Why Never-Trump Politics Is Bad For Jews

by Brian of London

I don’t like to say I told you so, but I told you so. On March 1, I wrote about the rash of bomb threats against Jewish targets in the US, which a large segment of the opposition media gleefully used to malign President Trump:

The question this leaves me with is whose political agenda is served by continuing to publicise what have clearly been bomb threats that haven’t materialised up to now? The threats, which do generate real fear and disruption themselves are the mode of attack. So far, thankfully, there haven’t been any real bombs threatening life. Unlike, for example, the real rockets that flew out of Gaza toward Jews in southern Israel in the past couple of weeks that received no international attention (until Israel bombed Hamas).

The publicity and associated panic run the risk of perpetuating this and spreading it worldwide. Jews will be terrorized worldwide, not by real bombs but by phone calls. It is not a sign that Jew hatred has increased, decreased or anything else: you cannot infer anything relative about the numbers of people hating Jews or the virulence of their hatred from the successful promotion of a tactic that can be carried out by one person or many. We just don’t know at this point.

There was barely any concealing the way in which media outlets and far-left Jewish organisations like the ADL used these calls to scream immediately about a rising tide of far-right antisemitism. This was completely contrary to what those of us who have spent the last decade watching global Jew-hatred know. While there is and always has been an underlying current of anti-Jewish feeling from a small far-right contingent, by far the biggest threat today comes from the left-wing alliance with Islam. The main increase in global antisemitism comes from movements that claim to be “pro-Palestinian” while really being virulently anti-Israel and, nearly always, virulently anti-Jewish too. This has been under-reported for a long time.

It still came as somewhat of a surprise to many when news broke just before the weekend that the suspect is an 18- or 19-year-old Israeli youth living in Ashkelon (mainstream reports can’t even agree on his age):

The suspect arrested Thursday for a wave of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers in the United States employed an array of technologies, including Bitcoin and Google Voice, to make himself virtually untraceable for months, The Daily Beast has learned. But in the end, it only took one careless slip-up to lead police to his door.

Police arrested 19-year-old Michael Kaydar, who has joint Israeli-U.S. citizenship, at his home in Ashkelon, a coastal city in southern Israel. He’s suspected of phoning in over 100 bomb threats to JCCs and Jewish day schools in 33 states since January, with the most recent calls made two weeks ago. Police also suspect him of making similar threats in Israel, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

The first reports specifically mentioned that the massive, worldwide publicity for his threats spurred the teenager to keep doing it, exactly as I had predicted almost a month ago.

He used some reasonably elaborate methods to hide his identity, but eventually got sloppy. He is not the only person arrested for these crimes, so far, but he does appear to be suspected of the majority of them. There was one other arrest:

Meanwhile, the bomb threats continued, coming in six separate  waves. Jewish centers and day schools began evacuating with almost routine regularity. The threats were generally seen as evidence that anti-Semitic fringe groups were feeling emboldened by the election of Donald Trump. Then in March, a St. Louis man was arrest for a handful of copycat bomb threats he allegedly staged in an effort to frame an ex-girlfriend.

The St Louis man, of course, was also about as far from a white supremacist Trump supporter as anyone can get. Juan M. Thompson is black and firmly from the left side of the political tracks:

Thompson attended Vassar College and is a former journalist who was fired from the online news site The Intercept in 2016 for fabricating sources and quotes in his articles. A statement Friday from The Intercept said of Thompson’s arrest, “These actions are heinous and should be fully investigated and prosecuted.”

Breitbart had a much fuller delve into the Bernie-supporting Juan Thompson:

Thompson’s Twitter account also reveals he supported socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for president. “I voted for Bernie Sanders, but his supporters are annoying as fuck. ‘I almost cried when I got a Bernie sign’. Yuck,” he tweeted in July.

This puts Sanders in an awkward position. Only days before Thompson’s arrest, he told J Street: “I hope very much that President Trump and his political adviser Mr. Bannon understand that the entire world is watching, that it is imperative that their voices be loud and clear in condemning anti-Semitism.”

No matter how many phone calls were made, it is obvious now that the numerous attempts to infer an increase in Jew-hatred in the US flowing from Trump’s rise was malicious and wrong. There are reports now on Israeli TV that the Israeli man arrested may have received funding from the US to make the calls:

The special [Israeli Police] Lahav 433 investigation unit discovered a Bitcoin account operated by the suspect. A series of large deposits from overseas sources suggests the suspect may have been working on behalf of foreign interests.

This doesn’t explain all the physical manifestations of Jew-hatred such as daubed swastikas (Colombian and Puerto Rican man arrested), turning a Jewish Chanuka symbol into a swastika (non-whites arrested), or damaged graves (some may have been the weather). However, many of these stories turn out later to have been perpetrated by anyone but the stereotypical white nationalist the press tries to blame on first report.

Predominantly left-leaning and anti-Trump Jewish institutions in the US, such as the Anti-Defamation League, under the stewardship of Soros-backed Jonathan Greenblatt, jumped on the story and pushed it, until eventually President Trump lead off his address to the joint session with a mention of the hoax calls:

Tonight, as we mark the conclusion of our celebration of Black History Month, we are reminded of our Nation’s path toward civil rights and the work that still remains. Recent threats targeting Jewish Community Centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a Nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms.

And even then they weren’t happy. On the day before that speech, the media made a highly speculative leap in order to tie these events to Trump and paint him as not caring enough about Jew-hatred. Worse still, they took hearsay as fact and (despite later denials from the White House) ran headlines claiming Trump spoke of conspiracy theories:

Trump Reportedly Suggests Wave of anti-Semitic Incidents Could Be False Flags Perpetrated by Jews

Trump spoke to a gathering of state attorneys general from across the country that included Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro. Shapiro told reporters in a conference call after the meeting that Trump suggested that the attacks could reflect something other than anti-Semitism, saying that “the reverse can be true” and “someone’s doing it to make others look bad,” according to Philly.com.

A journalist asking the questions “who, what, where, when and why” might look into the background of Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro to figure out if he has any reason for reporting Trump in an unfavourable light (besides reporting that he’s Jewish). Especially as he is the single source for the story. A quick date limited Google search finds that “Attorney General Josh Shapiro” has been a vocal opponent of Trump. The first result of that search:

17 Attorney Generals, Including Josh Shapiro Condemn Trump Executive Orders On Immigration

HARRISBURG — Seventeen Attorney Generals across the nation, including Pennsylvania Attorney General, Josh Shapiro issued a joint statement on Sunday condemning the executive orders by Donald trump as ‘un-American.’

Nowhere in Ha’aretz’s reporting can we find any reference to any inherent biases this progressive and politically ambitious Democrat Attorney General may have. The “why is he saying these things” of the story in this case. Those details weren’t important because the story aligned with the bash-Trump agenda of Ha’aretz.

Even now that the story has broken about the main suspect phoning in these threats from Israel instead of being a knuckle-dragging white racist with a swastika tattoo, the ADL’s Jason Greenblatt can’t take his teeth out of Trump:

In a phone interview Thursday from Washington, where Greenblatt was discussing anti-Semitism with members of Congress, he said, “It’s not the identity of the culprit that’s the issue,” but the outcome of threats themselves, which terrified Jews and disrupted Jewish life.

More extreme-left Jewish organisations, such as the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect (which seems to exist solely to malign President Trump using the cloak of the Holocaust), manage to ignore completely all facts and reason in their far-left crusade against Trump:

Steven Goldstein, executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, a civil rights and social justice group based in New York, said the arrest in Israel doesn’t change Trump’s record of being slow and insufficiently forceful in condemning anti-Jewish prejudice and bigotry in general. The center had repeatedly pointed to the bomb threats as evidence of “a national emergency of anti-Semitism” and accused Trump of failing to recognize the “real evidence” behind the problem.

All of this Jewish-backed hatred for Trump, emanating from the far-left, is absolute anathema to a non-dhimmi Jew, such as myself, who is living in Israel and fully awake to the threat of jihad all around me. These are the elements of the Jewish left in America that pushed for the insane Iran deal and wanted to see Hillary installed as President to further push Israel into a dark corner. These are the elements of American Jewry that can’t keep out of partisan politics in the US, with the worst accusations and insane insinuations that Trump is Hitler causing untold damage.

It is deeply unpalatable to say that Jews are responsible for antisemitism, but it also takes willful blindness to look at these Trump-hating actions of some elements of the US Jewish community, amplified to extraordinary proportions by the anti-Trump media, and fail to understand how this looks in the eyes of bemused Trump voters who have no real idea of the rifts within American Jewry and have nobody to explain the nuances.

First published in Jihad Watch.