Taken from here
and here
I previously posted this video of America’s Rabbi, Shmuley Boteach, interviewing a special guest, NYT’s columnist Bret Stevens. The topic to be debated was: Is President Trump good for the Jews?
Bret goes to great lengths to explain to the small group of his conservative coreligionists in attendance that they should be careful not to get over enthusiastic over Trump just because he is implementing the following policies that are favourable to Israel:
1. The embassy move
2. The Iran deal withdrawals
3. Not condemning the murder of 168 and the wounding of over 15,000 protesters
He points out that they must not be fixated with these gains. He becomes visibly frustrated as he is heckled by those loyal to Trump. He goes to great lengths to explain to his short-sighted comrades how things work.
While Trump has done positive things for Israel and, as a result, for Jews who reside in the villa, he still represents a threat to the Jews of the diaspora. And that’s because he’s a populist and uses populist phrases such as “Make America Great Again” and “America First.” Stephens reminds his audience the history of these phrases and how Jews suffered under fascism.
I’ll let Bret speak for himself, starting @ 10:02:
SB: What about with respect to the Jews?
BS: Well, the second thing is Jews I think have only really thrived and are only really safe in the world when liberal values are the dominant, prevalent values. And by liberal values I don’t mean Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. I mean liberal in the classic sense of respect for pluralism, emphasis on tolerance, emphasis on individual liberties.Those panoply of values which are the DNA of what we call liberal democratic society. Now, the Trump Administration, in a way that is similar to populist movements in Europe – like Marine Le Penne, the Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Geert Wilders in Holland, the AfD in Germany, the Northern League in Italy, Orban’s party in Hungary, the party that’s in power in Poland, and so on – Trump Administration represents a substantial and dangerous regression from those values. I think the comments, the attitude of this Administration towards immigration – Mexican immigration, Latin American immigration – is a scandal. You want to know something? In all of history, no Muslim terrorist has ever come across our border with Mexico. We’ve had one Muslim terrorist come across a land border and that happened to be with Canada. Why aren’t we building a wall with Canada? This worries me because to be anti-immigrant strikes me as antithetical to the liberal values that have been so good for us as Jews. Had a Trump Administration been in power in 1950, there’s no way my mother – a displaced person with $7 and no means to support herself and no skills – would have ever been admitted into this country. And yet, a generation later her son is the elitist snob at the New York Times, paying manifold in taxes what it cost the United States to bring us here. Each of you is one, maybe two, generations away from some poor schlemiel who came from like my grandfather from Bessarabia, or Galicia, or one other country… and I bet they didn’t come with Ph.Ds, and with great skills. I bet they didn’t speak a word of English. I bet many Americans here thought of them as smelly Jews with Bolshevik politics. And in my case, many of them did have Bolshevik politics, I’m sorry to say. Thank God we didn’t have that kind of political order when we were arriving in the 1890s, and so on. This turn away from liberalism – and it’s not just with respect to immigrants, it’s with respect to attitude toward the media… it’s with the coarsening and assault on fundamental institutions of government – is in the long term, I believe, dangerous for the Jews. Because I’m hard pressed to think of illiberal orders in the past that haven’t eventually turned on the Jews. And I’m hard pressed to think of populist orders in the past that haven’t eventually turned on the Jews. And so we engage this kind of politics, I think, at our peril. Now, he’s the president. We want the best to happen, obviously, as Americans… and we want a good outcome. But, I would just say to all of you who are tempted to say “Trump is the best thing to happen to the Jews,” caveat emptor… caveat emptor. Because the style of politics he is bringing with him, in the long term, has never paid dividends for us as a people, never mind for us as individuals… and I’ll stop there.