Trump doesn't understand how anti-Semitism works. Neither do most Americans.
On the evening after the deadliest act of violence against American Jews, President Trump said that Jews had “endured terrible persecution” for centuries: “You know that. We have all read it. We have studied it.” But his response to the horrific news that a gunman had killed 11 people and wounded six at Shabbat services at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh made it clear that Trump doesn’t actually understand the nature of anti-Semitism at all.
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Anti-Semitism fosters this perplexity because it is not about skin color and because it is thought to have been dead and buried after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Perhaps that lack of understanding is why executives at Twitter did not shut down the account of the Pittsburgh suspect after he tweeted that he was not going to passively allow the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to “bring invaders” into this country or “watch our people get slaughtered.” The man is reported to have said that “all Jews must die” when he entered the synagogue Saturday morning.
That insertion of “all” is instructive about the conspiratorial mentality that is central to anti-Semitism. It places the shooter in a long tradition of enemies of Judaism and the Jewish people. What has bound and binds these killers together is the conviction that we Jews, though small in number, are a uniquely powerful and evil people. That fusion of power and evil was long embedded in the New Testament story of the death of Jesus, a story told and retold by all the major Christian faiths for almost 2,000 years. It was only in 1965 that the Catholic Church decided that neither the Jews of Jesus’ time nor their descendants were responsible for the death of Christ. Much Jewish blood had flowed before the church arrived at that insight.
The absolute essence, the very core of Nazi anti-Semitism, one blared on the radio and plastered on the front pages of newspapers in Hitler’s Germany, was a secularization of that old religious-based fear. In the anti-Semitic imagination of the Nazis, the Jews became a political actor called “international Jewry.” They claimed that Jews, having seized power in the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, started World War II to exterminate the German people. So, in return, Hitler announced that he was going to defend the Germans by killing Jews in a vast act of self-defense called the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe. Hitler also was aiming at all Jews around the world. The Final Solution was to be global, to crush the powerful and evil conspiracy threatening Germany. That spirit of Nazism was present in Pittsburgh today.
But Hitler’s death did not end other manifestations of anti-Semitism. It lived on in the communist attacks on the conspiracy of Zionists with “American monopoly capitalists,” during the anti-cosmopolitan purges of the early 1950s; in the New Left’s denunciation of a supposedly powerful Israel working as a tool of American imperialism in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967; in the Palestine Liberation Organization’s lies that Israel was an apartheid state that practiced deliberate mass murder. It lived on among the radical Islamists in Tehran, among authors of the Hamas Charter of 1988, and in the al-Qaeda killers who attacked the “alliance of Jews and crusaders” on Sept. 11, 2001. That attack fused hatred of the United States and Jews. Every single one of these forms of anti-Semitism, though on opposite ends of the political spectrum, has a conspiratorial mind set at its core that leads to the use of violence to attack the supposedly powerful Jew, indistinguishable from the supposedly evil Zionist.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/28/trump-doesnt-understand-how-anti-semitism-works-neither-do-most-americans
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