In its rush to rightfully criticize President Trump’s controversial comments about American Jews who vote for Democrats, MSNBC’s Morning Joe completely skipped any mention of the virulent anti-Semitism being routinely spouted by far-left Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. In addition, the President was accused of inciting violence against a range of minority groups and trying to “hide behind his Jewish son-in-law and his Jewish daughter.”
“Donald Trump is actually attacking Democratic congresswomen for being anti-Semitic when he has trotted out anti-Semitic tropes throughout his entire political campaign,” co-host Joe Scarborough proclaimed during the lengthy panel discussion. Minutes later, the anchor imagined the President’s rhetoric would fuel “abusive attacks” on children:
My concern for some time, and any parent’s concern that thinks about it, would be what happens to the six-year-old American girl whose parents practice Islam, that goes to school, that goes to first grade and it is subject to abusive attacks there? What happens to the Hispanic child who sees the President, you know, calling Hispanics “breeders” and attacking Hispanics the way he does? What happens to a 14-year-old Hispanic girl that may be in a predominantly white high school, what sort of abuse does she receive? What happens to a seven-year-old Jewish kid who, of course, with anti-Semitism being encouraged by the President of the United States, with his anti-Semitic tropes that have been used, again, for centuries?
Julia Ioffe, a reporter for GQ magazine and an extreme member of the Trump resistance, went further than Scarborough with this diatribe:
But you know, in – on top of, you know these proverbial children you mentioned going to school and experiencing mocking or bullying at school, which we know is happening, there are other more fatal consequences of this. We’ve had shootings at mosques, at synagogues, at the El Paso Walmart where a shooter was specifically targeting Hispanics. These are people who are echoing Donald Trump’s rhetoric, who are praising him in their manifestos before they go in and kill people.
She went on to blame the President for a “spike in anti-Semitic hate crimes in 2017.”
Ioffe also used Jewish members of Trump’s family to smear him:
And the President’s gonna hide again behind his Jewish son-in-law and his Jewish daughter, but I think we all need to keep our eye on the ball, and realize that he is feeding a lot of this anti-Semitic violence, Islamaphobic violence, anti-Hispanic violence, and anti-black violence, and it’s only gonna get worse.
Ioffe has a history of her own nasty and deeply offensive rhetoric. In 2016, Ioffe was fired from Politico after issuing a vulgar tweet in which she ranted: “Either Trump is fucking his daughter or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?” In October of 2018, after having been hired by GQ, she appeared on CNN’s The Lead and told anchor Jake Tapper that Trump had “radicalized...more people than ISIS.”
On Tuesday’s Hardball, a similar panel of Trump critics was assembled and they also pretended the anti-Semitism of Omar and Tlaib did not exist as they targeted the President.
Here is a transcript of the August 21 segment on Morning Joe:
6:35 AM ET
(...)
WILLIE GEIST: Julia, all in the service of politics, he’s trying to make some political point to make these congresswomen the face of the Democratic Party, but in doing so, as Joe said, the numbers from Pew are actually 79% of American Jews voted Democratic in the 2018 midterm elections. So accusing disloyalty of 79% of American Jews. Disloyal to whom? It’s not totally clear, either to America or to Israel or perhaps to both.
JULIA IOFFE: Well, I think to both. But I think it does call into question Jewish – American Jewish loyalty, and as Joe correctly pointed out, this trope has a long and sorted history. My family suffered for it mightily in the Soviet Union after the foundation of the state of Israel. This created the kind of anti-cosmopolitan campaign by Joseph Stalin, which said that Jews should be, you know, they already have a homeland, so why are they in the Soviet Union? Or they were suspected of being loyal to another country.
But you know what else has a long and sorted history is Donald Trump playing footsie with anti-Semites and himself parroting anti-Semitic tropes. We dealt with this during the campaign in 2016, when he condemned – when he refused to condemn his fans that attacked Jewish journalists. When he ran the closing ad of his campaign, which was basically kind of the greatest hits of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, when he re-tweeted that photo-shopped image of Hillary Clinton with the Star of David on top of a pile of money, and deflected and said it was an allusion to Frozen. When, after the Charlottesville rally, once he was president, where people were chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” he said there were “very fine people on both sides.” So this trope may have a long and sorted anti-Semitic history, but so does Donald Trump.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: And Mike Barnicle, that is what’s been so fascinating and disturbing over the past several months. Donald Trump is actually attacking Democratic congresswomen for being anti-Semitic when he has trotted out anti-Semitic tropes throughout his entire political campaign. Again, you look at that Hillary Clinton ad that he re-tweeted, the attack of Hillary Clinton, talking about Jewish money trying to buy off the United States government. That lies right at the heart of anti-Semitic tropes. And again, for decades, for generations, for centuries, for centuries, this is exactly how Jews have been attacked, not only in the Soviet Union, but in Germany, across the world, that they are quote, “insufficiently loyal.”
MIKE BARNICLE: Well, Joe, you know, this again is just part of the premeditated ignorance on the part of the President of the United States. He says these things, I firmly believe, with a plan, a plot in his mind to further divide the country on an everyday basis on either race or religion or fear.
And John Meacham, I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on perhaps right now an unanswerable question. And the question is, with all of this rhetoric spewing out of the President’s mouth multiple times a day, how long do you think it will take for this republic to heel and to repair the damage that he’s already done to us, the American people, to our country, and to our image and who we are to countries abroad? How long is it going to take to repair that? And can it be repaired?
JON MEACHAM: Yeah, I think it can. And I think, blessedly, we’re a very resilient country. We’ve come through enormous crisis before. We have, in fact, gotten to a place that is still worth defending. Remember, nobody in the past stood around saying everything’s perfect now, we don't need to change anything.
(...)
MEACHAM: What I worry about, to go to the more troubling part of your question, I ran into somebody the other day who his daughter had adopted a child from Central America, about eight years old, I think, who had sort of picked up some of this in the atmosphere and asked her adoptive mother, “Does this” – after one of these comments about, I don’t know if it was “the countries” or “go back” – said, “Does the president not like me? Does the President not like me?” Because she was brown, and that’s a very troubling.
Deeply, deeply troubling because you have a whole generation. Remember, there’s a generation that grew up under Barack Obama, and there’s a generation who grew up under George W. Bush, and there’s one that grew up under Bill Clinton, and there were always issues there. But you do have a generation that’s, again, in the atmosphere, and I don’t mean to overly sentimentalize anything, but in the atmosphere, they now see American public life and the presidency as this constant source of contention, this constant source of strife, and this constant instinct to divide. And so, they’re gonna have – their central narrative that they came to the party with, so to speak, is not gonna be one that’s gonna have faith in these institutions. That worries me a lot.
SCARBOROUGH: Well, and you’re not being overly sentimental when you talk about that. My concern for some time, and any parent’s concern that thinks about it, would be what happens to the six-year-old American girl whose parents practice Islam, that goes to school, that goes to first grade and it is subject to abusive attacks there? What happens to the Hispanic child who sees the President, you know, calling Hispanics “breeders” and attacking Hispanics the way he does? What happens to a 14-year-old Hispanic girl that may be in a predominantly white high school, what sort of abuse does she receive? What happens to a seven-year-old Jewish kid who, of course, with anti-Semitism being encouraged by the President of the United States, with his anti-Semitic tropes that have been used, again, for centuries?
(...)
IOFFE: Dig up his closing ad of 2016, it really plays like, you know, the visualized version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, you know, the shadowy hand of the Jewish financiers running our politics and sucking the blood of the common man. I mean, it’s really something.
But you know, in – on top of, you know these proverbial children you mentioned going to school and experiencing mocking or bullying at school, which we know is happening, there are other more fatal consequences of this. We’ve had shootings at mosques, at synagogues, at the El Paso Walmart where a shooter was specifically targeting Hispanics. These are people who are echoing Donald Trump’s rhetoric, who are praising him in their manifestos before they go in and kill people. You know, the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League has noted a spike in anti-Semitic hate crimes in 2017 that rose further than at any point during their record keeping. And what was 2017? It was the first year of Donald Trump in office.
And the President’s gonna hide again behind his Jewish son-in-law and his Jewish daughter, but I think we all need to keep our eye on the ball, and realize that he is feeding a lot of this anti-Semitic violence, Islamaphobic violence, anti-Hispanic violence, and anti-black violence, and it’s only gonna get worse. I think honestly – I think we’re seeing him trot out his 2020 reelection strategy and it’s only gonna get worse.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Absolutely.
