New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted early Saturday that President Trump has been using anti-Semitic language to attack House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff in the face of an impeachment inquiry.
“Understand that Trump is engaged in deliberate, atrocious, targeted antisemitism towards Chairman Schiff,” she said on Saturday morning. “Then ask yourself why no one cares to denounce it – esp when his accusation of it towards others drove full news cycles earlier this year.”
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Understand that Trump is engaged in deliberate, atrocious, targeted antisemitism towards Chairman Schiff.
Then ask yourself why no one cares to denounce it – esp when his accusation of it towards others drove full news cycles earlier this year. https://t.co/bjEw6eb7Md
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 5, 2019
Ocasio-Cortez linked her tweet to an article from the Intercept that casts several past comments and actions made by Trump and his family members as “anti-Semitic.” The author, Mehdi Hasan, specifically cited a Trump tweet from the end of September that said, “Can you imagine if these Do Nothing Democrat Savages, people like Nadler, Schiff, AOC Plus 3, and many more, had a Republican Party who would have done to Obama what the Do Nothings are doing to me. Oh well, maybe next time!”
“More than 200 House Democrats have signed onto an impeachment inquiry and yet the president chose to target only three of them by name, two of whom are Jewish: Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler, chairs of the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees,” Hasan wrote. “The third target was — surprise! — a woman of color, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez … How is such rhetoric not racist?”
Hasan also suggested that Trump and his administration were operating from a Neo-Nazi “style guide” for the website “The Daily Stormer,” which suggests, “Always blame the Jews for everything.” Additionally, he noted that Trump’s choice of the nickname “Shifty Schiff” for the California Democrat is not an obvious play on his own name and reference to his choice to change the language of a Trump call transcript but an obvious anti-Semitic trope.
“The stereotype of Jews as ‘shifty,’ the suggestion that they are sneaky and manipulative, has a long and ignominious history,” he wrote.
Schiff has been under fire from the president after opening a House Intelligence Committee hearing last month with a summarization of Trump’s July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that was “at least in part parody.”
“My summary of the president’s call was meant to be at least part in parody,” Schiff said after being criticized for his remarks. “The fact that that’s not clear is a separate problem in and of itself.”
