Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Have these Jews forgotten what Fascism looks like?



According to the Religion News Service, Jewish voters favor Clinton over Trump by a wide margin.  Here's the key extract:

"... 61 percent of Jewish adults said Clinton and 19 percent picked GOP nominee Trump in the American Jewish Committee survey."    
Whole story here.
All well and good.  But it begs the question: What exactly do the remaining 19% of Jewish voters see in a Trump presidency? According to the article, some are annoyed by the nuclear deal the US and our allies made with Iran, but can that really account for almost one in five Jews preferring the obscenity, xenophobia, and fascist like concepts Trump has expressed as his platform?

Having come from a Jewish family, one that lost relatives in the Holocaust, the similarity between Trump's programs ...one might say "solutions" ... to our national ills is so blatantly fascist that it makes one blanch, or should.
 

It  includes singling out of minorities, Mexicans, Muslims  and Blacks.  According to Trump he'd reinstate water boarding ("enhanced interrogation" is the nice term), profiling, and  "stop and frisk" (which has been declared unconstitutional).  How one can hear that, read that, and not think: "I vant to see your papers mein herr!" baffles me.

Oh but of course,  anyone who is or looks black or Muslim or Mexican has to be up to something.  His declaration that Muslims know more than they tell, that we must treat Muslim "neighborhoods" differently;  that every illegal Mexican is a rapist or criminal (after all "someone is doing all the raping!") and must be rounded up; that Blacks are their own worst enemy and are the highest crime producing people in the nation...all of it speaks of demonization, of scapegoating that smacks of totalitarianism.
 

How does an educated Jew who knows anything about the Holocaust accept the singling out of minorities today, any more than they would have accept the singling out of Gypsies, Jews, the physically handicapped, the Trade Unionists, the Socialists in Germany and then across Europe?

Can it truly be  "Well, I'm not a  Black, or Mexican or Muslim, so what do I care?."  Can 75 years of time have really blunted the horror that such "special treatment" and "solutions" delivered? Can they really embrace the "It can't happen here." fallacy? Can those 19% of Jews be so callous or so blind or so hateful that they'll readily wear the same emblem that their ancestors' persecutors wore in the last century, just invisibly?

No explanation or commitment to other national issues could justify this obscenity among people who shouldn't have to think twice about it.  1 in 5 Jews will vote for Trump!!??  It's enough to make me ashamed of my Jewish  roots.