image?
One could be the single most Hebrewphilic person in existence and still notice and condemn the double standard.
Unless one considers Jewish interests and white interests to be fundamentally and diametrically opposed. In which case maybe the anti-”Semitic” have a point.
* I actually think this is a weak attempt to convince the alt-right crowd that You Are Not Forgotten. He actually called Israel a great ally in response to a heckler recently. The guy knows he has a mandate to deport *illegal* Mexicans and bar Muslims from entering, and that’s what he’s running on.
Antisemitism is kind of a nonstarter with the general public. Hollywood’s too good at what they do, and…what’s the last time *you* got mugged walking through the Jewish neighborhood? A lot of the behind-the-scenes cultural manipulation stuff is of interest only to cultural conservatives, the USS Liberty was a while ago (I’ve actually seen on more liberal comments sections: ‘A possibly mistaken attack 50 years ago? That’s the best you can do?’), there’s plenty of goyish blame to go around for the Iraq War, and with the current crop of ‘diversity’, people admire immigrant groups who actually try to assimilate and work hard and go to school. (You don’t see much resentment of Chinese-Americans, for example.)
Hell, non-Jewish people are trying to get on JDate. I wouldn’t wish Jewish women on anyone (OK, my mom is a nice person but she wasn’t born here), but there’s enough guys with cuckold fetishes and paying dominatrices that I guess there’s some niche appeal.
* I doubt Trump was trying to connect Hillary with Goldman Sachs money and with Jewry — but maybe he should have.
Hillary’s daughter is married to former Goldman, Sachs employee Marc Mezvinsky. Mezvinsky ran a hedge fund in which he tried to game the Greek financial crisis and lost 90% of his investors’ money. There is suspicion that Hillary tried to use her position as Secretary of State to get inside information on the Greek bailout to assist her son-in-law’s hedge fund.
Chelsea’s father-in-law, Ed Mezvinsky, did prison time for running a financial scam.
* That kind of graphic design (highlighting something inside a star for pizzazz) is so old-fashioned that I think it was intentional, although I don’t think Trump is “anti-Semitic”. I’m pretty sure the Curiel comments were intentionally provoking too. I think Trump plays a dangerous game. Curiel probably hurt him, while it’s not clear what he was trying to do here, so difficult to tell with this one.
Gideon Resnick writes for The Daily Beast:
Trump’s Star of David Hillary Meme Was Made by Racist Twitter User
The image using an anti-Semitic trope to attack Clinton appeared on 8chan after a vile Twitter user created it two weeks ago.
The meme Donald Trump put on Twitter on Saturday that has been called anti-Semitic for featuring a six-point star like the Star of David was first created by a racist Twitter account.
On Saturday, his campaign tweeted an image co-opting a graphic depicting Hillary Clinton proudly looking off into the distance with the words “History made” emblazoned across it. Except this version featured a background made entirely of money and prominently included what appeared to be a red Star of David with the words “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” written inside.
The earliest iteration of the questionable picture seems to have come from the Twitter account @FishBoneHead1, which tweeted the image on June 15.
From there, the image found its way to 8chan, a gurgling cesspool on the Internet that is currently devoted to celebrating the death of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. As Mic.com reported on Sunday, the image was posted there on June 22, featuring the file name HillHistory.jpg which could be a reference to the Neo-Nazi code "HH," short for "Heil Hitler."
Trump’s campaign quickly took down the meme after backlash but then put up a new image with a circle pasted over the star, whose points could still be faintly seen.
@FishBoneHead1 describes himself as a "comedian" who will "probably offend you if you are Liberal, Politically Correct, Feminist, Democrat." The account has created or shared several racist memes bashing Clinton, Muslims, and other minorities.
Another tweet from the same account includes a garish cartoon depicting a Muslim man carrying a severed head with an upside down sign reading "Refugees Welcome."
* Hey Jack, can you clue us in on all the other “Jewish things” out there.
We would all like to avoid being anti-semitic and it would really help to have an official list.
* The picture was obviously meant as another in a long line of winks to Trump’s alt-right fans, because he has to keep suckling at their teet for more votes, I guess.
It’s just major enough so they’ll notice it (and they have) and just minor enough so it’s not outright offensive-looking to all people.
Trump has done this through his twitter account roughly a dozen times now. Once or twice might be an accident. But these accidents just keep happening.
* You’re right, of course. It’s worth getting Jewish people all riled up (yet again), and getting himself labeled an anti-Semite, just to get the votes of a hundred thousand or so people who already refer to him as a god-emperor.
That makes total sense, and isn’t paranoid or ridiculous at all.
* If you actually went to the twitter feed of the guy who posted the picture, you would see that he’s simply a political troll, and anyone who took this tweet to be “anti-semitic” is just being trolled. It’s what happens on the internet.
Don’t get me wrong: there is such a thing as the alt.right. Sometimes the generally chauvinistic, nationalist tenor of the alt.right is anti-Semitic, and sometimes it is not, especially because there are plenty of Jews who buy into the chauvinist and nationalist point of view. If this picture used — I repeat, if — the Mogen David to troll Jewish sensibilities, it was not done to pursue some secret Nazi Protocols agenda. It was done to make fun of hypersensitive Jewish sensibilities. However, anti-semitism doesn’t mean that people have to respect the things that are sacred to you. To insist that that is the case is to buy into the whole justification for the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the need to shut down discussions about A because someone holds a belief B that is currently “unacceptable”, that prevents speakers, even pro-Israeli speakers, from holding talks on college campuses, which demands trigger warnings, safe spaces, a priori belief in all sexual assault claims, and much else besides.
In short, get over it.
* This is very unlikely to be an ultra-subtle anti-Semitic dog whistle, because Trump seems basically incapable of dog whistling. He openly says whatever idea pops into his mind, even if it gets him into trouble.
Back during the Bush administration, listening to the president’s speeches was like trying to read between the lines of Pravda. Bush would be giving a speech that was supposed to be about national security and he’d start rambling on about the Dred Scott decision.
In a Trump administration, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.
* I think this issue is totally much ado about nothing. These people must be really desperate if they have to go to such lengths to build up a case of anti-Semitism against Trump, whose daughter not only married an Orthodox Jew but converted to her husband’s religion. You can disagree all you want with Trump’s political positions, but please spare me the silliness that Trump is somehow a racist or anti-Semitic.
* The thing about Trump, whom I have a love/hate relationship with, is he has some very obvious personal weaknesses, among them that he’s an extreme narcissist who creates an echo chamber around himself.
Like today, the news that for his running mate he’s considering: 1. Newt Gingrich, the “I really am a secret Hillary plant and want to lose” choice. Here’s a refresh (2) on Gingrich’s popularity level. 2. Mike Pence, the “go completely off-message and make it a referendum on social issues, which would be a losing strategy even if the notion of Donald Trump as pious moralist weren’t beyond ludicrous” choice. Also, he looks like a mugshot on the sex offender registry. And he’s not even popular in his home (red) state of Indiana. 3. Chris Christie, the “Hillary won’t be indicted but your running-mate will” choice. Nevertheless manages to look like a sane pick compared to the other two, so of course he’s looking like the least likely. I mean, it’s really something for the most unpopular nominee in history to nevertheless manage to choose a running-mate who’s a liability, and its all because he’s too narcissistic to consider anyone who’s criticized him. So I don’t think it makes sense to view Trump’s actions as being motivated by a desire to appeal to the middle ground and win, so much as stroking his own ego. He clearly didn’t tweet the image as an intentional anti-Semitic dog-whistle, but the /pol/tard who created it and tweeted it at him in the first place did, and he carelessly sent it out again. I read someplace that Obama has to have 7 people look at one of his tweets before he sends it out — you don’t necessarily need to sink to that level, but you do need to have someone prevent this kind of stupid own goal from happening, after it’s happened dozens of times. And the reason it isn’t happening is because his aides are too afraid of offending him.
