Jonathan Marks posts on FB:
* How Are Those Non-Racist Open Borders Working Out?
Is Islamophobia worse than rape and sexual assault? More than 1,000 crimes by Muslim migrants against women in a single night in Cologne. Police detain two suspects, from Algeria & Iraq. Of course, we should have more migrants and less jails, say Bernie & Hillary.
* If depicting Yitzhak Rabin in a Nazi uniform was said to be incitement and prelude to his assassination, is the relentless comparisons of Trump to Hitler an equal incitement and prelude to his assassination? What leaders are disavowing that verbal violence?
* As that violent instigator Trump says, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun. Because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl.” Oh, wait a second, that was Obama.
* Appearing on CNN’s Reliable Sources on Sunday, longtime media critic Steven Brill — no conservative — saw a double standard in how the media reacted to the events in Chicago: “I want to say this very narrowly, because this does not excuse Mr. Trump from inciting violence, it does not excuse everything else he’s doing in his campaign. I do think that if Trump supporters, by the dozens or hundreds, planted themselves at a Hillary Clinton rally or a Bernie Sanders rally and stood up and disrupted it, and that was their intent, that the press would cover that differently. So in that sense, I think Trump has a point.”
CNN host Brian Stelter agreed: “I think you’re right.”
* Why when leftist protestors disrupt Trump rallies does it reflect poorly on Trump, not on those leftists attempting to suffocate political expression? If right-wingers disrupted a Hillary or Bernie rally, would we blame Bernie/Hillary people or the disruptive right-wingers? So far, only leftists are disrupting Trump rallies, not rightists disrupting anyone. Try disrupting a Black Lives Matter rally in Baltimore and see how gently they’ll react.
* Some said (not in this story), what’s worse, being endorsed by David Duke, whose endorsement Trump didn’t seek, or Hillary and Bernie actively meeting with and seeking the endorsement of Al Sharpton, provocateur of the Crown Heights Pogrom, with its cries of “Kill the Jews,” the murder of Jew and dozens of home invasions? What’s more threatening, a Klan endorsement that Trump didn’t seek, or Hillary and Bernie voting for the Iran nuclear deal? The deal allows Iran to test ballistic missiles, and this week Iran did, with threats to annihilate Israel written in Hebrew on the missile. To Jews, Sharpton is worse than Duke, Iran is more threatening than the Klan.
Jonathan Mark writes:
In a campaign stained by insults and innuendo, has anyone been more smeared than conservative Republicans supporting Donald Trump?
More than a few Orthodox Zionists among them complained to us that in a dangerous, uncertain world, their fears are dismissed as phobias: xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia; they’re called racist, nativist, fascist. Their candidate, Trump, is routinely compared to “Hitler” by professors, comedians, even Anne Frank’s half-sister, Eva.
(Despite the oft-repeated charges that Trump hates Muslims, a March 1 poll conducted by CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, found that 18 percent of American Muslims are now Republican and Trump is their favored nominee.)
Last week, Trump asked those at a rally to “raise your hand,” like a juror at a swearing-in, in a pledge to vote for Trump in the primary. To the people at the rally, an innocent gesture, surely, but it was “Heil Hitler” in the eyes of Abe Foxman, formerly of the Anti-Defamation League, signaling “obedience to their leader.”
Foxman, for decades, scolded those who made Holocaust comparisons to petty politics. Americans are routinely scolded against comparing the nuclear deal with Iran to the 1938 Hitler appeasement. “We can’t even compare Islamic terrorists to Nazis — or even to Islam,” said one Trump supporter, “and suddenly we’re told that a Trump rally is a Nuremberg rally on the eve of the Holocaust.” Incivility is contagious; Trump’s campaign, drizzled with impolitic insults, is being mirrored on the left by intemperate critiques as incendiary as Trump’s own.
J.J. Gross, a New York writer now living in Jerusalem, e-mailed: “I am not for Trump; I am against Hillary [Clinton] and [Bernie] Sanders. Hence I will vote for Trump, absent any other opponent to those two.”
Gross was one of several who pointed to Sidney Blumenthal as an example why “Hillary can’t be trusted.” Blumenthal’s son, Max, is a fierce critic of Israel; The Nation called “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel” by Max Blumenthal, “the ‘I Hate Israel’ handbook.” The elder Blumenthal suggested Clinton read Max’s articles, some of which Clinton distributed to her staff.
Gross continued, “Bernie Sanders’ Jewishness is the most dangerous kind. … My worry with Sanders is not what he would do ‘for’ Israel but what he would do ‘to’ Israel. Yes, Trump is a bombastic, bloviating egomaniac, in the American tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and P.T. Barnum; such ego demands greatness for America, and by extension its allies, of which Israel is certainly one, if not the only one.”
In Brooklyn, one rabbi, familiar with back-room conversations in Borough Park and chasidic Williamsburg, said Trump’s supporters were “not the sophisticated people.” But even unsophisticated people can have good reasons, said the rabbi, who asked not to be named because of his political ties. “There’s great anger at the Democratic Party,” and “here comes a man who speaks his mind, telling everyone off. He’s not really a nice guy. The Yiddish word is prust,” crude, coarse.
Nevertheless, in Florida, Sid Dinerstein, former Palm Beach County Republican chair, said, “The Republican Jews I speak to seem very solid for Trump.”
Larry Spiewak, chairman of the Flatbush Council of Jewish Organizations, was cited last summer in Hamodia and Haaretz as a Trump supporter. (In the American Jewish Committee poll of Jewish attitudes released last fall, Trump polled higher than any other GOP hopeful.) Spiewak told Haaretz that Trump was like Howard Stern. “Only Trump has the guts to say what others are afraid to say out loud. … Is he abrasive sometimes? Yeah, but that’s what people like…”
Six months later, Spiewak is not so sure. He senses that Trump supporters may be less apt to express their support. “Look,” Spiewak told us, “I listen to Howard Stern every morning, but I don’t go around telling everybody. I still agree with what Trump’s saying on the issues, but I’m not agreeing with how it is said — the way he puts people down. He’s losing respect from the community. My respect level is less than it was.
“You know,” said Spiewak, “I always say to my friends, ‘anybody but Hillary.’ But I really don’t know what I’m going to do now. Hey, it’s early. My father used to say, an hour before Shabbos isn’t Shabbos. A lot can happen.”
What about him being neutral on Israel? (Trump has said that in negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians he would be “evenhanded,” an honest broker.) “I don’t think he’s neutral on Israel,” said Spiewak.
Dr. Alan Rosenthal, a professor of surgery at New York University, said he had no problem with Trump’s “neutral” comment regarding Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. “He is correct in ‘not showing his cards’ at this time. I would not want to play poker with Donald Trump. I don’t think Trump would hesitate to treat Arab leaders as condescendingly as he did Chris Christie.”
Rosenthal continued, “From an Israel/Jewish perspective, a priority to me, I trust Trump to be a very strong, positive candidate. People I know who have had dealings with Trump, both business and personal, never heard him intimate even the most subtle anti-Jewish or anti-Israel comments.” His Jewish daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren, “all of whom he loves dearly,” are all shomer Shabbat, “making an anti-Israel/Jewish position very unlikely.”
There hasn’t been much polling on the race in Israel, but the Jewish Journal cited an Israeli Democracy Institute monthly Peace Index poll saying that 60 percent of Israelis say that Trump is good for Israel, while 51 percent say the same for Hillary Clinton. Seventeen percent of Israelis say Trump would be bad for Israel; 32 percent say Clinton would be bad for the Jewish state.
Dennis Prager writes March 15, 2016:
This past Friday, a left-wing mob shut down a Donald Trump rally in Chicago. Most Americans viewing what happened saw it for what it was — another left-wing assault on the speech of those with whom they differ and on traditional American civility.
Not surprisingly, the media reporting has concentrated overwhelmingly on Trump for incendiary and inexcusable comments he has made at some of his other rallies that were disrupted by protesters. For example, he offered to pay any legal bills incurred by a man in the audience who sucker-punched a protester as he was being led out of a Trump rally.
Many have also noted the alleged assault by Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who was accused of trying to grab Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields’ arm. (I say “alleged” because I have watched the video of the alleged incident four times but could not ascertain what actually took place.)
For the record, I have been relentless in my criticisms of Donald Trump, both in print and on my radio show, preferring any other Republican candidate. Based on his past, I have not had any reason to trust him as a conservative or as a Republican, and he has exhibited serious character flaws.
Nevertheless, truth must trump opposition to Trump.
And the truth is that the left-wing attack on Trump’s Chicago rally had little, if anything, to do with what the incendiary comments Donald Trump has made about attacking protestors at his events. Leftist mobs attack and shut down events with which they differ as a matter of course. They do so regularly on American college campuses, where conservative speakers — on the rare occasion they are invited — are routinely shouted down by left-wing students (and sometimes faculty) or simply disinvited as a result of leftist pressure on the college administration.
A couple of weeks ago conservative writer and speaker Ben Shapiro was disinvited from California State University, Los Angeles. When he nevertheless showed up, 150 left-wing demonstrators blocked the entrance to the theater in which he was speaking, and sounded a fire alarm to further disrupt his speech.
In just the last year, left-wing students have violently taken over presidents’ or deans’ offices at Princeton, Virginia Commonwealth University, Dartmouth, Providence College, Harvard, Lewis & Clark College, Temple University and many others. Conservative speakers have either been disinvited or shouted down at Brandeis University, Brown University, the University of Michigan and myriad other campuses.
And leftists shout down virtually every pro-Israel speaker, including the Israeli ambassador to the United States, at every university to which they are invited to speak.
Yet the mainstream media simply ignore this left-wing thuggery — while reporting that the shutting down of a pro-Trump rally is all Trump’s fault for his comments encouraging roughing up protestors at his events.
That the left shuts down people with whom it differs is a rule in every leftist society. The left — not classical liberals, I hasten to note — is totalitarian by nature. In the 20th century, the century of totalitarianism, virtually every totalitarian regime in the world was a leftist regime. And the contemporary American university — run entirely by the left — is becoming a totalitarian state, where only left-wing ideas are tolerated.
Tens of millions of Americans look at what the left is doing to universities, and what it has done to the news and entertainment media, and see its contempt for the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. They see Donald Trump attacked by this left, and immediately assume that only Trump will take on, in the title words of Jonah Goldberg’s modern classic, “Liberal Fascism.”
And if these millions had any doubt that Trump alone will confront left-wing fascism, Trump’s opponents seemed to provide proof. Like the mainstream media, the three remaining Republican candidates for president — John Kasich, the most and Marco Rubio the least — blamed Trump for the left-wing hooligans more than they blamed the left. It is possible that in doing so Senators Cruz and Rubio and Governor Kasich effectively ended their campaigns and ensured the nomination of Trump as the Republican candidate for president. The combination of left-wing violence and the use of it by the other GOP candidates to wound Trump rather than label the left as the mortal threat to liberty that it is may clinch Trump’s nomination.
And if the left continues to violently disrupt Trump rallies, they — along with the total absence of condemnation by the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate — may well ensure that Donald Trump is elected president. Between the play-Fascism of Trump and the real Fascism of the left, most Americans will know which one to fear most.
