Trump and Israeli Politics
Trump is clearly a good friend of Israel. Israelis know it, and so Trump is very popular over there. But in the strangeness of American politics, the Democrats, and American Democratic Jews in particular, refuse to give Trump that credit. There is a complete disconnect between the reality of Trump’s approach toward Jews, and the Left’s opinion of Trump about it. Then that hatred of Trump by the Left becomes increasingly more bizarre, as they embrace, and excuse, actual anti-Semitic Islamic supremacists, like freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar. The Islamic Movement, the Jewish Left, and the anti-Semites on the Left, all form an alliance in their inexplicable, shared hatred for Trump. But by that weird alliance, the disconnect between feelings and facts grows, and is becoming dangerous.
President Trump carries his Israeli popularity with pride. In early March 2019, Trump spoke to Israel-friendly supporters in a private weekend getaway fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. He told that group of Republican National Committee donors that he would poll at 98% if he ran to be Israel’s next prime minister. Well, despite the obvious numbers exaggeration, Trump does have a point. In fact, he has a 73% approval rating in Israel, by far his largest approval rating in any country on Earth.
Citing three unnamed sources who had heard Trump’s comments, Axios later reported on the closed event. Florida Gov. Rick De Santis (R) and the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, were among the attendees. The press had been excluded, and security guards reportedly required attendees to place their cell phones in magnetized pouches to prevent possible leaks of Trump’s speech.
Israel and Trump have a long history in friendship. Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, who has served as Israel’s prime minister since 2009, has long been Trump’s good friend there. But oddly contrary to Trump’s widespread popularity over there, his counterpart in Israeli government, Bibi, is now facing the toughest challenge to his own 10-year rule. Elections for the next Israeli Knesset session will be held soon in early April. Perhaps Trump’s popularity in Israel may be boosted by the fact that he is not actually in the rough contentions for power that go on in that state.
Bibi’s strong opposition comes from a new political party, formed only three months ago—Blue & White—the colors of the Israeli flag. The party is headed by three former Israeli Defense Force chiefs of staff. Nobody quite knows if this election will be close, or if Bibi will survive his current scandals and smears against him, or if an election upset will bring the Blue and White into power as a stunning end to the momentous Netanyahu decade.
In other news from his private fundraising speech that weekend to the Israel-friendly donors, Trump reportedly took aim at Democrats, as he accused, “The Democrats hate Jewish people.” That was a blunt reference to a chain of recent shockers revolving around the freshman, Somali Muslim, Rep. Ilhan Omar. Just days earlier, Omar’s hostile, serial comments about Israel and Jews had been pathetically followed by the Democratic Party’s failure to even reprimand her by name, let alone to remove her from key positions in Congress.
Perhaps to affirm Trump’s severe charge against them, the Democratic Party leadership seems to be more willing lately to abandon both Israel and American Jews. For instance, in recent days, the radical Left group, MoveOn, astonishingly called for a boycott of the annual conference of the tiny American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC). And even more astonishing is that, even in the wake of the Ilhan Omar uproar and the wilting away of any Democratic-led Congressional outrage, all of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have agreed to honor the radical Left boycott against that bipartisan Jewish PAC. The anti-Jewish forces seem to have become energized by it all.
Despite those ominously growing signs, up to recent elections, it has been understood that many more American Jews vote Democratic than Republican. And more Jews are elected as Democrats than Republicans in the House and Senate. Clearly, misguided party loyalty plays a big part in tolerance for the growing menace of anti-Semitism in America. Time will tell if American Jews care enough about the threat of such recent hostilities coming against them, from the extreme Left and its alliance with Islamic supremacists, to shift their own political alliance away from the Democrats, and most effectively, to change their donation pattern.
Meanwhile, the media agitators keep a narrow focus instead on every off-color utterance by the president they hope to bring down. Following up on Trump’s alleged remarks at the Mar-a-Lago event, the Hill made a request to the White House for further comment. But the request got no immediate response. Faced with a continuing hostile press, the Trump administration seems to be putting the media into ignore mode lately. January 28, 2019 marked the first press corps briefing by Sarah Sanders in 41 days—an event at which she quipped, “Missed you guys.
And then, that briefing just marked yet another long lull to come for the anxious news reporters, until Sarah Sanders returned to the podium on March 11, immediately after the Mar-a-Lago fundraiser; and which in turn, had come after the strange March 7 House vote to generically condemn “hatred,” instead of reprimanding Ilhan Omar, which was supposed to have been the precise purpose of the House action to begin with.
And so what resulted from that entirely weird week of media and political misdirection was that the Congressional rookie Ilhan Omar appeared to gloat in her escape, and to have regained power in the identity politics of her Islamic victimhood. She may have actually won a political validation for her Islamic bias, precisely because the House response was so weak, non-specific, and failed to either call her out by name, or to isolate for condemnation her specific, outrageous expressions of Islamic supremacism against Jews.
The anti-Trump media, Democrats, and American Jews may continue to stand by Ilhan Omar, in their apathy, wishful thinking, ignorance, delusion, or just irrational rage against Trump, which they share in hate along with Omar. In giving Omar cover, Nancy Pelosi said that Omar just did not understand her own words. But Omar knows what she is about, when she attacks Jews.
Ilhan Omar took her oath on Quran. That book commands Omar, as an observant Muslim, to obey verse 5:51—“O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you – then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.”
Ilhan Omar was raised and taught in her supremacist worldview by Muslim leaders, who are scholars of Islam, who know all about Muhammad’s precisely murderous dehumanization of Jews. Right behind Quran, they revere the collection of hadith, Sahih al-Bukhari. In it, Muhammad said, from Book 52 Hadith 177— “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”
So while Democrats, many American Jews, and Islamic supremacists in Congress all continue hating on President Trump for no rational reason, he remains a steadfast ally of the Jewish people, and of their young, modern state of self-determination in Israel. The Jewish people of Israel are much closer to the threat of extermination by the supremacist, murderous agents of Islamic ideology. So perhaps Trump’s friends in Israel are simply much more aware of the real-world danger that comes out of the Islamic texts. We can only hope that enough of the Jews in America will also come to a similar point of realization, before it is too late for the education phase, and becomes the survival phase.
