Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

where i stand:

How can Trump be so ignorant, uncaring as to invoke such bigoted images?

Never again.

As a young, Jewish child growing up in the United States, the words “never again” were etched in my brain.

In part because I grew up in my father’s house and, in part, because every time there was an Arab-Israeli war breaking out — and there have been a number of them throughout the almost 70 years of Israel’s existence as a Jewish homeland — the words were the rallying cry for a people who never again would go quietly to the slaughter.

That slaughter was the wanton murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. It is called the Holocaust. For certain, there were many other non-Jews also sent to their deaths by Hitler. It was the darkest of times for this world.

And, yet, here we are in 2016, in the United States of America and in the middle of the race for the next president of the United States, and the specter of that unthinkable time has thrust itself back into the public arena.

By now, there shouldn’t be an American who hasn’t seen or heard about Donald Trump’s tweeting of an image of Hillary Clinton that harks back to the height of Hitler’s maniacal rule of the Third Reich.

To suggest that the image Trump shared of Hillary Clinton surrounded by a pile of money and a Jewish star with the words “Most corrupt candidate ever” was anything other the most vile kind of anti-Semitism is to ignore the lessons of history. The image, which had its origins on a white supremacist website — not unlike similar sites from which the Trump campaign procured other tweets, knowing the kind of vile hate that existed on them because it patrolled them regularly — left no room for interpretation.

And, yet, that is exactly what The Donald and others from his campaign tried to do while the rest of the country, including some of the highest elected Republican officials, condemned his campaign’s actions as the worst kind of anti-Semitic behavior.

Even Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, wrote a long apologia in his New York Observer newspaper, saying his father-in-law didn’t have a racist bone in his body. I suppose that is what a son-in-law should do, unless the words “never again” burned bright on his psyche.

It became clear right away that Kushner’s family members didn’t share his opinion, because they railed in cyberspace against Jared’s invoking their grandparents’ Holocaust survival story as a way to clear Trump of any anti-Semitic charges. They wanted nothing to do with their family name in any way defending anti-Semitism. How could they? Their grandparents were its victims.

A Jewish member of Kushner’s newspaper staff posted an open letter critical of his defense of Trump. The outpouring of pure hate that flowed from Dana Schwartz’s post was exactly why Trump’s careless and callous use of that initial tweet is so dangerous.

Tweets like, “Here is a simple answer to your problems. Kill yourself.” A picture of a young woman in front of an Easy-Bake Oven. “A world without Jews would be a far more pleasant one.” “Preheat the ovens.” There’s more, but you get the picture.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting Trump is an anti-Semite. What we are questioning now is whether he is so ignorant of history or uncaring about the most recent history of the Jewish people (his daughter Ivanka and her children are Jewish) that he would allow his campaign, in the furtherance of his strategy that divides people by race and religion, to go to a place that every Jewish person in this country knows should be off-limits.

Never again will we be like our murdered German-Jewish ancestors who thought that the anti-Semite Hitler wasn’t talking about them when he blamed the world’s ills on the Jews. After all, they were Germans; it could never happen to them!

Never again will Jews remain silent when the haters in our midst attempt to stir up those deep-seated feelings that lurk in the dark spots of humanity in an effort to finish the job Hitler came so close to achieving.

And never again should any person — Jew and non-Jew — remain silent when the words and images and tweets and other declarations of candidates for high office try first to divide us by race and religion and, then, to defend that filth in the face of universal condemnation.

And, yet, that is exactly what Trump did Wednesday night. Instead of apologizing for his campaign’s outrageously hateful tweet, he said his staff shouldn’t have deleted the offending image because he would rather have it stay up so he could “defend it.”

All one needs to do is look at social media to see how the hate groups, the white supremacists, the anti-Semites and anyone else who lives on the fringes of decent society responds to such stimuli to understand how dangerous Trump’s actions are to the very fabric of our democracy.

Yes, those people live at the edges, but decent people do their best to keep them marginalized. Trump, on the other hand, does his best to encourage their hate because it engages them in his campaign.

There comes a time when all the benefits of the doubt — his Jewish son-in-law and daughter and grandkids — don’t overcome what the candidate refuses to acknowledge when given the opportunity. Over and over.

All he needed to do was tell the Jewish people and all others who abhor the thought of the Holocaust and Hitler that his campaign was wrong. That it made a mistake. That he was sorry.

Instead, Trump said he was prepared to defend what almost everyone else on the planet knows is completely indefensible.

He should have said it shouldn’t have happened and it will happen “never again.”

Brian Greenspun is publisher, editor and owner of the Sun.

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