By Laureen Lipsky(AMERICAN THINKER)
The Jewish Democratic Council of America ran an ad comparing Nazi Germany to President Trump’s America. This ad is blatantly untrue, and it dangerously minimizes the Holocaust and the real threat to American Jews from Antifa and Black Lives Matter, leftist groups that hate Israel. Worst of all, though, the ad lies about the fact that Trump is the most pro-Israel, Jewish-friendly president in modern history.
Ironically, Democrat Jewish are allying themselves with America’s left. The left hates Israel. BLM protests have included anti-Semitic rhetoric, and there was a BLM pogrom in the Los Angeles area. The left also ignores that the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter was anti-Trump due to the president’s strong connection to Jews.
Instead, many leftist Jews scoff when Republican Jews heap praise on Trump and ignore Trump’s growing support from moderate Democrat Jews. These leftists are not in on the open secret: Trump is good for the Jews. More than any other president, President Trump has stood with the only Jewish homeland, a country that is also one of America’s greatest friends and a strategic ally. Additionally, Jews in the Diaspora are safer when Israel is strong.
Even as leftists were calling Trump a “Nazi,” the Trump administration fulfilled a decades-old promise to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Israel’s actual 3,500-year-old capital. In 1995, a bipartisan Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, authorizing the U.S. embassy’s move to Jerusalem. Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama all invoked the legislation’s waiver provision instead of recognizing reality and moving the embassy.
Despite massive pressure from both international and domestic political anti-Semites not to act, President Trump moved the embassy, cementing a promise to Jews that our ancestral capital matters and should be treated with diplomatic deference. No Democrat officials attended the embassy’s opening ceremony in Jerusalem.
In the past three and a half years, Trump enacted a dizzying number of pro-Israel policies. After the U.S. withdrew from the failed JCPOA (Obama’s Iran nuclear deal), sanctions have choked Iran’s terrorist regime. Trump made Nikki Haley his ambassador to the United Nations, where she spoke out clearly and forcefully against anti-Israel actions in that body. Under President Trump, the U.S. left the Israel-hating UNESCO, which routinely declares Jewish heritage sites “Palestinian.”
President Trump also stopped funding the anti-Semitic UNWRA, a U.N. agency dedicated solely to Palestinian Arabs. UNRWA perpetually keeps Palestinians as refugees and “victims” of the 1948 Arab-led war. Adding to the long list of counter-terrorism measures, Trump closed the terrorist PLO office in D.C. The president, through his directives, made it clear that he stands with the Jewish homeland.
The above moves should prove that Trump is no Nazi, but there is more! When Trump recognized the Golan Heights, he surprised even U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman. Unlike Judea and Samaria, which were originally Jewish lands that Jordan occupied until the end of the Arab-initiated 1967 Six-Day War, Israel captured the Golan Heights, a strategic area in the north of Israel, on the Syria border, in a defensive war and then annexed the region.
Trump implemented pro-Jewish policies against actual terrorists (e.g., cutting $200 million in funds to the Palestinian Authority because of its pay-for-slay tactics) and pulled the United States out of the anti-Semitic United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). This anti-Semitic body existed to prop up authoritarian Arab regimes.
When Trump had Iranian Quds Force arch-terrorist Gen. Soleimani killed, his order was celebrated domestically and internationally by those who understood Soleimani’s trail of the terror carnage. Israel has been debating applying sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, Israel’s ancestral heartland, and the Jordan Valley. In a very non-Nazi way, Trump and secretary of state Mike Pompeo have indicated that, if Israel asserts its sovereignty, the U.S. will recognize this action as legal. The Abraham Accords have also fundamentally realigned the Middle East geopolitically and normalized relations between key Arab states and Israel.
At home, the Trump administration’s pro-Jewish and pro-Israel actions have been significant. The State Department now uses the correct language Judea and Samaria instead of the propaganda phrase “West Bank.” Education secretary Betsy DeVos is fulfilling her promise to investigate anti-Semitism on college campuses, including the most pervasive type, anti-Zionism. And on December 11, 2019, the White House enacted the ultimate philo-Semitic executive order when it included Jews in Title VI, protecting Jewish students from anti-Semitism in federally funded institutions. Before 2019, Jews were excluded from Title VI and therefore fared poorly at programs and universities, especially where anti-Israel hate was expressed without fear of repercussion.
Presidents Washington and Lincoln were friendly to their Jewish citizens, but President Trump might as well be a member of the tribe. Like many people in 2016, I didn’t vote for my candidate; I voted against the other. Thus, I voted against Hillary. Her colossal failures and massive corruption scared me. This November, though, I will be voting for President Trump enthusiastically, both as a proud American and as a Jew.
Laureen Lipsky is a pro-Israel advocate living in New York and the founder of “Taking Back the Narrative.” An op-ed writer, previously published in Jewish publications, she has recently written an exclusive piece on anti-Semitism for the Center for Security Policy.
