Tuesday, February 07, 2017

ONE MORE GROUP THE TRUMPERS DELIBERATELY OFFENDED

You know about that list of allegedly unreported global terrorist attacks released by the Trump administration last night. You know that many of the stories were, in fact, widely reported (Think Progress says the 78 incidents on the list generated more than 17,400 stories). You may know that Donald Trump himself appeared on TV to discuss some attacks that were allegedly unreported, and that the list is full of typos, and that the mother of a victim in one attack insists that it wasn't terrorism, a conclusion backed by police officials who investigated the case. And you probably know that the list ignored white racist and nationalist terrorists.

But because this is the Trump administration, another group of attacks was also omitted:
No attacks in Israel were included on a list of 78 “underreported” terrorist attacks released by the White House....

Attacks in Israel were omitted from the list, though over 350 terrorist attacks -- including stabbings, shootings, vehicular ramming attacks and a bus bombing -- have taken place since Sept. 13, 2015, according to a report released last month by Israel’s Foreign Affairs Ministry.

Daniel Shapiro, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, wrote on Twitter that the omission of attacks in Israel “is really hard to explain,” adding that several attacks “were genuinely underreported.”
No, it's not hard to explain. The Trump White House always thinks it's a good idea to dog-whistle in the direction of alt-right anti-Semites. That's strange -- this White House could choose to appeal to old-school Fox-watching right-wingers, who love to regard themselves as Israel's greatest defenders. But Trump's brain trust, or at least certain members of it, don't care about that. They'd rather deal out little anti-Semitic snubs (e.g., the omission of Jews from Trump's Holocaust Remembrance Day statement), just because.

3 comments:

Danp said...

Drawing attention to Israel might also show that draconian responses to terrorism don't work all that well.

Orthodox said...

It makes National Review pieces like this almost seem cute.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434730/leftist-anti-semitism

maxk1947 said...

Maybe not "just because" - there was a lot of anti-semitic alt-right outrage when Trump issued Hannukah greetings. They don't want to mention Jews in any contest.