Netanyahu hails Trump’s cruel racist crackdown

Ali Abunimah Rights and Accountability 29 January 2017

A protest at Chicago O’Hare, one of dozens at airports across the United States on 28 January, against President Donald Trump’s order banning arrivals of refugees and travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries.

Ali Abunimah

President Donald Trump’s executive orders barring entry to refugees and ordering the completion of a southern border wall “have united the world against you,” former Mexican president Vicente Fox warned in a tweet on Saturday.

Even some Republican lawmakers are publicly criticizing Trump’s policies.

But through all the anger and chaos he has created, Trump has found at least a few staunch allies: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some of his hard-line US supporters.

Netanyahu’s public alignment with Trump’s incendiary policies will likely accelerate the erosion of some of Israel’s traditional bases of support in the US.

Let them in

On Saturday, thousands of people turned out for spontaneous mass rallies and sit-ins at airports across the United States, including New York’s JFK, Chicago O’Hare, Washington Dulles, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, to demand the release of refugees and residents detained under Trump’s order barring entry to most nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries.

Acting on an emergency lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union on Saturday evening, a federal judge in New York imposed a national stay on elements of Trump’s order – preventing the government from deporting dozens of those detained upon landing. Federal judges in other states have also ruled against parts of the policy.

Trump’s cruel order could, by the estimate of a former US official, up-end the lives of half a million US residents, including permanent green card holders, who could now be arbitrarily barred from returning from overseas trips. (On Sunday, a senior White House official said that green card holders would now be exempted from the ban – underscoring the confusing and chaotic nature of the administration’s actions.)

At Chicago O’Hare, as in scenes repeated across the country, protesters chanted slogans such as “Let them in” and “No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here.” They cheered whenever another detainee was freed.
They staged sit-ins that blocked terminal entrances and access roads.

At JFK, the New York Taxi Worker’s Union, whose members are predominantly immigrant and Muslim, staged a strike, refusing to pick up passengers at the airport in solidarity with the protests.

White House supremacists

According to CNN, the US Department of Homeland Security had advised the White House that green card holders should be exempted from any ban, but that was overruled by two top Trump advisors, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.

In his student days, Miller was a staunch fan of David Horowitz, an extreme pro-Israel and anti-Muslim agitator who has argued that African Americans benefited from slavery.

Bannon is the former chief of Breitbart News, which he described as “the platform for the alt-right.”

The term “alt-right” is a euphemism for white supremacy, white nationalism and outright neo-Nazism.

Richard Spencer, a key figure of the alt-right, has previously described his call for a European “ethno-state” in North America as “white Zionism.”

He took to Twitter last week to reiterate his identification with Israel:

Zionist Organization of America

A key theme of the protests has been that the United States should learn the dark lessons of its past when it refused to accept Jewish refugees fleeing Adolf Hitler, returning them to their deaths in the Holocaust.

That Trump’s order coincided with Holocaust Memorial Day made the message even more poignant.

Jews had been vilified as a threat to the United States, accused of Bolshevism, anarchism, criminality and even of being Nazi spies and saboteurs.

The Anti-Defamation League, a powerful Israel lobby group, called Trump’s order “a sad moment in American history – the time when the president turned his back on people fleeing for their lives.”

But the Zionist Organization of America warmly praised the measure, arguing that unlike Jews in past decades, Americans really should fear Muslims.

Netanyahu has repeatedly lent his warm public support to the ZOA.

Netanyahu says build the wall

Mexico-US relations reached their lowest point in decades during Trump’s first week in office, with a public spat between President Enrique Peña Nieto and his US counterpart over the latter’s insistence that Mexico pay for his border wall.

In Mexico, the wall and Trump’s threats to impose punitive trade tariffs are almost universally seen as an attack on the country motivated by the US president’s previously expressed bigotry characterizing Mexicans as rapists and drug runners.

Mexico is the world’s second largest destination for US goods exports and its third largest trading partner overall – after Canada and the European Union.

Amid the rising tensions, Netanyahu decided to step in, tweeting, “President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel’s southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea.”

Netanyahu’s intervention came after Trump himself cited Israel’s walls as an inspiration. But the Israeli leader nonetheless sparked consternation and anger on both sides of the Mexico-US border.

It recalls his opportunistic exploitation of recent mass-casualty attacks in France and Florida, stoking further division and feeding anti-Muslim sentiment.

Mexico’s foreign ministry expressed its “profound astonishment, rejection and disappointment” at Netanyahu’s comments.

Even more forthright criticisms played out on social media, and Mexican Jews expressed particular worry that Netanyahu’s comments would incite anger against their community, given that Israel markets itself as the global representative of all Jews.

“As a Mexican Jew, I am ashamed of this tweet,” León Krauze, an anchor on the Spanish-language TV network Univision, tweeted in reaction to Netanyahu’s statement.

The heads of Mexico’s Jewish community felt compelled to publicly condemn Netanyahu’s comments, and offer strong support for their country’s united opposition to US policies:
Netanyahu’s wall is part of a racist policy to keep refugees and migrants from African countries out of Israel.

The Israeli prime minister has previously expressed anti-Mexican bigotry similar to his racist views of Palestinians and Africans.

As author Max Blumenthal discovered, Netanyahu argued in a 1993 book that creating a Palestinian state could lead Latinos to demand the creation of a “second Mexico” in the southwestern United States as a result of “continuous emigration from Mexico.” This warning was intended to counteract arguments for a Palestinian state.

Ideology aside, Israel benefits directly from US militarization of its southern border. The Obama administration, for instance, already awarded a $145 million contract to Israeli arms maker Elbit Systems for surveillance equipment along the frontier.

Eroding support for Israel

In the United States, Representative Joaquin Castro, a Democratic congressman from San Antonio, Texas, tweeted about Netanyahu’s support for the wall, “This is very troubling to hear from the Israeli prime minister.”

Castro copied in AIPAC, a sign that he is not afraid to poke the powerful pro-Israel lobby group over such a fundamental matter.

This is just the kind of thing Israel’s liberal supporters are worried about. Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of the Israel lobby group J Street, warned that “When Israel gets involved in these internal US debates – it doesn’t promote long-run, bipartisan support for Israel.”

That, at least, is a silver lining. What is clear from the tumultuous events in the United States is that popular protest and legal challenges to Trump’s unjust policies are viable and must continue.

And, that in the global struggle against racism, ultra-nationalist right-wing bigotry and repression, Israel is a growing part of the problem.

Tags

Comments

picture

sage replied on

Netanyahu must be feeling elated that finally someone in the world, after years, is also building a racist wall. Netanyahu and Trump are two pariahs in the world, and should be treated like that.

picture

Jerry Hamilton replied on

Why is the media so against Trump?
Obama did exactly the same without a problem.

picture

karen replied on

Trump scares the establishment because he comes right out and says we ARE racist and violent and greedy and darn proud of it. Obama wouldn't *say* it, he would just quietly do it, so it had the public fooled. Things like inviting the racist cop and the Black victim to forgive and forget over a beer on the White House lawn while dumping military equipment onto the local police and beefing up new forms of war against your own people (besides letting the cops get away with more and more murder) are so much more effective at keeping people in line.
Too much honesty cures the doublespeak. I love how Netanyahu and Trump openly love each other and Elbit.

picture

R Davis replied on

Isn't wonderful to see the people out in the streets exercising their right to be human.
Power to the people!

picture

tom hall replied on

Contempt for the law is a pervasive theme of Israeli rule. Reports are now surfacing that U.S. border patrol agents are operating in clear defiance of a federal court order.

https://www.theguardian.com/us...

A constitutional crisis is being fomented by Trump as he moves rapidly to consolidate power and direct public hostility towards a vilified racial enemy. Decades of systematic planning have created instruments of state repression never seen before. They're available to the Trump administration and they are going to be used. The world looks on with a sense of dread, placing its hopes in the ability of Americans at the grass roots to resist and overcome this calamity.

picture

kayos99 replied on

I wonder why the fact that the US has created and abetted the refugee/immigrant crisis is seldom mentioned. Do millions of people suddenly wake up one morning and choose to be refugees? Or could it be that they can no longer live in their demolished homes with bomb raining down? Even Tulsi Gabbard has told America that the US has backed the wrong horse in Syria. Who in the 21st century ruined Iraq, Libya, Syria, Honduras, to name a few? Who ruined Palestine, invaded Lebanon, snatched Golan, rejects all immigrants except Jewish, and fights, well, you fill in the blank? The US with its rampant interventionism and its partners have created this crisis and instead of righting the wrongs and making their homes safe again, they exacerbate the crisis for these people. Breakpoint? Or do we keep lying to ourselves until there is no more world? Evil is afoot. Do we not examine the cause of the crisis and only focus on the effect?

picture

Edward Huguenin replied on

It is a sad and bitter irony indeed that perhaps the most dangerous, vicious, evil and vile criminal leader in the Middle East wasn’t from Iraq, or Libya, but in fact from Israel. Clearly so much of the violence and hatred and terrorism is a direct result of the crimes and atrocities committed by Israel. It would have been far better to have removed the nuclear weapons from Israel in 2001 and forced Israel back to the Pre1967 borders as mandated by international law instead of destroying 2/3’s of the entire Middle East killing millions, turning 10’s of millions into refugees, reducing entire cities to rubble, spending more than 7 Trillion dollars. The world in general and America in particular would have become a far better place than it is today.

picture

Mr Reynard replied on

Woww.. Learn always something new ?? Up to now,I didn't know that Islam was a RACE ??

picture

tom hall replied on

Yes, learning can be so- what's the word?- educational. Try this example for a dazzling new insight: Jews are not a race, but they can be victims of racism. Mexicans are not a race, but they too can be targeted by racism. Is this beginning to sound familiar?

picture

Peter Loeb replied on

I have read that "Natanyahu" (various spellings) is the old Hebrew
version of "Gift of Yahweh" (Thomas L Tomlinson, THE MYTHIC PAST.
Benjamin "Netanyahu"'s Grandfather, Milikovsky, from Lithuania
changed his name to "Netanyahu" upon emigrating to Palestine.

Nethanyahu was raised in Philadelphia, USA, graduated from
MIT in Cambridge. (Max Blunmenthal, GOLIATH)

(Name changes are not uncommon among Jews.)

To hide? To assimilate? To profit?

--------------------

Rania Khalek wrote about the role of Elbit. I believe she
wrote that they are also involved in "crowd control" (oppression)
providing assistance to US police forces to be used against
protestors for Black Lives Matter in the US.

For free?

Of course, much of this started under a previous
Administration! That previous Administration may
claim its humanity to eternity, but was unsurpassed
in supplying Israel (and Saudi Arabia) with arms.

----Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA

picture

Peter Loeb replied on

Title of book is:

Thomas L. THOMPSON : "THE MYTHIC PAST"

-----Peter Loeb, Boston, Ma,

Ali Abunimah

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books.

Also wrote One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Opinions are mine alone.