How sad it is to see a Jew and staunch Israel supporter attack U.S. President Donald Trump, an even greater friend of Israel, following the terrible massacre in Pittsburgh. Our friend Bret Stephens finished his column in The New York Times with the terrible sentence: "The blood that flowed in Pittsburgh is on his hands, also." In this short, yet cumbersome sentence, Stephens exposes his true feelings but also the fact that his entire case against Trump is artificial. Why else would he use the word "also"? If Trump is guilty, then he has blood on his hands. Period. And why talk about "the blood that flowed in Pittsburgh"? It is morally evasive not to again mention the fact that the victims of the shooting attack were Jews and the massacre was carried out inside a synagogue.
And so instead of being united in the face of such a terrible tragedy, Jews, Israel and Israel supporters were within hours hurling accusations at one another. This is unfortunate, and would quite frankly have been inconceivable had this been an attack on blacks. Indeed, we bore witness to the solidarity and warmth shown by black people for their fellow African Americans following the 2015 Charleston church shooting, in which a white supremacist gunman killed nine African Americans.
Why is that when Jews are shot in Pittsburgh, every screaming left-wing pundit has to go and blame Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel's Education Minister Naftali Bennett? The particularly meticulous, among them The New Yorker's Bernard Avishai, remember to include in their attack criticism of Israel's nation-state law, the Gaza Strip and Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. I would suggest our friend Stephens look into this phenomenon. Why do senior writers who are published in prestigious publications turn an event that concerns Jews into another opportunity to attack Israel and its supporters, the most prominent among them, of course, is Trump.
The thinking is clear and the result of that old mechanism mistakenly referred to as "self-hatred." This so-called self-hatred is in fact what the late historian Robert S. Wistrich defined as a "self-love that is expressed in the hatred of other Jews, the bad Jews, those who are not 'me,'" in other words those who are conspicuous in their Jewish pride and are therefore blamed for having awakened this dormant anti-Semitic hatred.
A few of the things Stephens says are true, but they do not answer the question he poses at the outset: "How can you address a problem if you won't even call it by its proper name?" Stephens notes that neither Tree of Life shooter Robert Bowers nor Florida mail bomb suspect Cesar Sayoc are "deranged," and there is every reason to believe their acts were politically motivated. True, Bowers was also angry at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a nonprofit that once helped Jewish refugees relocate to the United States and now assists asylum seekers and immigrants. But beyond all that, he wanted to wipe out the Jews.
There is an uncontrollable intellectual urge to connect a lot of processes and show that Bowers is the inevitable result of those processes. Blaming Trump and Netanyahu, the usual suspects, as various people on Twitter and various writers have done, only serves to prevent Jews from grappling with the fear the massacre has instilled in their communities head-on.
Stephens never does succeed in calling the problem by its name. This is an anti-Semitic attack of the first degree, and that is exactly what so many commentators are trying to conceal. When someone like Bennett says that explicitly to the mourners in Pittsburgh, they get angry at him.
American historian Jeffry Herf has been the only one to define with some degree of accuracy Trump's role in the attack: Trump is not an anti-Semite, but he also doesn't understand how anti-Semitism works. Trump must understand that anti-Semitism is one of the most effective strategic weapons for fragmenting society. The greatest enemies of the United States in particular and the West in general have specialized in inciting anti-Semitism for their own ends. It is enough to see the results of the anti-Israel engines of hate operating inside Israel and the U.S., the divide between Israelis and American Jews. What we have here then, Mr. Stephens, our dear friend, is a case of anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism that would very much prefer not to be recognized for what it is. You and former Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman, however, can afford to call it by its explicit name.
