Hang Down Your Head and Cry

HANG DOWN YOUR HEAD AND CRY
Dateline Paris / November 6, 2024

I am not a straw man. Not even a straw woman. And certainly not a straw trans. You cannot catch me in any category of the disgruntled whose well-earned sadness today should be a laughing matter for you. I don’t have contempt for the common people, I don’t hate the poor, the wealthy, the stranger and the man next door. The values I respect in others and expect of myself include: integrity, decency, intelligence, goodwill, devotion, refinement and elegance. I love the light in human beings and have always done my utmost to kindle it in my private and public life.
290 + electoral votes change nothing, absolutely nothing in my evaluation of Donald Trump. He is the man I have seen more than enough and heard endlessly for the past nine years. What I see today is that the America of junk food has chosen a junk president. Both are indigestible for me. But I’m not there. I left 52 years ago and will not be coming back. As a fair-play defender of democracy, I take note of this choice and wouldn’t even comment on it if it were limited to the domestic scene.
But, along with a reported 4% of American voters, I am concerned about foreign policy. The implications of this Trump victory for us, in Europe, in Israel, in the free world, are weighty.

The broad smiles and great expectations of so many of my Zionist friends and colleagues chill my heart. Donald Trump—who warned the Jews that if he lost it would be their fault– won the swing state of Michigan with the help of a resounding Arab vote. An allegiance he had carefully cultivated this year, surfing on the “abandon Harris” wave. The Islamists of Hamtramck, the Lebanese of Dearborn, the antisemitic antizionist negationist latter day enthusiasts for the Republican candidate were hooked with a double pronged line: the promise to end the wars in the Middle East and the deft silence on the threat of jihad or even a polite mention of radical Islam.

The “enemy within” is a mix of Democrats, recalcitrant Republicans, journalists, prosecutors/judges/juries, South American immigrants, wokies, pro-Palestinian and BLM demonstrators, 4-star generals and former members of Trump’s first term administration… not stealth sharia law convertors, not Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators, not imams preaching genocidal Jew hatred. Those are great people. All they want is peace.

Michael Flynn, Tucker Carlson, Trump’s Lebanese son-in-law, and assorted lesser lights, with the gargantuan help of Elon Musk, have contributed to the development of an Arab-Muslim voting block that, unlike their fellow Americans, is highly motivated by questions of foreign policy. The peace they want is nothing less than withdrawal of American support for Israel. And the marginalization of American Jews.

MAGAs, obsessed by the real or imaginary voting block of illegal immigrants allegedly cultivated by the Democratic party find nothing objectionable in their version, nourished and harvested in Islamic fields. Yes, it’s true, some truly scary, brutal, cruel, death-dealing gangs slip across the southern border. What of the jihadists in suits and ties that are building a political machine with the help, today, of the once and future President Donald Trump?

Shalom achshav, version Trump, will apparently begin with the sacrifice of Ukraine– and, subsequently, Georgia, Transnistria, Moldavia, etc.—to Vladimir Putin. Rational, well-informed, clear-minded colleagues are already telling us that it is in no one’s interest to drag on the hopelessly lost war in Ukraine. Trump has repeatedly spoken about the senseless slaughter. Of course, when Kamala Harris spoke in these terms of civilians in Gaza, while insisting on Israel’s right to defense, security, and the liberation of the hostages, she was snidely mocked as a closet Hamas sympathizer. Whereas the president-elect simply wants everyone to be safe, happy, and gainfully employed.

Is this the way the best friend of Israel plots his course? Bowing to Putin, indirectly surrendering to the North Korea-China-Iran axis, and making you believe that a whoof of his flaming big bad wolf breath will scare all the villains out of their flimsy cabins and back into their modest economies, where they’ll manufacture consumer goods to sell us with a 25% protectionist tariff.

Either Trump’s geopolitical word mush is meaningless and should be ignored, or he truly thinks that the killer tunnels of Gaza swallowed themselves during his first term and the Iranian centrifuges will vanish in thin air on the 21st of January. Kim Jung Un is preparing a new love letter. There’s a new sheriff in town and all the bad guys will drop their guns. He won’t start wars, he’ll stop them.
So that means the wars that are currently tearing apart our world only happened because we started them?

Is he going to appoint Tulsi Gabard as Defense Secretary? Elon Musk could replace, single-handed, the entire Department of Education. We won’t need education anyway, people can just X their brains out. The birthrate will rise with the “father of fertilization” in the Oval Office. Tucker Carlson? He’ll be The Media. No need for a variety of pesky TV networks, newspapers and websites.

The triumphant comeback of Donald J. Trump was a blow. The dismissal of Yoav Gallant touches my heart. In my vision of this war, Gallant is inextricably joined with those brilliant heroic soldiers of Tsahal, risking their lives, too many of them tragically wounded or killed. I feel like they have been kicked in the teeth with the harsh dismissal of Yoav Gallant, who wears the profound soulful expression of a grieving Jewish state that stands straight and tall, and will spare no effort to achieve victory.

Since the simchat torah massacre, whenever Donald Trump bothered to mention the war, he would say Israel has to get it over with because it’s giving them a bad image. He implied that the Biden-Harris administration was standing in the way of this crushing blow. The exceptional military and financial support and the defensive alliance against Iranian attacks is dismissed, in the MAGA Zionist camp, as thin pickings.

We shall see.