Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/dharris-gershon/)
While campaigning in Iowa during the primary season, Donald Trump told a cheering crowd that he would establish a national database upon which all Muslim-Americans would be legally obligated to register. The guiding principles underlying such a registry were clear to everyone: Muslim citizens are suspect, and should be tracked and monitored both transparently and with frightening ease.
This is the story of how a powerful lobbying organization enlists black Americans – victims of oppression and state violence for centuries – to mask the suffering of another oppressed people. It is the story of how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) strategically recruits and educates black leaders to defend Israel from critique. And it is the story of how Palestinians living under Israel’s occupation suffer in ways that reverberate upon America’s streets – where black bodies are bruised, bloodied and destroyed under the weight of police violence, mass incarceration, and disenfranchisement.
In 2011, New York magazine called Barack Obama “the first Jewish president” for his tough-love support of Israel. It was not only a ridiculous statement at the time, bombast intended to counter the exaggerated attacks coming from right-wing hawks, but it was an offensive statement for many American Jews who understand that backing Israel does not make one Jewish.
Anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from American lawmakers and presidential candidates reached a fevered pitch earlier this month when, standing before a cheering crowd aboard the USS Yorktown in South Carolina, Donald Trump called for a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the United States. This call came on the heels of Trump and Ben Carson calling for mosques to bemonitored, Senator Marco Rubio suggesting that places where Muslim-Americans gather beshut down, and hundreds of lawmakersvotingto turn away Syrian refugees.
Today, Representative Steve Israel (D-NY) voted, along with 46 other House Democrats, to suspend the acceptance of all Syrian refugees fleeing terror. It was a shameful vote for the 289 members of Congress who chose fear and callous bigotry as expedient political tools. Even more so for the 47 Democrats who joined their fear-mongering Republican counterparts in an attempt to keep desperate Syrian refugees out of our country.
Hillary Clinton has published an op-ed in The Forward―a storied, daily American Jewish publication―entitled, “How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu.” The problems with it are so profound and numerous that I have no choice but to present some of her words and annotate them, which I’ll proceed to do shortly.
The Washington Post has published one of the most important pieces ever to appear in a mainstream American publication dealing with the bounds of Israel political discourse in America and within the American Jewish community.
As missiles fell in Israel and bombs obliterated portions of Gaza last summer, I awoke each morning with a jolt, as though remembering some pressing task nearly forgotten. That jolt felt from afar – from across the Atlantic – was unmitigated fear. A fear that when I swept the crust from my eyes, fired up my laptop and scanned Twitter, I’d either find that an Israeli soldier I knew had died or bear witness to more images of bodies piling up in Gaza. While the former fear was never realized (despite 66 soldiers and six civilians dying in Israel), the latter was actualized with a nauseating consistency.
I’m an American Jew who is a conscious ally of the black community and happens to also be a supporter of President Obama’s Iran deal. Neither of these things make me unique. Indeed, most US Jews, politically liberal and socially progressive, are allies in the fight against bigotry – 64 percent of Jews think blacks still face and lot of discrimination – support Obama’s diplomacy with Iran.
Near-universal rage has been directed at presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who yesterday said Obama would “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven” with the Iran deal.