The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
- Edmund Burke
I wrote yesterday about the controversy over Donald Trump tweeting an image of Hillary Clinton against a backdrop of money and the message, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” set in a six-sided star. That the star was understood by most any reasonable person who saw it to be a representation of the Star of David seems the very definition of dog whistle politics…and it worked. Not only did racists, bigots, and anti-Semites of all stripes crawl out from under their metaphorical rocks, the meme genereated a ton of what in effect was free advertising for the Trump campaign.
Those most (understandably and justifiably) upset by the tweet are Jews, the majority of whom immediately understood the tweet to be neither subtle nor unmistakable in its intent. As an anti-Semitic dog whistle, it was brilliant. Bigots, haters, and virulent anti-Semites were almost giddy over the bone tossed their way by the Trump campaign. It was constructed in such a way that the candidate could not only deflect/refuse to accept blame, he could, in fact, turn things around and blame the “dishonest media,” which was (unsurprisingly)the response he chose.
The best defense is a good offense, eh? Thus far, no one in this Presidential campaign has caused more gratuitous offense and with more plausible deniability that Donald Trump, who never saw a personal $#@%up he couldn’t blame on others.
This sorry saga is distressing enough on its own merits, but what’s been lost in the Sturm und Drang is that Trump’s daughter is married to Jared Kushner, a Jewish media mogul. Oddly enough, Kushner has remained silent in the wake of the virulent anti-Semitism currently being employed by his father-in-law’s campaign. Unfortunately for Kushner, one of his employees, Dana Schwartz, has decided not to remain silent and has, in fact, written an open letter taking his boss to task for his silent complicity, which to his way of thinking in effect condones anti-Semitism.
My name is Dana Schwartz and I’m an entertainment writer at the Observer, the paper owned by your publishing company. On July 2…your father-in-law Donald Trump tweeted out an image of Hillary Clinton in front of raining money with a six-sided star declaring she’s the “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!”
I responded to the meme, calling out its blatant anti-Semitic imagery because people can play ignorant, blame the corrupt liberal media for trying to “get” Trump, but it takes only a basic knowledge of world history or an understanding of how symbols work to see a wall of cash, a Star of David, and the accusation of corruption and not see the subtext.
But deny or play dumb as you might, when I tweeted out my response, my worst fears were realized: his message, whether purposeful or inadvertent, was met with cheers by those to whom that star’s message was certainly clear. Mr. Trump’s tweet was seen as a winking promise to this nation’s worst and most hateful individuals.
When Schwartz says his worst fears were realized, he’s not being hyperbolic. I’m not about to dignify the tweets he received by reproducing them, but you can go here if you need/want to see them.
Trump’s tweet is a clear and undeniable dog whistle, despite Trump’s pathetic effort to “correct” the record by tweeting that it was just a sheriff’s star, or even a plain star. It went out on his personal account, which means that, regardless of who wrote it, he bears ultimate responsibility. No intelligent, reasonable person is buying what Trump is selling. Of course, the very nature of a dog whistle is that it’s coded in such a way that those the message is intended for will understand it without hesitation while also providing the responsible party with plausible deniability.
Compounding the offense was that the tweet sent out covering the Star of David with a circle contained the hashtag #AmericaFirst. To the historically impaired, America First was a movement led by White supremacist Charles Lindbergh that advocated against American intervention and involvement in World War II. The Anti-Defamation League asked Trump to reconsider the use of the hashtag due to its unmistakable anti-Semitic connotation.
He and his campaign deny that the image—which had been found, previous to Trump’s tweet, on a white supremacist internet forum—has any Jewish implications at all. Instead of acknowledging the obvious, he and his campaign used it as an opportunity to undermine the free media in the style of the most dangerous regimes in history, and mock those like me, who had been getting strangers on the Internet telling her to put her head in the oven for the past day and a half….
You went to Harvard, and hold two graduate degrees. Please do not condescend to me and pretend you don’t understand the imagery of a six-sided star when juxtaposed with money and accusations of financial dishonesty. I’m asking you, not as a “gotcha” journalist or as a liberal but as a human being: how do you allow this? Because, Mr. Kushner, you are allowing this. Your father-in-law’s repeated accidental winks to the white supremacist community is perhaps a savvy political strategy if the neo-Nazis are considered a sizable voting block—I confess, I haven’t done my research on that front. But when you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law, you’re giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval.
Does Kushner’s silence make him complicit, in the sense that he’s providing tacit approval to his father-in-law’s- most virulently hateful supporters? From where I sit, there’s no doubt but that Kushner’s silence is harming the cause of Jews, the vast majority of whom simply want to be left alone to live their lives as genuinely and authentically as possible. How can he not speak up against those of his father-in-law’s supporters who’d happily see him and his co-religionists marched into ovens?
I can’t begin to get into Jared Kushner’s head, nor do I envy the position he finds himself in…but for him to stand by silently as his father openly courts those who hate Jews and perpetuates the age-old vile stereotypes against them is as unconscionable as it is unimaginable.
When good people- like Kushner, who’s uniquely placed to defend Jews against hateful stereotypes- remain silent, evil can and may well triumph. It’s why I refuse to remain silent…but I don’t have the resources or the connections necessary to have anywhere near the impact he could.
All he needs to do is to speak out against the anti-Semitism fomented and cultivated by his father-in-law’s campaign.
(Update: Kushner finally did issue a statement…which addressed the virulent anti-Semitism of his father-in-law’s campaign not at all. To quote more than a few AIDS activists from the ’80s, “SILENCE=DEATH,” eh?)
