Saturday, October 15, 2016

It’s time to acknowledge reality: Donald Trump talks like an anti-Semite

http://www.vox.com/world/2016/10/14/13288138/donald-trump-anti-semite-israel-david-duke-racism-misogny-clinton
"It’s no secret that Trump has long drawn the support of many from the American far right, including its fetid racist and anti-Semitic constituencies. The Daily Stormer, America’s most popular neo-Nazi website, endorsed him less than two weeks after he launched his candidacy. In a prescient article in August 2015, the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos detailed Trump’s support among white nationalists, who were drawn to his derisive comments about Mexicans and his threats to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. Some of those supporters have lashed out at journalists writing critically about Trump with explicitly anti-Semitic language and imagery, something Trump and his family have been slow to condemn. When journalist Julia Ioffe profiled Melania Trump, she was hit with a barrage of hate that included an anonymous caller playing a Hitler speech while others took to Twitter to post doctored photos with her face superimposed onto a picture of a prisoner at Auschwitz. The Daily Stormer called her a “filthy Russian k*ke.” The language was vile and frightening. Melania Trump’s response? Ioffe, she said, had “provoked” it. Melania Trump’s wink-nod response to openly anti-Semitic remarks has been the rule, not the exception. When Duke publicly endorsed Trump in February, the mogul’s initial response was to falsely claim that he didn’t know who Duke was. That was a lie; Trump had denounced Duke as far back as 1991 and in 2000 described him as “a bigot, a racist, a problem.” It took Trump weeks to grudgingly disavow Duke’s support and condemn white supremacy more broadly. That hasn’t stopped Trump and his family from continuing to use language and imagery that carry anti-Semitic undertones or from retweeting comments from supporters with Twitter handles like @WhiteGenocideTM."