If you think that the Donald Trump supporters who hate Muslims love other minority groups, you have no idea how hate works. I’ve never heard a person say, “I really hate Muslims, but I love black people.” Nope, haters hate. It’s truly a mental disorder that causes them to hate people who don’t look, sound, or pray like them.
And as many witnessed on Twitter over the last two days during the AIPAC convention, Trump’s anti-Semitic fans are out in full force. I’m talking jaw-dropping, vile anti-Jewish bigotry that is as bad as, if not worse than, the anti-Muslim garbage we have seen from Trump’s fans.
Just ask Daniel Sieradski, the founder of “Jews Against Trump.” The Twitter feed for this group is littered with Sieradski fighting against the anti-Semites supporting Trump.
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As Sieradski explained to me, “It’s astounding that so many Trump supporters are completely unabashed in their anti-Semitism and that Trump himself has done absolutely nothing to condemn it or even acknowledge.” Sieradski detailed some of the anti-Semitic garbage he has received from Trump fans, from slurs to sending him “memes about pushing Jews into ovens.”
A tiny sample of the hateful tweets he has responded to include: “Jews: A hostile elite whose power is beyond public discussion while presenting themselves as powerless & persecuted.”
Then there was @rockprincess818, who tweeted, “If the Jewish power brokers are so against Trump, he is definitely the one to vote for.”
And the accounts for the Trump-lovers spewing anti-Semitic hate aren’t ones with only 20 or 30 followers. Rather, it’s people like @rockprincess818 with over 50,000 followers and @MikeRotondo86, who has over 20,000 followers and who tweeted today: “With control of American foreign policy, Jews destabilize the world and then make money financing war... ”
Sieradski added with exasperation that despite the tidal wave of anti-Semitic hate being spewed by Trump supporters online, “Not one publication has taken Trump’s campaign to task for it.”
Sieradski is right. The media have not pressed Trump on this issue. And the worst part is that this anti-Semitism we are seeing from some Trump fans is nothing new. It’s just that the media have for the most part has ignored it.
I first became aware of Trump’s anti-Semitic fans in December after The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote an article calling Trump a “bigot and a racist.” Milbank, who is no stranger to criticism given his years of experience as a political writer, was so stunned by the anti-Semitic comments he received in response to that column from Trump supporters that he felt compelled to write a follow-up article two weeks later titled, “Trump brings bigots out of hiding.” In it, Milbank shared the comments from Trump supporters such as one who called him a “bigoted kike supremacist” and another who sent him a “Nazi-style cartoon of a big-nosed Jewish man with a skull cap and bad teeth.”
But still this went so under the radar that a CNN anchor said on a radio show just last month that we haven’t seen any anti-Semitism from Trump supporters. Perhaps if the media had strongly called out Trump’s anti-Jewish bigots in December, they would not have felt emboldened and we would not be in alarming place we are today.
Just this past Monday, Bethany Mandel, a Jewish journalist, wrote an article for The Forward documenting the vile anti-Semitic barrage she endured for simply calling out Trump’s anti-Semitic supporters a few weeks ago. Mandel noted that Trump fans called her a “slimy Jewess” and told her she “deserved the oven.” But it got worse, as Mandel noted, with Trump supporters searching for personal information about her and then making death threats to her on her private Facebook account.
Mandel was so concerned that she not only filed a police report, she bought a gun to protect herself and her family from Trump supporters who she feared might try to kill them. I want you to think about that for a moment. We are now at a place where a Jewish journalist is in fear of her life from Trump’s anti-Semitic supporters.
But stunningly that’s where we are today. Twitter is a growing cesspool of anti-Semitism being spewed by Trump supporters. And if you have any doubt that the same people spewing anti-Semitism also hate Muslims, just check out any one of the Twitter feeds I noted above. You will see tweets like, “#DeportIslam Muslims don't belong In the west” and “A moderate #Muslim is a Muslim with no ammunition.”
As Sieradski aptly commented, “The common link between Trump’s anti-Jewish supporters and white supremacist supporters is Islamophobia.” Milbank made that very same point in his article, noting, “various Trump defenders derided Muslims as ‘Muzzies’ and ‘Mo-slimes.’” Trump truly is a uniter as he has brought together anti-Semites and anti-Muslim bigots to support him.
Trump loves to invoke Ronald Reagan. Well, it’s time for Trump to offer words like Reagan did: “We must never remain silent in the face of bigotry....we must teach tolerance and denounce racism, anti-Semitism and all ethnic or religious bigotry wherever they exist as unacceptable evils. We have no place for haters in America—none, whatsoever.”
Will Trump ever make such a statement? Nah. Trump has boasted that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose supporters. I’m not even certain he would even lose them then. But I bet if Trump sincerely and passionately called out his anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim supporters, he would lose many of his fans.
