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Adam Sostrin
Not a Spare

Cognitive dissonance is in the air

(Screenshot: used in accordance with Clause 27a of copyright law)

Since October 7, 2023, countless members of the Jewish community have supported Israel in its war in Gaza, Lebanon, etc., and while many others have taken the side of Israel’s detractors.  Likewise, while most Jews in the US condemn Antisemitism/Antizionism – or call it what it is, ‘Jew Hatred’ – at universities, and down ballot locations of learning (K-12, probably), some do not. The reasons why that isn’t offensive to some Jews but is in actuality, ‘just desserts,’ doesn’t seem to make perfect sense. If someone wants you dead or the country destroyed where friends and relatives of yours live and families moved to after the Holocaust (“Yes, Generation Z, we can safely say it happened.”) is that the time to cross the picket line and break-bread? I’ll never know.

So, what does it mean to be Jewish in America and support the Democratic Party, or the Republican Party? We are in an election year, and there’s only two more weeks before we find out a winner unless hanging chads and voting machine controversies seize the imagination.

Now if Kamala wins, will she go on stating that ‘Israel has the right to defend itself?’ How many times must we be told that the only Jewish nation on the planet, if under attack, can legally protect its people? Since it feels like a hall pass, I suppose thanks are in order. The hard part is, if that is your hall pass it doesn’t also include the right to strike back. I shudder to think how many American Jews support this approach. Confusion is in the air. My good friend calls it, ‘Clown World.’

Would a President-elect Kamala go on with Biden-Harris equivocations regarding the purpose of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, that is, is it a war for self-defense or a basis for Bibi to stay in office? I’m told there is a seven-front war aimed at the only Jewish state on the planet, although MSNBC and other Democratic pundits states the war isn’t about protecting the people in Israel. Don’t Iron Dome, David Sling, Arrow, the extortion money paid out to the United States for Thaad missile defense, not to mention the constant barrage of munitions, drones and rockets directed at and fired at Israel, tell a different story? There’s just so much confusion in what people are saying and how Jew haters feel about it that our ability to perceive correctly is on the fritz.

Will Harris go on to maintain that Israel has committed a ‘genocide’ in Gaza, as she recently did at a campaign stop in Milwaukee? I don’t have an exact answer to this, but I am assuming that even Doug Emhoff is familiar with the actual genocide of the Jews despite what his daughter may or may not have to say about it. As of February 29, 2024, numbers provided by ‘Gaza Authorities,’ aka Hamas, provided that the combatant-civilian death ratio was 13:14, when historically “civilians count for 90% percent of casualties during war.”  [Times of Israel. ‘The genocide claim against Israel doesn’t add up.’ Shlomo Cohen and Yaacov Samet. June 2, 2024.]  Of course, the ratio in the Holocaust involved Jewish civilians to Jewish civilians, six million of them. Food for thought.

Also there is the baseless claim of the Biden-Harris State Department that Israel is employing a ‘policy of starvation’ Gaza. To even accept the premise, forget about Israel bringing food in by the ton since the beginning of the war, the theft of the trucks by Hamas, the terror network going into the business of selling the plunder back to the people of Gaza, and that giving food aid to the enemy has little historical precedent, if any at all. Assuming this is all being done for the sake of Michigan and Minnesota, and it is meant as a short-term strategy, that’s quite a cynical thing to do to an ally surrounded by nations whose twofold wish is the destruction of Israel and the Jews.

Senator Bernie Sanders won’t come to the rescue, which should come as a surprise to no one. The senator recently suggested that Kamala may be on board with an arms embargo against the Jewish state should Kamala obtain the highest office.  That doesn’t bode well.

Lest we forgot to mention why we’re here in the first place: Biden-Harris’ financial support of Iran, and the failure to enforce sanctions against the terror state.  Assuming I were the proximate cause of so much misery and grief to Israel and Jews throughout the world, the least I could do would be to use Title VI against American universities who fail to address discrimination against Jews in school. They haven’t gotten to that so much.

Now on to the most hated person in the media.

Trump has many problems, most of which are of his own making: it’s typically what he says and sometimes what he does. Trump’s election denialism and behavior on and immediately after January 6, 2020, was unbecoming of a presidential office holder. Trump is the only former president in American history to have been impeached twice, prosecuted many times over, and convicted of a felony (Not sentenced. Not yet.) However, the impetus for the constant pillorying is ostensibly political and the legal theories behind the complaints are often as novel as the judicial decisions that accompany them. [Given the subject matter, it wouldn’t be fair to ignore the Justice Department declaring Biden to be an appropriate subject of prosecution but for his age.]

Let’s get back to the worst bits and what Trump’s detractors focus on most, which are the things Trump ‘says.’ This year Trump declared, inter alia, that Israel and/or the Jewish people have had no greater ally than him while at the same stating that if he loses the election the Jews would be at partly responsible for an election loss.  Not helpful. Pretty awful, actually. On the other hand, Trump’s campaign statements appear to offer Israel a free-hand in going after its enemies – including Iran, whereas Biden doesn’t typically go beyond ‘[d]on’t’ or ceasefire now, whether or not achieved with the return of the hostages.

In a recent essay from ‘The Atlantic,’ titled ‘Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini,’ it addresses Trump’s use of, let’s call it ‘Hitler-ian’ or ‘Hitler-adjacent’ rhetoric, such as: ‘vermin,’ ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ ‘bad genes,’ ‘they’re not humans; they’re animals,’ and ‘the enemy within.’ Not helpful. Although I disagreed with the point made in the article that even segregationist, George Wallace, wouldn’t dignify Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. But wasn’t actual segregation worse? Isn’t the doing worse than the saying, and aren’t we all made vulnerable by a media which conflates these two concepts?  [Short disclaimer: the list of ‘did he say that[s]?’ is too long to go into.]

Now juxtapose the things Trump has said with what he did over the course of his first term, i.e., Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, allowed Jewish settlements in the West Bank (Reversing an Obama era preclusion), and the Abraham Accords. Also, Trump killed Soleimani, sidelined Iran before Biden fluffed it back from obscurity, and destroyed ISIS.

Biden-Harris has been a foreign policy disaster. They botched the withdrawal of Afghanistan, in addition to overseeing the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the creation of a Russia-China alliance. Next, for reasons that are not exactly clear, Biden-Harris allowed Iran to flourish which imperiled Israel and resulted in the October 7th massacre; and to add insult to injury, their policy of second-guessing Israel’s war planning and motivations, equivocal language regarding Israel’s effort to ethically fight a war in civilian areas with Hamas infrastructure and terrorists, and indefensible reliance on Hamas death statistics, has had the effect of promoting rather than discouraging antisemitism.

When comparing what Trump says versus what Trump does, versus what Biden-Harris has said and done, Trump would appear to be a stronger advocate for Israel and the Jewish people in the United States. Biden-Harris, while providing – and sometimes threatening to withhold – an important defense to Israel, coddles radicals in their party who condemn Israel while trading in libels and false inferences re civilian to combat deaths and starvation. Notwithstanding, the Jewish community in the United States is overwhelmingly supportive of Harris because – as we often are told – Trump is no better than the worst dictators of the 20th century. Welcome to Clown World.

According to ABC News/Ipsos polling, Jews living in the United States favor Harris over Trump by 63% to 33%.  [ABC News. ‘Israelis broadly favor Trump over Harris on security and in vote preference.  Gary Langer.  October 4, 2024.] Likewise, a recent Jewish Democratic Council of America poll determined that 68% of American Jews support Harris with only 23% of Jews supporting Trump. [Democratic Council of America. New Poll: Jews voters overwhelmingly support & trust Kamala Harris; oppose and distrust Donald Trump.’  September 9, 2024.]

Despite Biden-Harris’ repeated calls for a ceasefire and threats to withhold aid to Israel, and seemingly providing over Iran, American Jews overwhelmingly favor Harris over Trump in handling the Israel-Hamas war by a margin of 54% to 36%, as recently stated in a CHIP50 poll.  [Northeastern University.  ‘Exclusive: In new poll, US Jews say Trump more supportive of Israelis but Harris better on Gaza War.’  David Lazer. October 2024.] Likewise, according to a Pearson Institute/AP-Norc Center for Public Affairs polling, Democrats are significantly more likely to be a critical of Israel than Republicans.

Also from the platform, ‘War on the Rocks:’ “Partisan differences embody another fundamental change that now threatens the bipartisan consensus in favor of Israel. Today, Republican voters are much more likely than Democratic voters to fully support Israel. In 2001, 51 percent of Democrats said they sympathized more with Israelis, while only 16 percent said they sympathized more with Palestinians, according to Gallup. In March 2023, for the first time, Gallup found that more Democrats sympathized with Palestinians (49 percent) than with Israelis (38 percent). Meanwhile, the percentage of Republicans who sympathize with Israelis has grown, from 59 percent in 2001 to 78 percent in 2023.” [“The Bipartisan consensus in favor of Israel is broken, but will it change US Policy?” Kerry Anderson. April 8, 2024.]

As discussed in a recent Langer Research Associates and PORI survey, if Israelis were voting in the upcoming election, they would choose Trump over Harris by a margin of thirty percentage points, to wit: 54% to 24%.  [ABC News. ‘Israelis broadly favor Trump over Harris on security and in vote preference.  Gary Langer.  October 4, 2024.]  Why the obvious discrepancy between Israeli support of Trump and American Jewry’s unfavorable take on ‘the Don?’ Surely, Israeli Jews do not wish that their greatest ally be ruled by Hitler and for Hitler to annihilate the American Jewish community.

The Anti-Defamation League recently stated that there more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents between October 7, 2023, and September 2024, versus 3,325 incidents in the prior year.  [CNN. ‘Shocking, historic spike in anti-Jewith threats across the US, ADL says.’  Josh Campbell. October 7, 2024.]  Many of these occasions for hate stem from persons on the political ‘Left’ who identify as ‘antizionist – which is typically a ‘beard’ for simple antisemitism – and/or are outright supporters of Hamas. This means that American Jewish Democrats are wittingly and unwittingly voting alongside antisemites who do not support the existence of Jewish homeland.  Talk about your cognitive dissonance.

That is not to say that antisemitism does not exist at the other end of the spectrum.  It surely does, and Donald Trump has kept strange bedfellows who are likely antisemitic. While I assume that is because Trump doesn’t wish to lose votes, it is a dangerous and unacceptable gamble, which is not so different – albeit smaller in scale – than the Michigan/Minnesota strategy played out by the Democrats.

Nonetheless, given the mainstreaming of antisemitism on the Left, and the coddling of radicals in the party and in Congress itself, the canned response that Trump is no better than a two-bit fascist feels a bit like a con job. If your raison d’etre is stopping Hitler, consider not voting for the candidate who has the support of jackbooted thugs shouting ‘from the River to the Sea.’ Everything is so discordant.

About the Author
Adam is an attorney based in Southern California. He practices criminal law. He has two dogs whom he loves, and is deeply involved in animal rescue. Also, Adam enjoys photography and posts images to an unsuccessful instagram account. Adam could have been a comedian and instead chose a different path.
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