Yarmuth: 'all forms of hatred and bigotry must be denounced'
By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 1360
The other day, President Trump said “the Democrats hate Jewish people," adding that he “didn't understand how any Jew could vote for a Democrat these days.”
Seventy-nine percent of Jewish voters in last November's mid-term elections cast Democratic ballots, according to a Pew poll.
Congressman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla, is Jewish. So is Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Louisville. Strong supporters of organized labor, both voted for the recent House resolution condemning hate.
“He is the worst perpetrator of purveying anti-Semitism,” Wasserman Schultz replied to Trump's remarks. "The president continues to use dog whistles and train whistles to perpetuate anti-Semitism.
“He is a hypocrite. He has perpetuated anti-Semitism himself, and now what he is doing is even worse. He is, instead of trying to use the platform that he has to heal the situation, and calm the waters and bring people together, he’s dangerously weaponizing anti-Semitism as a political bludgeon, and that jeopardizes Jewish lives.”
Before Yarmuth voted, he issued a statement that made two rock-solid points:
-- You can criticize Israel's government and not be anti-Semitic. In his statement, Yarmuth cited "a very real and serious problem of humanitarian violations by the Netanyahu government with the United States’ approval."
-- The Republicans are guilty of blatant hypocrisy in denouncing anti-Semitism.
The measure, which passed Thursday, 407-23, stemmed from Democratic freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar's controversial remarks that were critical of U.S. support for Israel. Republicans, and some Democrats, claimed her comments were anti-Semitic, or close to it.
Omar apologized, as a story in Thursday's Louisville Courier-Journal pointed out. She also voted for the resolution. (Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Lewis County) didn't vote for the legislation and his "office did not immediately respond to a request for comment," wrote the C-J's Philip M. Bailey.)
Here's the statement:
There’s no question that Representative Omar was careless in the way she discussed a very real and serious problem of humanitarian violations by the Netanyahu government with the United States’ approval. I know she now better understands the pain and history of the use of anti-Semitic tropes, as well as the weight of her words as a member of Congress. But the flood of sanctimony from Republicans who tacitly condone deliberate bigotry at the highest levels of their party and of this government is the height of hypocrisy. The President of the United States stood up and claimed some Nazis and white supremacists to be ‘very fine people’ after their horrific murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, yet this is the thing that we’re in an uproar over? As a Jewish American and someone who believes all forms of hatred and bigotry must be denounced, I will vote in support of today’s measure. But symbolic procedural votes will not fix the root problems that exist, and the ongoing use of selective outrage by some of my colleagues—for no reason other than to score political points—is a dangerous practice that undermines the office we hold.
Donald Trump panders to hate, non-stop. The president borrows terms from the 20th century's most murderous dictators. He calls the media (except for fawning Fox News and the rest of right-wing TV and radio) "the enemy of the people," a slam favored by Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Adolf Hitler.
With Hitler's blessing, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels smeared as "enemies of the people," Jews and others the Nazis hated (including anti-Nazi trade unionists) and imprisoned, tortured and murdered them.
During his rise to power, Hitler attacked the anti-Nazi press as the Lügenpresse, meaning "lying press." He muzzled the press (and destroyed Germany's unions) when he became dictator. (Trump, who is pro-"right to work," ran on the most anti-union presidential platform in history.)
At Trump rallies on the campaign trail, some of his supporters yelled Lügenpresse at reporters. The term, too, has been resurrected by far-right groups in Germany.
Republicans indeed "tacitly condone deliberate bigotry at the highest levels of their party." Yarmuth's fellow Louisvillian, Sen. Mitch McConnell, is Trump's enabler-in-chief. (McConnell and Massie are also union-busters.)
"Trump’s willingness to say and do things that most people would shy away from because they are constrained by social norms, or ethics, helped carry him to where he is today," The New Yorker's John Cassidy wrote in a 2017 essay headlined "Donald Trump’s Craven Republican Enablers" and illustrated with McConnell's photo.
He warned that until the McConnell and the Republicans stop being Trump sycophants, "they will be complicit in the erosion of American democracy."
In a New York Review of Books essay last year, Christopher R. Browning, an historian who specializes in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, also didn't pull punches in characterizing the Senate majority leader: "If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell."