{"id":113679,"date":"2017-04-16T06:32:25","date_gmt":"2017-04-16T14:32:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=113679"},"modified":"2017-04-16T06:43:15","modified_gmt":"2017-04-16T14:43:15","slug":"jewish-leaders-owe-an-apology-to-trump-and-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=113679","title":{"rendered":"Jewish leaders owe an apology to Trump and America"},"content":{"rendered":"

I cover similar ground in my essay<\/a> on “Jews for Consistency.”<\/p>\n

Dennis Prager writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Last month, I wrote a column<\/a> under the headline, \u201cThere Is No Wave of Trump-Induced Anti-Semitism or Racism.\u201d I was right. But my being right is not what matters. What matters is that the mainstream media and the Jewish left \u2014 which is now essentially almost all of Jewish life outside of Orthodoxy \u2014 were wrong. So wrong that it was morally inexcusable.<\/p>\n

Some Jewish leaders need to either publicly apologize \u2014 to the Jewish community, to conservatives, to America and to President Donald Trump \u2014 or be fired from their positions. <\/p>\n

The entire claim that America was engulfed in a rising tide of anti-Semitism was a lie \u2014 \u201cfake news.\u201d And the claim that Trump\u2019s election is what aroused all this anti-Semitism was not merely a lie, it was malicious libel.<\/p>\n

No Jew has disseminated this libel as much as Steven Goldstein, executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect in New York, part of a worldwide network. The man has engaged in chillul Anne Frank \u2014 a desecration of the name of Anne Frank.<\/p>\n

Here are a few examples of Goldstein\u2019s public comments:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe cancer of Antisemitism has infected his [Trump\u2019s] own Administration.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMake no mistake: The Antisemitism coming out of this Administration is the worst we have ever seen from any Administration.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most vicious antisemites in America are looking at you [Trump] and your administration as a nationalistic movement granting them permission to attack Jews, Jewish institutions, and sacred Jewish sites.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the organization doesn\u2019t fire this man, it is complicit in his radical politicization of an institution calling itself a center for \u201cMutual Respect,\u201d and in the misuse of Anne Frank\u2019s name to disseminate political hate.<\/p>\n

More important than Goldstein and his so-called Center for Mutual Respect is Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of what is supposed to be the leading American-Jewish organization dedicated to exposing and combating anti-Semitism, the Anti-Defamation League. He has played a leading role in disseminating the narrative that since the Trump election, America has been drenched in anti-Semitism \u2014 even comparing its levels to those of Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n

As reported<\/a> by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in December:<\/p>\n

\u201c \u2018Anti-Semitic rhetoric in the United States has reached levels unprecedented since 1930s Germany,\u2019 Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt warned a gathering of Israeli lawmakers in Jerusalem on Monday.<\/p>\n

\u201c \u2018Anti-Semitism has wound its way into mainstream conversations in a manner that many Jews who lived through Nazi Germany find terrifying,\u2019 he said at the Knesset meeting, which was convened to discuss the plight of American Jewry under the incoming Trump administration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Greenblatt\u2019s allusion to Nazi Germany cheapened the evil of Nazism and of the Holocaust; I wrote about left-wing Jews doing this very thing in another column in mid-February.<\/p>\n

And note Haaretz\u2019s inflammatory description \u2014 \u201cthe plight of American Jewry under the incoming Trump administration\u201d \u2014 made six weeks before there was a Trump administration!<\/p>\n

In December, Greenblatt told NPR:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found it so deeply problematic when some of the images and some of the rhetoric [from Trump] seemed to evoke longstanding anti-Semitic conspiracies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Greenblatt repeated this charge in February in an op-ed he wrote for The Washington Post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cLast year, we watched as the Trump campaign repeatedly tweeted and shared anti-Semitic imagery and language, allowing this poison to move from the margins into the mainstream of the public conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n

That whole charge \u2014 made by the left within and outside of Jewish life \u2014 was false. But the left has always believed it is OK to falsely accuse conservatives of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, bigotry, xenophobia, hate, etc. It\u2019s effective, after all.<\/p>\n

Greenblatt also wrote in that Washington Post column:<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump could have said he condemns anti-Semitism and takes incidents, such as the dozens of threats made to Jewish Community Centers, seriously. But instead, he lashed out against those asking the question.\u201d<\/p>\n

It turns out that President Trump was right: There was no eruption of anti-Semitism in America, let alone in the White House. And \u201cthose asking the question\u201d did indeed deserve the contempt the president showed them.<\/p>\n

It turns out that some disturbed American-Jewish kid in Israel was the source of nearly all these threats against Jewish Community Centers (JCCs). And the handful of other threats to JCCs came from a Black radical.<\/p>\n

So, it turns out, as I wrote here four weeks ago: \u201c[T]here is no wave of Trump-induced anti-Semitism or racism in America. This is only one more example of left-wing hysteria. \u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n

And, it turns out that the conclusion to my column was also valid:<\/p>\n

\u201cJews who think there is such a wave do so because they hate Donald Trump so much, they want to believe it. In other words, a lot of Jews want to believe that Jews are hated in America more than ever. Yet another way in which leftism has poisoned Jewish life.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the \u201cpoison\u201d that ought to concern Jonathan Greenblatt.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, he owes the president of the United States and the American people an apology.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I cover similar ground in my essay on “Jews for Consistency.” Dennis Prager writes: Last month, I wrote a column under the headline, \u201cThere Is No Wave of Trump-Induced Anti-Semitism or Racism.\u201d I was right. But my being right is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[605,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-semitism","category-dennis-prager"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=113679"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113690,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113679\/revisions\/113690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=113679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=113679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=113679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}