Nostalgia

There has, thankfully, been a lot of criticism of Donald Trump for failing to condemn a speaker at a town hall in New Hampshire who said American Muslims are a problem because they’re forming “training camps…to kill us,” and the president is a Muslim who wasn’t born in the United States. Paul Waldman, a senior writer at the American Prospect and a columnist at the Washington Post, instructs the Republican Party that it is alienating minority groups by harboring such views.

Waldman offers this reflection, kind of out of nowhere:

When I was young, my parents would often tells us about how many Jews were among the white people active in the civil rights movement, often at great personal risk and for some, like Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, at the cost of their lives. Part of that was about my parents’ pride in their people’s participation in a righteous cause, but it was also a lesson in empathy: Jews supported the cause because they knew what it felt like to be outsiders, to be viewed with suspicion or contempt, to have your country tell you that though you’re here, you’re not a “real” American. Jews in America may not have suffered to anything like the degree that African-Americans did, but they understood.

I grew up in the same community. I reveled in this good feeling, too. The attitude is now 50 years old and self-congratulatory; Waldman leaves out the persecution of millions of Palestinians by a self-described Jewish government that is more racist and Islamophobic than Donald Trump and derives its chief political support from US Jews. He also leaves out the degree to which Jews are now insiders, after whom Republicans, and Democrats, clamor for campaign contributions. It’s cooler to be an outsider.

The columnist is helping to popularize the word PEP. Progressive Except Palestine! For his Palestinian omission is glaring to anyone under 30; and it is about to become a sore question inside the Democratic Party.

Thanks to Donald Johnson.

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Phil:

His article, as quoted by you, did not quite necessitate taking on I/P. And the world moves on, sometimes making people think again about long-settled (or long-ignored) issues.

Why not politely and low-key-ly ask him about is attitudes. Might not be PEP after all. Of course his entire writings may well show that you were right.

I agree his paragraph was self-congratulatory. Just the right spring-board for a discussion of his ideas about I/P as to which, who knows, he may see something not to be self-congratulatory about.

CSPAN is now showing the confirmation of Adam Szubin as Treasury Undersecretary On Terrorism; that is, he’s the 3rd Jewish American in a row to be US Sanctions Czar in a country where Jews make up 2% of the population. Please don’t tell me this is coincidence. http://www.timesofisrael.com/obama-taps-adam-szubin-as-sanctions-czar/
BTW, he’s an orthodox Jew.

The guy who asked Trump that question, I would wager, knows perfectly well Obama’s religion and place of birth. In my experience in the Jim Crow South, deliberate mixing up of names and facts was often employed (e.g., “what do ya think about this Mahtin Luthah character?”), as a way of saying, “I’m not going to honor this person by pronouncing his name correctly, or stating his background correctly, I’m going to deliberately screw it up because I don’t like the guy, and my good ol’ boys will get a laugh out of it,” the exact reaction Trump gave him. Lyndon Johnson used to used the same ploy on, among others, Henry Kissinger, pronouncing his name “Keesinger,” to his great distress. There was some old Southern cold warrior, I’ve forgotten his name, who always said “commonists,” in reference to Communists, using the same tactic. It’s just like the “Democrat Party.”

I’d wager that most of the Republicans who answer those poll questions are doing the same thing, deliberately answering incorrectly, and laughing at the effect.

It’s not the gang of allies that I would’ve thought Israel would seek to align with in America, but, there you have it.

An Islamaphobe justifies the overreaction of school officials in Texas. If this was a Jewish kid Maher would have said it was anti-semitic, or been outraged at the school.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bill-maher-ahmed-mohamed_55fdb3cbe4b08820d918ea3f

“Paul Waldman, … instructs the Republican Party that it is alienating minority groups by harboring such views.”

The Republican party needs no such instruction. Their strategy is divide and conquer. Chaos is a tactic. And they are following orders from Israel, as shown by their unanimous and emphatic pledges of allegiance to Israel and war with Iran.