The denial of Jews as the main victim of the Holocaust in trump’s Holocaust Remembrance Day statement, was thorough:
- They blocked a version mentioning the Jews
- They said it wasn’t a mistake (“it’s inclusive”) and refused to correct it
- Finally, they blocked a resolution declaring “the indisputable fact that the Nazi regime targeted the Jewish people in its perpetration of the Holocaust”
A mistake would have been excused if corrected and inclusiveness doesn’t contradict with mentioning the main victim of a crime. Indeed every crime of this magnitude, has many different victims. But we don’t say “victims of all races of the KKK”, just because they also killed a few white people and we don’t say “all the nations attacked on 9/11”, just because there were 372 foreign nationals among the murdered. If we wish to be inclusive, we mention the main victim along with the others – not remove all of them and create some whitewashed non-specific event.
This is the same tactic used by racists for the BLM movement: they fake inclusiveness with “All lives matter” (\”all the victims of the Holocaust”), to hide their racist exclusiveness. You never see these people screaming “all lives matter” at women rights rallies, animal rights protests or on behalf of any group of beings that is actually suffering from discrimination.
The same happens in Israel, where the further you go to the right and into pro-settlements and anti-Arabs spheres, the more you hear the demand for “equality”, with arguments like “Jews should be allowed to build homes just like Arabs” or “all citizens of Israel deserve to have schools and roads built in their neighborhood” – disregarding that their building it on Palestinian land.
Source: Chainsawsuit
The cry for Equality arises in them just as an argumentative tool for suppressing actual equality. “All live matters” is a reactive talking-point – not a proactive moral approach; An equality based argument, used for maintaining dominance. For them, Mexicans are rapists, blacks are lazy criminals, Jews are greedy thieves, Muslims are terrorists – but all lives matter.
And so, the inclusiveness excuse for the remembrance day statement (“all the victims of the Holocaust”), doesn’t hold up. It’s obvious that the Jews were a special target of the Nazi regime – six million murdered: more than all the other victims of the Holocaust combined. But This denial is based on ideology, not numbers. The denial of Trump’s ban being a Muslim ban, is based on the same logic.
It’s obvious it’s a Muslim ban and trump has referred to it as such, up until he was told it was illegal: “People were so upset when I used the word Muslim. Oh, you can’t use the word Muslim. Remember this. And I’m okay with that, because I’m talking territory instead of Muslim”.
So he announced and promoted it as a Muslim ban and he tells us to our face the name change was forced on him and doesn’t reflect his true intentions, yet people are still trying to claim it’s a territory based ban.
The hypocrisy in Israel is even greater, since Israel is the only country in the western world that blocks freedom of speech, when calling for a ban on a territory: It’s illegal to call for a boycott of the settlements. Israelis and Pro-settlements supporters of trump’s ban, who try to portray themselves as non-Islamophobic, do so while creating an internal contradiction, which re-exposes their racism:
- It’s OK to ban Muslims in the US because it’s territory based.
- It’s illegal to boycott settlers in Israel, because it’s territory based.
A ban/boycott on a territory is illegal, when that territory is occupied by Jews, and legal when it’s occupied by Muslims.
Recently Israel pushed this hypocrisy even further, with the new land-theft law, which says Jews building their homes on private Palestinian lands will not be evicted, if they “thought” the land belonged to no one (It’s still Palestinian land even if it’s not the private property of a single Palestinian. But stealing non-privately owned Palestinian land, has been legalized or decriminalized in Israel, decades ago). Basically, if settlers build their home on private Palestinian land, whose owner wasn’t living on it at the time – and many Palestinians are unable to reach their lands, because of the occupation – The state will compensate the owner, but he will lose his property.
Again: the same country which says its illegal to boycott settlers, because it’s illegal to discriminate based on where a person lives, also says it’s legal to steal land from Palestinians, because of where they live.
Back to Trump…
The Cato institute inquiry into Americans killed by foreigners, only further exposes the ban’s racism:
“the annual chance of dying in an attack by foreign-born terrorists on U.S. soil was one in 3.6 million. […] the chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack by a refugee on U.S. soil is only one in 3.64 billion per year. Only three such murders have ever occurred — all three instances were in the 1970s, and the attackers all came from Cuba”.
To be even more specific, Cato also checked the banned nations and found that from 1975 to 2017, no American citizen was killed on US soil, by a citizen of the 7 banned countries. The ban “security rational” collapses even further, when you look at the countries that aren’t banned, and the amount of Americans killed by their citizens (almost all of the killed are 9/11 victims):
So we see, Trump’s ban prohibits entry from countries which never killed an American (on US soil), and allows entry from countries which killed thousands.
This is where the ban’s supporters still try to maintain the facade of being non-racist, by explaining that “if it’s a Muslim ban, than why aren’t all Muslims banned?”. Again, this is the same tactic (only in reverse) used to explain the Jews exclusion from Holocaust Remembrance Day statement: you exclude a group, but explain it’s not an exclusion, based on what remains after the exclusion.
But obviously, we don’t judge a person on the inclusiveness which remains after his actions, but on the exclusion he pushed for. That would be like passing a law saying Africans cannot use the same toilets, and explaining it isn’t racist, because they can still drink from the same fountain; as if the racist diminisher of rights is somehow excused by the remaining equality.
Israelis do the same thing with the Palestinians: “If we are racist towards Arabs than how come we give some of them the right to vote and be elected?!”. That’s why all closeted racists love to have a few friends from the hated group – It allows for these “judge me by the portion i include” explanations (or the more common version: “some of my best friends are…”).
This usually isn’t a conscious process. We can see this in action in Trump’s response to the Jewish reporter, Jake Turx, who asked him why his administration isn’t responding or even coming out with a statement against the rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the US:
Trump is asked what will he do to combat other people’s racism, but responds by explaining why he himself isn’t racist. The true victim, in his eyes, aren’t the Jews attacked by racists, but him, attacked by the accusation of racism (which didn’t even happen). That’s because he doesn’t see other people as truly “other”. A racist looks at people in the same manner one walks in front of funhouse mirrors: He doesn’t see you, but the extent and manner you distort the purity which he embodies.
The Jews victimized in the Turx question, are not seen as a whole human being, but only as the part which distorts Trumps reflection (in this case, the possibility of being labeled a racist). Melania, like the previous models trump married or dated, wasn’t chosen for what she is, but for what she makes trump look like. Yes-men and brown-nosers, like Stephen-will-not-be-questioned-Miller, aren’t appreciated for their non-existent professionality, but for being the mirror which reflects Trump as the fairest of them all. Trump loves and hates, based on how your existence reflects his.
Thus Trump reveals racism’s true face: it isn’t about hating the other – it’s about not seeing the other as other to begin with. This becomes obvious as we see discrimination is rampant even within homogeneous societies. That’s because the racist doesn’t belong to a race – he is the race; he defines it and the resemblance to him determines your purity. Racism is just a name for one byproduct of Egocentrism; Racism is externalized narcissism.
In closing,
Trump’s administration is infected with modern day racism: the same old beliefs, under the new taboos. As such, racism is simultaneously rejected in statements, but achieved in actions or supported by inaction. Under various false explanations, the same old targets are marked, but supposedly for new, justified and non-racial reasons.
This, of course, isn’t new. Racism was always justified by pseudo-scientific explanations. No racist philosophy has ever declared: “Our hatred and fear for these people is without reason, and still we hate them nonetheless. Follow me and let us kill people who are identical to us, except in some insignificant exterior aspect!”.
Photo by: Nuccio DiNuzzo
Even if the explanations are false, people still need them to create the cognitive dissonance required to justify what they otherwise know to be immoral. That’s why the number ‘0’ – Americans killed by citizens of the banned states – and the number ‘6,000,000’ – Jews killed in the Holocaust – are equally meaningless for the Trump administration, in evaluating the existence of a phenomena or lack thereof:
The Jews are not excluded because they weren’t specifically targeted in the Holocaust and the Muslims are not excluded because they specifically target Americans. Both are excluded because they share the most dangerous similarity of all: They are different.
Eishton is an anonymous Israeli investigative blog, which relies solely on donations from its readers. If you found the content worthy, please donate by clicking here.
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