Trump claims ‘Israel literally owned Congress’ in bizarre attack on the Squad
JVL Introduction
Much of what former President Trump said in office was bizarre, off-the-wall ranting which – unfortunately – many tens of millions of Americans seemed nonetheless to treat as gospel.
How bizarre, then, his recent interview, bemoaning the election of “the Squad” (Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar et al) to Congress.
The had destroyed the natural order of things, according to Trump. And what was that natural order?
That the US Congress was “rightfully” controlled by Israel!
Suggesting this is rightly regarded as an antisemitic allegation, but clearly not from Trump’s world view.
Far from being a critique of “Jewish power” it is an affirmation that such power ought to be how things are as was his 2019 claim about Jewish Americans that if “you vote for a Democrat, you’re being very disloyal to Jewish people and you’re being very disloyal to Israel…”
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This article was originally published by the Independent on Mon 1 Nov 2021. Read the original here.
Trump claims ‘Israel literally owned Congress’ in bizarre attack on the Squad
Former president and others accused Ilhan Omar of antisemitism for similar comments in 2019
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I’m not sure why Trump or the author of this piece take for granted the Squad’s anti-Zionism. It’s not borne out in the Squad’s actions. For example, take AOC who appears to be gearing up for a run for the Senate:
“After changing her vote from ‘no’ to a noncommittal ‘present’ at the last moment, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was seen crying as the House passed funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.
The House passed a $1 billion bill on Thursday to replenish Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense system, depleted after a week of relentless rocket attacks from Palestinian militants this summer…
It is still unclear why Ocasio-Cortez switched her vote at the last minute, and whether her tears were an expression of genuine anguish at the decision, or an attempt to stave off anger from her progressive supporters. However, AOC has broken with her base in a similar manner before, voting ‘present’ on a bill to provide funding of $2 billion to the Capitol Police earlier this year, despite her advocacy for defunding law enforcement several months earlier. The bill ended up passing by a single vote.”
https://www.rt.com/usa/535681-aoc-crying-iron-dome-present/
The Squad are not socialists. They are mildly left Democrats with more interest in their own careers than in the causes they claim to espouse.
It is now more than 15 years since the London Review of Books published a remarkable 12,000-word article on the influence of the Israeli lobby in Washington written by Professor John Mearsheimer of Chicago University and Professor John Walt of Harvard. The article was originally commissioned by The Atlantic, but – realising the explosion which was likely to follow publication – the magazine got cold feet and rejected it . The authors turned to the LRB, which published the article in March 2006. “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.”
Even from this side of the Atlantic, the article caused a furore. The former U.S. Ambassador, Edward Peck, wrote that “The expected tsunami of rabid responses condemned the report, vilified its authors, and denied there is such a lobby — validating both the lobby’s existence and aggressive, pervasive presence and obliging Harvard to remove its name.” Peck endorsed the authors’ central thesis: “Opinions differ on the long-term costs and benefits for both nations, but the lobby’s views of Israel’s interests have become the basis of U.S. Middle East policies.”
Rather unusually, Trump was speaking the truth – and confirmed what the learned professors said all those years ago.
The LRB article can be found on-line and is well worth reading.