On Thursday morning, Howard Dean, former Democratic governor of Vermont and former DNC chairman, attacked President Donald Trump for “demonizing Jews” in the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. He argued that the shooting energizes Democrats ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
“The Democrats are trying to run against a president who’s got a very powerful message of hate, basically, which can be effective at times like this when the nation has been turned upside down by this president,” Dean told MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski.
“I’m pretty optimistic, actually, because these kinds of elections are usually determined at the last three days, which pollsters can’t pick up,” he added. “I do think there’s a tendency towards voting Democratic, and I do think Democrats are a lot more energized, particularly — I hate to say this — after the shootings in Pittsburgh, where Trump really showed his true colors and then went right back to demonizing Jews shortly after the shooting.”
President Donald Trump condemned the shooting in no uncertain terms. Furthermore, he is the proud father of a convert to Orthodox Judaism (Ivanka), and he has worked closely with her Orthodox Jewish husband, Jared Kushner. So where does this claim of “demonizing Jews” come from?
The left-wing smear group the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) tied Trump to the shooting, claiming he was spreading an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory” about “white genocide” in South Africa. Trump did indeed go too far in this claims about the struggles of white farmers in South Africa, but he his remarks on the subject never mentioned “white genocide” and never attributed the situation to Jews. Some alt-right trolls online had indeed made that connection, but Trump did not.
More likely, Dean was referring to the president’s attacks on George Soros, a liberal billionaire financier and hedge fund manager who gained fame for “breaking the Bank of England” by short selling U.S. $10 billion worth of pounds sterling. He has long funded liberal causes through his Open Society Foundations.
Despite Soros’s shady history — he claimed, in one television interview, to have worked with the Nazis against fellow Jews in Hungary — and his advocacy of liberal causes, liberals have started rebranding criticism of George Soros as “anti-Semitic.”
This does not pass the smell test. Soros’s liberal advocacy is more than sufficient an explanation for Trump’s attacks. Just last week, a coalition of Soros-funded groups launched “Change the Terms,” a campaign to convince tech companies to remove “hate speech” from their platforms. The SPLC itself led this effort, and the SPLC is notorious for branding its political enemies “hate groups.”
With censorship on social media a rising concern among conservatives, Soros-funded groups are pushing for more censorship — and they’re branding conservative speech “hate.”
Liberals like Howard Dean have engaged in a similar Orwellian redefinition of anti-Semitism, in order to smear Trump as “demonizing Jews.” Sorry, Howard Dean, but Trump isn’t “demonizing Jews,” he’s responding to one liberal mega donor. Trump has condemned the synagogue shooting, allied with Jews, and supported Israel more strongly than any president in decades.
The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting was a horrific tragedy, and Americans have united against anti-Semitism. Howard Dean’s attempt to weaponize the shooting in order to bolster Democratic turnout is disgusting, and should be universally condemned.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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