Trump’s Springfield blood libel is not funny, for dogs, cats and Jews too

When I heard it I cracked up. Donald Trump’s rant about Haitian immigrants in Springfield Ohio eating dogs and cats was by far the most LOL moment of the debate. Having heard this completely baseless rumor being juiced up pre-debate by JD Vance (who should know better, regarding baseless rumors), I wondered whether Trump would be crazy enough to actually go there.

He went there and, if there is any sanity at all left in our electorate, he should have sealed his fate for this election. He has proven himself to be a worthy disciple of his ruthless mentor, Roy Cohn, and he should face the same blowback as Cohn’s client, Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Trump proved in that one moment, as if it hadn’t been proven time and time again before and since (yes, he did also accuse Harris in that same debate of “putting out,”) that he doesn’t have a shred of decency. Forget the presidency, he doesn’t deserve to be elected dog catcher, certainly not in Springfield.

Of course the man-eats-dog comment was funny and a gazillion memes were birthed. Even the ones supporting Trump, featuring our orange superhero saving Spot and Puff from their Haitian tormentors, seemed in retrospect like parodies designed to mock him. Every time I hear the clip of Trump saying, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs…the cats…” I can’t help but laugh again. It’s as perfect a synthesis of hatred and stupidity as anything that ever came out of Archie Bunker’s mouth (though you’d have to go far to beat his encounter with Sammy Davis Jr.) and matches Jennifer Coolidge’s t-shirt-worthy line from The White Lotus (about a minute into this clip), “These gays! They’re trying to murder me!”

But here’s the thing. As laugh-inducing as it is, it’s no joke.

What Trump said at the debate, in front of 67 million people live, was a horrible blood libel leveled at a completely innocent community. Like other recent immigrant blood libels, it could well lead to violence, and not just directed toward Haitians – which would be horrific in itself. Let’s not forget that 2018’s October surprise, the murder of worshippers at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, was directly inspired by Trump’s xenophobic anti-immigrant “caravan” campaign, which the shooter then blamed on Jews. Why? Because Jews believe in welcoming strangers, since we were strangers in the land of Egypt (and everywhere else), and because we follow an ethical code calling on us to love the stranger – which is one reason Jews tend not to vote for xenophobes (likely to the tune of 75-25 percent).

We Jews know that all xenophobic roads eventually lead to us, and we also know that even if it didn’t, it’s just plain wrong to gin up hate against the defenseless.

I read this heartbreaking article in Friday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer.

• See also: Columbus man regrets taking goose photo he says is being weaponized against immigrants (Columbus Dispatch)

We’re human beings! We protect our animals! We live with animals!

Shylock could not have been more articulate. To refresh your memory, Shakespeare’s most eloquent cry against the injustices of antisemitism was put into the mouth of the Merchant of Venice:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

Hath not a Haitian pugs and Pomeranians, Abyssinians and shorthairs? If you troll us, do we not cry? If you wrong us, do we not vote?

Well, many of them don’t yet. Which is sort of the point.

As if it isn’t bad enough to dehumanize an entire proud ethnic community so cruelly, and simultaneously to insult the whole city, Springfield today is facing another product of this Trump-inspired evil: bomb threats to local schools. Elementary schools. Little kids. The city’s mayor this week blamed Republicans for inciting the bomb threats. Per Cleveland.com:

Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, in an interview with ABC6 in Columbus, explicitly tied the bomb threats to the anti-immigration rhetoric from Republican politicians. He said the emailed threat involved “enough” negative language toward immigrants and Haitians to warrant concern. “All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it,” he said.

Where is the outrage? Governor DeWine? Senator…oh wait, not Vance. Can’t expect the arsonist to put out the fire.

I come from a group that has had to be explain to its neighbors that, no, we don’t eat children.

We don’t eat children?!

We have had to say that? Just like Minnesotans don’t kill their newborns.

Why is this insanity being tolerated?

Just because this is only the Blood Libel du Jour on the Trump menu, doesn’t make it any less a blood libel. Jews of all people can never allow a such a heinous slander to be normalized.  Blood libels have been directed against us since the Middle Ages – and even today we see the residue in conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, which Elon Musk and others are still pushing.

Only now, we have added to the false accusations of Democrats and Jews being pedophiles this new twist of Haitians being pet-o-philes.

That quote from the man who presumably fled from Haiti to Springfield Ohio for a better life, only to have his entire community accused of eating the very animals that they themselves love – and by a presidential candidate – a former president, no less – at a debate watched by 67 million….

All Americans should be hanging their heads in shame that such a person is actually a candidate for the highest office in the land. It is a stain on all of us. He is a laughing stock around the world, but it’s not funny.

This is the opposite of funny. This could well lead to murderous violence, as it did in 2018.

What kind of unfeeling idiot could possibly get up at a debate and say “They’re eating your dogs!”

To quote Army Counsel Joseph Welch at the McCarthy hearing, where Trump’s idol Roy Cohn dutifully stood back and stood by:

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Evidently not.