Trump derangement syndrome manifests in increasingly puzzling ways, and Tuesday’s announcement by the White House about an executive order to be signed on anti-Semitism is perhaps the most galling recent example. In response to the serious situation for American Jews on college campuses (this Commentary article is a good primer), Trump issued an executive order to clarify that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects against anti-Semitism on college campuses, with the intention to extend the scope of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin, to include anti-Semitism as well.
Lahav Harkov of the Jerusalem Post explained on Twitter, “Title VI allows the government to revoke funding from schools if they discriminate based on a few things. Nationality is one, religion isn’t. The Executive Order was meant to allow schools to be penalized for anti-Semitic activity on campus.”
This is how many on the Left are choosing to cover it:
President Trump to sign an order to interpret Judaism as a nationality https://t.co/GVLdZ1Cc7Z pic.twitter.com/XGvwT5dd9e
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) December 11, 2019
And the freak-out over literally Hitler came right on cue:
Remember that Trump said those of us that don’t support him are “bad Jews”.
Saying we’re not American and actually of some nebulous “other” nationality is a setup to start targeting and removing us.
— Erin Biba (@erinbiba) December 10, 2019
Erin Biba was so terrified she spent the rest of the night tweeting about eyeshadow. But, I digress.
Taking this step to carve out a special definition for Jewish peoplehood is hardly unprecedented; Jews have defended themselves as a people since the days of the Torah.
I’m just going to leave Gen 12:2 herehttps://t.co/xw9VMEItIU pic.twitter.com/ZAw88rPkky
— Rabbi Josh Yuter (@JYuter) December 11, 2019
Nevertheless, people who are all too happy to ignore campus anti-Semitism because it’s perpetrated by their own side would rather continue to deny the dire situation on campuses because it’s too inconvenient to their narrative.
I am on a U.S. college campus right now. I see Jews wearing yarmulkes everywhere and I don’t see or feel any tension. This is bullshit. https://t.co/xXbb4JTiBY
— Lisa Goldman (@lisang) December 11, 2019
These liberals have spent the last day comparing the president of the United States to Adolf Hitler and Soviet government authorities — all because he has taken a step to protect Jewish students by pointing out how the uniqueness of the Jewish people can make them a target, similar to Muslim and Sikh Americans.
It’s obscene, and it sends a very clear message: They care more about scoring cheap political points than actually protecting Jews.
The origins of the hysteria begin with misreporting from the New York Times about how exactly the order worked and how Jews were specifically defined.
Unless the administration changed the executive order on anti-Semitism at the last minute, it seems like we had a national Twitter freakout yesterday over bad reporting. Not great. https://t.co/AsQ2UFGw3d
— (((Yair Rosenberg))) (@Yair_Rosenberg) December 11, 2019
It’s funny how all of these kinds of mistakes break in one direction and how concerned the president’s opposition is with the facts.
One example of how Twitter’s incentives are broken: I could’ve tweeted yesterday about how Trump’s executive order defining Judaism as a nationality was the first step to deporting Jews and got 5k retweets. But tweets now correctly noting the order doesn’t do this get hardly any.
— (((Yair Rosenberg))) (@Yair_Rosenberg) December 11, 2019
Matt Gertz, a fellow at the liberal group Media Matters, pointed out this extremely inconvenient truth about the origins of the most offensive parts of this order: defining Jews as a separate and protected classification came from the Obama administration’s Department of Justice.
May very well be serious viewpoint descrimination issues with the order and it will assuredly be tested in courts. But I’m seeing people compare this to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union’s treatment of Jews and that’s… not right.
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) December 11, 2019
One can argue that the executive order is bad for free speech on campus, and more generally, or that defining Jews in this manner may not be precise enough or set a good precedent. Unfortunately, almost none of its critics have decided to offer this kind of substantiate analysis. Instead they’ve chosen to compare the president to mass murderers.
It’s more of the same “Orange man bad” we’ve come to expect from the Left. In the process, we’ve come to see where their priorities lie, and it isn’t with Jews.
Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a stay-at-home and homeschooling mother of four and a freelance writer. She is an editor at Ricochet, a columnist at the Forward, and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
