"Hillary Clinton gets to Donald Trump's right on Israel." That's the dead, dangerously wrong headline in a March 21 Washington Post op-ed by Paul Waldman. The fodder for this falsehood is Clinton's address before AIPAC, where she dissed Trump's recent statement that he would be "neutral" between the Israelis and Palestinians. In utterly predictable verbiage, she said: "Yes, we need steady hands, not a president who says he's neutral on Monday, pro-Israel on Tuesday, and who knows what on Wednesday, because everything's negotiable." Responds Wladman: "In Trump's defense (yes, I just wrote those words), when this subject comes up he’ll say as loudly as anyone else how 'pro-Israel' he is, but when he used that term he was talking about being an arbiter in negotiations."
How many times can we say it? This is not about "right" and "left." It is purely a faction fight within the USA's right-wing establishment. Trump is playing to the paleocon, isolationist and (yes) anti-Semitic right. Clinton is playing to the neocon pro-Zionist right. She is not to the "right" of Trump in any sense. How deluded can this Waldman be? Just what we need, the Palestinian cause being mixed up with an unapologetic "defense" of the fascistic Trump, who has built his whole campaign around Islamophobia!
Of course the capricious would-be American Führer has shown little consistency on anything other than demonizing immigrants, and has himself also played to the neocons. Maybe Waldman didn't get the word on his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal—an issue Trump exploited in his own speech to the AIPAC meeting, as Iran's Press TV gloats. The Hill noted back in January that he even called the deal "suspicious," implying it was conscious treason. Looks to us like Trump has positioned himself to the right of Bibi Netanyahu here!
Jon Ward on Yahoo News writes that despite Trump's statement to AIPAC that "I didn't come here tonight to pander to you," he in fact "prostrated himself before the largest pro-Israeli advocacy group in America." But in his speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition in December, he alienated his audience with unabashed anti-Semitic tropes, as Salon reported. ("Stupidly, you want to give me money… You're not going to support me because I don’t want your money.") Was this just the pendejo being his charming self? Or was he consciously throwing a wink to the Judeophobes? Doesn't much matter. The Jew-haters are getting the message either way. Note the "Go to Auschwitz!" line hurled against protesters at one of his hate-fests, and his supporters' increasing fondness for the Hitler salute. (See HuffPo in case you missed this loveliness.)
Despite all this, Waldman is not the only deluded pseudo-leftist to have come to this monster's "defense." The (ever-problematic) MondoWeiss wrote after his faux pas before Republican Jewish Coalition, "Trump wasn't anti-Semitic." Of course this is the same MondoWeiss that has shilled for Ron Paul (like other pseudo-left icons) and for Chuck Hagel.
We've been for years noting this pseudo-left convergence with the paleocons, and warning how unprincipled and downright stupid it is. It was pro-Israel tweeter Yair Rosenberg who noted the nearly identical rhetoric used by neo-Nazi mouthpiece David Duke and Alison Weir of "If Americans Knew" on Obama's choice of a Supreme Court nominee of Jewish background. Why does it fall to a pro-Israel voice to call out this ugliness? Do you understand how this moral failure serves the interests of Zionism?
