![]() Similarly, Omar’s defenders insist she was merely pointing out a truth that is universally acknowledged: that lobbying groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee raise and spend a lot of money to influence the political debate. Rashida Tlaib said that backers of a series of pro-Israel bills “forgot what country they represent,” defenders of the freshman Michigan Democrat said the targets of her tweets weren’t even Jewish. ![]() The Trump campaign, you’ll recall, insisted that “globalist” is a catch-all term for someone who doesn’t put America first and that those who say otherwise are paranoid. Tropes are often easy to identify because they can be deployed unknowingly by those who couldn’t accidentally, say, deface a synagogue.Īs a result, tropes allow those charged with anti-Semitism a degree of deniability. (The Hebrew expression for such circumlocution is “ hamevin yavin” - literally “those who understand will understand” or, as Rabbi Eric Idle put it, “Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more, say no more.”) Intentional users employ a trope as code hoping to avoid the anti-Semitism charge while dog-whistling their audiences. They bluntly describe Jewish conspiracies and quote the classics of anti-Semitism like “Mein Kampf” or “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” They make it clear that “no Jews are allowed.”īut “tropes” are anti-Semitism once (at least) removed. They scrawl a swastika on Jewish gravestones. They got one.Īnti-Semites usually make it pretty easy for us to identify them. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and the entire Democratic leadership issued a joint statement calling Omar’s “use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters” deeply offensive and insisted on an apology. The Anti-Defamation League responded, “The notion that wealthy Jews are controlling the government is a longstanding anti-Semitic trope and one of the pillars of modern anti-Semitism.” policy toward Israel is “all about the Benjamins, baby,” politicians and observers insisted that the Minnesota Democrat had invoked age-old stereotypes of Jewish power and control (“Benjamins,” as in Ben Franklin, as in the face on the $100 bill). When Hungary’s government ran a campaign against the pro-democracy philanthropist George Soros featuring his smiling face and the slogan “don’t let him get the last laugh,” some said it recalled the Nazi-era trope of the “laughing Jew.”Īnd this month, when freshman Rep. When Donald Trump’s closing argument at the end of the 2016 campaign invoked “the global special interests” that “don’t have your good in mind” - and then featured images of a financier, a banker and the chair of the Federal Reserve, all Jews - he was accused of employing the “trope” of Jewish global control. It’s a long list: the dual loyalty trope, the blood libel, the clannishness charge, the global conspiracy motif and the control-the-media mantras (to name a few). ![]() ![]() In short, tropes are phrases or images that evoke classic anti-Semitic ideas rather than state them explicitly. This has been the era of the anti-Semitic “trope,” with the word popping up in hundreds of news stories since the 2016 campaign. ![]()
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