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The Shallow State

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There has been a lot of consternation amongst the conspiracy-theory-obsessed Trump world that their hero is standing against an unseen and unknown ‘Deep State,’ conspiracy. This fear turns non-partisan civil servants into the boogeymen foot soldiers of a national or even global conspiracy headed either by wealthy Jews (like George Soros and the Rothschilds), educated elites like Bill Gates, or Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton. Trump thrives on this fear, and everything he does, from throwing human beings in concentration camps to fighting to take away millions of Americans’ health care during a pandemic is seen through that lens. Regardless of how short-sighted, cruel, racist, or idiotic Trump is, it is always declared to be justified after the fact, and even science is perverted to make him look good. Yet, while Trump’s followers dissect the footage of old Clinton speeches searching for secret handshakes and nods, and examine their Xboxes for proof that Gates wants to microchip them, Trump has shown that the power of the Shallow State is real and dangerous. And if you take the man at his word (usually a losing proposition), he may be sending that Shallow State – in the form of his un-identified, armed, and armored private Department of Homeland Security/Justice Department Army – to your hometown very soon.

The real Shallow State is far scarier than the fake ‘deep’ one. The Shallow State sizes someone up by their appearance, and the farther away from a Caucasian a person is, the less ‘American’ they are judged to be. The Shallow State is concerned with how and where you pray, and who you sleep with. The Shallow State wants to protect statues and monuments because it is terrified of change, and monuments and statues don’t change. The Shallow State doesn’t look beyond the surface, which is why Don is unable to comprehend that forts named after Confederate officers like Fort Bragg and Fort Hood would still have played the roles that they did in American history – like in winning World War II, which he often brings up, and just called a ‘beautiful World War,’ – regardless of what they were named. We didn’t defeat the Nazis and the Japanese Empire because we named our forts after traitors and murderers: it’s just a coincidence that dishonors the Black, Indigenous and People of Color who fought and died fighting in America’s wars.

A lot more damage has been done in world history by those who vowed to unmask alleged conspiracies than by the groups alleged to be conspiring. And many of the supposed unmaskers were cowards too frightened to act without a mask themselves. They are people who are too afraid to admit mistakes, because their entire claim to power is based on appearing strong and infallible. Imagine if Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, had a few days to ‘look over the books,’ and declared that actually Jews and Communists weren’t responsible for Germany’s defeat in World War I? Or if Joseph McCarthy admitted that there wasn’t a Communist conspiracy in the US government? Or if Trump admitted that there is no ‘Deep State,’ that global warming is not a hoax, or even simply acknowledged that he altered the map of Hurricane Dorian’s projected path? But even getting Trump to admit that he was wrong in not wearing a mask or asking other Americans to wear them took several months during which countless more people were exposed to Covid-19 than otherwise would have been. Don is currently not doing things – like calling on the Defense Production Act – that experts have been begging him to do for months because if he does them now it will look like he’s admitting to having made a mistake in NOT doing them sooner. People are literally dying because Trump believes his chance at re-election in November would be hurt more by admitting he made a mistake and using every tool at his disposal to fight the pandemic than by letting people get sick and die.

The notion of the ‘Deep State,’ may animate Trump’s followers and has led to a purge of civil servants from throughout the government who are viewed as insufficiently loyal to Don. But the Shallow State is scarier, and it has no time for subtlety. People thrown into unmarked vans or terrorized with tear gas and violence so that Don could have a photo-op in front of a church are the victims of the Shallow State. The Shallow State doesn’t exist in fever dreams as a way to defend Trump from being attacked as the worst president in American history. It is very real, and we need to fight against it. This Shallow State and its tainted pool of hateful, racist, conspiracy-minded fascists is the swamp we need to drain in November.  

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Can the USA Survive Trump?

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The United States is facing the largest threat to its continued existence as one nation-state since the Civil War. This is not hyperbole or exaggeration: I have extensively studied the Civil War and American history as a whole, and we are in dangerous waters. As I see it, the threat is a massive leadership vacuum coming from the Washington and Donald Trump.

The problem with the vacuum is that far too many states, cities, and people are not content to just twist in the wind regarding health care, global warming, and immigration. The American people and their state and city representatives are going to step up and fill that vacuum, leading to a potential clash between state and national power the likes of which have not been seen for well over a century.

Even some Liberals are skeptical of the Trump-Russia connection, but if Vladimir Putin made a wish for the United States when he blew out his birthday candles last October, he’s already gotten most of what he wanted. There has been a massive erosion of faith in the American government, the media and even factual, objective reality as a whole; the USA has largely relinquished the leadership role it has held since the end of World War II and is more isolated than any time since just before the War. Now, with the recent G-20 Summit and Trump’s decision to quit the Paris Climate Accords, the rest of the free world openly mocks us. And most troubling of all going forward, our nation is splitting at the seams as the political, cultural, ideological, and economic ties that have bound our nation together for so long are ripped apart.

And the end of our nation may be coming sooner than later. Donald Trump has less legitimacy and political capital than any president in American history, and it isn’t even that close. We already see individuals, states, and cities rising to fill the leadership vacuum, but I believe the real problem will come to a head soon as a result of 2 potential sequences of events, both involving Trump’s role as Commander-in-chief.

1.) Trump grows angrier and angrier over the increased resistance to his rule and to approval ratings lower than intestinal parasites and he and his advisers decide that military action will cause the American people to line up behind him out of patriotic duty. Now, recent history (Iraq) should show him and his advisers that this approach is flawed in the extreme, but Trump neither knows nor cares about recent history. In 2002, President George W. Bush labeled Iraq, North Korea, and Iran an ‘axis of evil,’ and Iraq, the ‘easiest’ target of the 3 is no longer on the list. That leaves the nuclear-armed North Koreans, and Iran, a nation of 80 million people (for comparison, Iraq had 26 million when we attacked in 2003) that will achieve nuclear arms pretty quickly once we tear up the deal that we – along with the UK, France, China, Russia, and Germany – made with them in 2015. Not only will any pre-emptive US attack on those nations devastate our allies and further isolate us more than Trump already has, but there will be many in our armed forces who will not risk their lives for an aggressive war that will be transparently political. For maybe the first time in American history, those who protest the war at the start or who refuse to fight will be those celebrated as patriots.

2.) The more likely scenario as I see it. Trump grows angrier and angrier over the increased resistance to his rule and to approval ratings lower than genital warts, and he finally decides he can’t ‘allow’ protests anymore (First Amendment be damned), and he orders either the National Guard or regular military to disperse the most high-profile and disruptive protests; he does not order them to use deadly force but to use all force short of lethal. It is again easy to see many refusing to follow such orders, which is the very type of situation at the start of many revolutions throughout history.

When the US faced the greatest crisis in our history, we had an almost perfectly designed leader to handle it in Abraham Lincoln. When the Great Depression threatened to end our democratic republic, we had an almost perfectly designed leader to handle it in Franklin D. Roosevelt. We are now at the precipice of national disaster just as we were in 1860 and 1932, but instead of having Lincoln or FDR, we have an erratic, petty, angry, ignorant, short-sighted, dishonest, and probably mentally ill man standing where those two giants once stood. There is no easy answer for this type of situation in the Constitution: we have to find it our selves, and we must identify, elect, and follow leaders in our states, cities, and towns, because there is a vacuum in Washington right now, and we have to recognize it, and decide whether or not it is fatal to the United States as we know and understand it.

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Trump the Bad Neighbor and Fighting His Lies

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Allow me to present a metaphor that I feel may help explain the way I look at the situation Americans currently face in a Trump Administration that lies more often, more frequently, and about more things than any Administration in US history.

You leave your house and walk down your driveway where your neighbor stops you and begins to talk. He tells you that the tree in your yard is not really a tree, but is actually a crashed alien escape pod that will open any day to reveal alien monsters who will kill and eat your family. You calmly point out that this is not true. You walk him over to the tree and inspect it with him. You show him pictures of other trees of the same species and type, and present detailed facts to prove that, it is indeed a tree. Your neighbor is not very convinced, and walks away. The next day, your neighbor is back, and he again says that the tree is a crashed alien escape pod. You are puzzled and exasperated, and while you don’t have the same enthusiasm, you again walk him through the overwhelming evidence that yes, it is just a tree. Your neighbor presents you with information that describes why your evidence doesn’t convince him. Your neighbor angrily stomps off, while you sigh and go to work; while at work, you read the information he presented you with and find that it is nonsensical ramblings that might even make you laugh if you did not know how serious your neighbor took it, or hear the echoes of fear-driven hatred and violence behind it.

The next day your neighbor’s back at the foot of your driveway. He again says that your tree is a crashed alien escape pod that will open any day to reveal alien monsters who will kill and eat your family. You are annoyed, and explain to him that the arguments he shared with you have no basis in fact and you feel he should discard them. He says that you are either a naïve tool who cannot detect that you are being lied to and hypnotized by some vague frightening entity (maybe it is a world-wide conspiracy, maybe it is ‘the media,’ maybe it is scientists, maybe it is minorities, maybe it is ‘elitists.’) or that you are actively in on ‘it,’ and you’re simply a liar. This is too much for you after the last few days; you explode and tell him off for being a hateful, stupid, disgusting bigot. He then smiles in triumph, “That’s how it is with you and people like you: you don’t have facts on your side, so you simply call me a racist or a bigot. You can’t beat me by argument, you sink to attacking me!” The debate you had been having has now become about name-calling and whether or not you crossed the line, and your initial point about your neighbor’s conspiratorial paranoia has been obscured; your neighbor leave and you head to work fuming and at the end of your patience with this person.

The next day, your neighbor is back at the foot of your driveway and ready to resume the fight, but you have no more stomach for this debate; you know that nothing you will say can possibly convince him, and that you will likely wind up screaming at him again, and that you’ll get nowhere. “Whatever,” you say, “Just leave me the hell alone,” and you go off to work. You don’t want to keep having these confrontations because they are negatively impacting your quality of life: you are angry and stressed all the time and you dread simply walking to the edge of your driveway because you expect that if you do, you’ll wind up in an endless, un-winnable argument. You become withdrawn and you cede more and more ground to your neighbor because you don’t want to have constant fights about what you consider to be simple good sense and objective reality. You and your neighbor were actually friends before he began spouting nonsensical lies, and you enjoyed talking about sports, movies, and pop culture, and you both genuinely care for each other’s families. Now you don’t even want to be in your yard if he’s outside because you don’t want to be around him; there are no more ‘safe’ topics because your neighbor thinks that you are stupid, naïve, and blind to reality while you think that he is being dangerously misled, believes in crackpot conspiracy theories, and that he has become a mean bully. You feel that the less you see him and have to deal with him, the better.

Other neighbors who are your friends and know that your tree is just a tree are puzzled because they no longer see you standing up for what they know is common sense and sanity. They know your tree is a tree, but now that you’ve ceded the argument to your neighbor, they’re not going to contradict your neighbor either. Your neighbor has convinced almost no one, but he has succeeded in muddying the water in the eyes of many in the neighborhood. People still don’t believe your neighbor when he comes out a few days later and tells the person who lives across-the-street that her swimming pool is filled with water poisoned by the government to turn swimmers homosexual, but you have already decided to stay away from your neighbor, and each day and with each ridiculous new assertion, fewer people are fighting back even against things that they know are demonstrably untrue. Objective reality in the neighborhood is no longer agreed upon, and people start to avoid one another because it is as if the neighborhood has been littered with invisible landmines, that will explode if someone walks over them. The neighborhood is now less safe, less civil, less sane, less kind, and tension is lurking everywhere, as people struggle daily in a figurative fight to keep from having a literal fight.

Forgive me for perhaps stretching this metaphor a bit far, but if Donald Trump is our bad neighbor, how do we fix that situation? How do we save our own national neighborhood from his lies and his hate? How do we stand up for objective reality, and build a safer, happier place for ourselves, our children, and their children?

Donald Trump has been president for just over three weeks, but he has already bombarded the nation with an avalanche of dishonesty and disinformation so thick and powerful that he has actually weakened the idea of objective reality! Even for someone such as myself who always looks to history for precedent to make sense of current events, Trump is moving in a direction that is unprecedented in our nation’s history. His assault on the truth and reality itself has grown out of a massive explosion of hyper-polarization unlike anything the nation has seen since directly before the American Civil War. Until relatively recently Republicans and Democrats agreed on many issues but disagreed and debated the ways to deal with those issues, but that all changed during the Barack Obama Administration. Under President Obama the two Parties no longer debated about what was the best plan to deal with problems like how to fix our health care system, our immigration system, or to counter global warming, instead Democrats continued to propose solutions to what they believed were serious problems, while Republicans offered no competing proposal because they denied that there was anything wrong with health care and immigration in the first place, and they claimed that global warming was a hoax. Conservatism and Republicanism became defined not by adherence to an ideology – not even to the old ‘small government,’ orthodoxy that was at the heart of Republicanism from 1980 to 2008 – but by opposition to President Obama and the Democratic Party.

The new Grand Old Party’s disdain for President Obama led to an atmosphere where literally nothing the President said or did – not even the legitimacy of the President himself – would be accepted at face value. This was seen in a Republican Party that refused to believe falling unemployment numbers in 2012 because those numbers were bad for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign, refused to believe numbers that violent crime was down, refused to give any credit to Barack Obama for approving the operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, and refused to believe that neither the President nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was not personally to blame over the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 that resulted in the death of 4 Americans. Republicans were so certain that Obama or Clinton did something wrong in Benghazi that they conducted 7-tax-payer-funded investigations into the event that cleared both President Obama and Secretary Clinton; when the GOP disliked that result, they refused to believe the findings of their own Congressional investigations.

But the real seed of the legendarily dishonest Trump Administration was in the racist ‘Birther’ lie that held that Barack Obama was not really the president of the United States because he was not born in Hawaii, in the USA, but in Kenya. While much of ‘Establishment’ Republicans, from Speaker of the House John Boehner to Mitt Romney and Republican 2008 presidential nominee John McCain loudly distanced themselves from the myth, a large part of the Republican and Conservative base refused to believe that Barack Obama was the legitimate president of the USA. One of the public faces of this racist lie was Donald Trump, who flirted with a presidential campaign in 2011-12 based almost entirely on the issue of ‘Birtherism.’ Trump publicly proclaimed that Obama was not born in Hawaii and that he had hired a team of investigators that was producing irrefutable evidence that Barack Obama was not an American. President Obama believed that he had successfully answered this nonsensical claim in 2008, and reluctantly released his ‘long form,’ birth certificate in 2011 to shut down the myth for good. Trump’s burgeoning campaign fell apart when his lie was exposed, but he never admitted that he had lied and that he was wrong. It was the first of the many lies of Donald Trump the politician, which have included lying about personally witnessing ‘thousands’ of Muslims celebrate the 9/11/2001 terror attacks, lying about why he would not release his tax returns, lying about his admission that the Birther Lie was a lie, lying about having publicly come out against the Iraq War, lying about his business career, and on and on and on.

Of course, President and President-Elect Trump did not abandon his lies when he won the election last November. Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes, 66 million to 63 million, Trump is unable to accept that he received 3 million fewer votes than Clinton, so he lied (and continues to lie) that he actually won the popular vote because ‘3-5’ million people voted ‘illegally.’ He lied about the crowd at his inauguration and the weather that day; he lied about stepping down as the head of the Trump Organization and putting his assets in a blind trust. He lied that he would release his tax returns after the election, and that Mexico would pay for the wall. He has lied about his Muslim travel-ban. Donald Trump now represents the United States of America both at home and abroad, and not even a month into his Presidency there appears nothing too big or too small for him to lie about. It can be overwhelming to try to contend with an Administration that is spreading new falsehoods every day. Trump is using the strategy of the bad neighbor in the metaphor above: muddying the water around every single issue and challenging the validity of everything that he dislikes or disagrees with. This is so that the resistance to his authoritarian regime is disorganized and divided, and so that each group or individual trying to sift through the river of bullshit that Trump’s Administration spews 24 hours a day, 7 days a week cannot possibly keep up. Trying to address single lies, whether the biggest or the smallest, means that some are getting through every day because it just isn’t possible for any one person to stop them all.

But there is hope for those who will fight for truth and objective fact – there is a way forward. We have tools that the victims of past authoritarian regimes did not possess, and thanks to the Internet, we are more connected than ever before. If we work together we can stand against hatred, ignorance, dishonesty, fear mongering, cowardice, greed, and short-sightedness. Just because the task before us is difficult, and the way is unclear does not mean we will fail. The first thing we have to do is organize ourselves. It is almost impossible for one person, regardless of his or her intellect, to combat every one of Trump’s lies, so what we need to do is work together and organize strike teams. One team can fight his lies about the popular vote and push back his naked attempt at voter disenfranchisement; another team can fight back on lies about crime and criminal justice reform; another can work on his lies about immigration and anti-Muslim lies; another on digging up his tax returns and keeping track of his ties to foreign governments. Maybe we can’t fight Trump’s lies as individuals, but we have the advantage if we can organize together.

Besides mobilizing together, there are some other things that we can do that will help us save our democratic republic from an authoritarian coup.

1.) No matter how warranted it may be, we must never shout names and allow Trump and his lying followers to try to get us to act out, because the facts, evidence, and morality are all on our side. We should say ‘here’s proof that Trump lied’ to Trump’s followers instead of saying, ‘Trump and his orders are racist and stupid, so you are racist and stupid too!’ which will just lead to the old Conservative standby of ‘you called me a racist! That is just what Liberals do when they can’t win an argument!’ Fighting even the most egregious lies or hate speech by attacking someone who believes the lies will get us nowhere, since it will turn the debate into an argument about racism itself, leaving the initial topic completely forgotten in the dirt. You are now arguing about insults and not about Trump or his actions.

2.) Don’t take the bait if/when a Trump supporter says that you are biased and that you believe that President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or some other Democrat or Liberal was/is perfect. This is another trick, and the Trump supporter is trying to bait you into listing your own (likely legitimate and fact-based) reservations about a Liberal politician, and whether it be Obama, Sanders, or anyone else, the topic will no longer be what Trump has done or said and why it is wrong; it is now about the flaws of Obama/Bernie/whomever. And if you think that the Trump supporter is reasonable and he/she will then say, ‘Well, I have reservations about Trump, too, and here they are,’ then you’re likely going to be disappointed with the result. You are now arguing about Obama/Bernie/a Liberal politician and not about Trump or his actions.

3.) We cannot have any more arguments about hypocrisy or alternate realities where we say things like ‘If Obama was as cozy with Russia, as Trump is, the Republicans in Congress would move to impeach him,’ because they don’t matter. Many of the biggest Trump supporters and Trump himself are hypocrites – in one of the alternate scenarios we should cease to use going forward, try to imagine Trump and his supporters’s reactions if Hillary Clinton had been the one who received 3 million fewer votes than Trump did, yet she won by the exact same numbers in the Electoral College – but it doesn’t matter. How the Republicans may have reacted to Obama or to Hillary doesn’t change the fact that now Trump and the GOP hold the power, and many of the highest-ranking Republicans, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (as seen in his recent comments about how shocked and upset he is about Democratic obstruction in the Senate of late), either have a complete and total lack of self-awareness or have no shame or integrity. McConnell in particular is responsible for creating a new Senate operating procedure where the Senate Majority Party will no longer allow the president who is of the opposing Party to fulfill his/her Constitutional duty to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court. The new reality apparently is that Democratic presidents will be denied that duty if the Republicans hold the Senate and if he/she does not nominate the identical person that a Republican president would nominate. McConnell has done unprecedented and as yet unquantifiable damage to the Judicial Branch of government and in particular to the highest court in the land, and we’ll have to wait and see if that damage is fatal or not to the Judicial Branch as it currently exists. The point, however, is that the fact that McConnell is a hypocrite is not important right now, all that is important is stopping him and Donald Trump from stealing our democracy out from under us.

4.) No lie, no matter how big or small, can go unchallenged. We need to be organized well enough that we have people able to respond to any and all lies – if Donald Trump says it is 68 degrees outside and it is really 66, we need to counter it and share the truth.

5.) No more politeness. We must follow rule one and never engage in ad hominem attacks (no matter how justified we may be), but it is vital that we stand up and argue for what we believe in. We need to publicly respond to every Trump lie, but we also need to call out lies in our own lives, too. If a friend says that Trump actually won the popular vote, explain why that is untrue and wrong. If you hear a total stranger in the supermarket say that Barack Obama is a Muslim from Kenya, do not let it go unchallenged. Pointing out the lies of strangers is both uncomfortable and impolite, but we need to fight for the truth and for objective reality. I have always hated the phrase ‘history is written by the victor,’ because the Confederacy lost the Civil War but, after the period of Reconstruction ended in 1876, the North stood aside even as the South taught its students the ‘Lost Cause’ Mythology that lied about the War and its causes and helped perpetuate Jim Crow segregation for almost another century. We cannot allow history to be written by the person who yells the loudest simply because we find it too inconvenient to argue even when we know we are right.

6.) We must seek the acceptance of potential moderate Republicans who either did not vote for Trump or who voted for him just because he was not Hillary Clinton. The idea that moderate Republicans are going to support Democratic candidates or Liberal policies/ideas is unrealistic, but only the most committed Trump supporters believe in his core lies, like that 3-5 million people did vote illegally and that Trump is the true winner of the popular vote. Only the most committed Trump supporters agree with every word of Trump’s Executive Order on immigration. To protect the very idea of objective reality and honest governance, we are going to have to work alongside people who we disagree with on about 7 issues in 10, and even though we fought against them in November and will fight against them tomorrow to defend Medicare and Social Security, right now the overriding concern must be the marginalization and removal from power of a regime that does not view George Orwell’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four as a cautionary tale of the nightmare of unchecked authoritarianism, but as a blueprint from which to operate. We will never give up our desire to expand Medicare, achieve single-payer health care for all Americans, and fighting for a more Progressive, open, free, and inclusive society, but right now the most important battle is the one against a Trump White House that says 2 + 2 = 5.

I may come off as preachy or hyperbolic, but I assure you that I am sincere and I believe this is an incredibly important moment for the state of California, the nation, and even the world, and it is not the time to do nothing. Fortunately I am not the only one who has been motivated to act, and I have been humbled to watch and work alongside some of the most capable, empathetic, intelligent, generous, hard-working, dedicated, tireless, and just all-around incredible people that I have ever met or hope to meet. I am inspired every time I see the level of commitment from these people, the vast majority of whom are unpaid volunteers, and who have jobs and families, yet somehow find spare time that they use to fight to make the lives of others better. The majority of people in just my town, let alone the county, city, state, or nation will probably never know the sacrifices that are made every single day in their names.

Whether in my metaphorical neighborhood or in the real world, by encouraging people to stand up to this government, I know that I am asking them to take on potential risks in their personal and professional lives, and even asking people to do very uncomfortable or unnatural things like arguing with strangers if we hear them spreading lies. However, I vow to you that I will never, suggest that other people should risk anything if I am not also willing to pay the same price myself. I was born with the joint disease Arthrogryposis (which is coincidentally the New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski was mocked by Trump for having in December 2015), having in December 2015) and the spinal condition Scoliosis, and I have had several major spinal surgeries and spinal fusions throughout my life. I have not spent even one solid hour out of intense back pain since September 1998, and as such I must always weigh the impact any particular action might have on my back, but I will endure extreme agony to fight for our nation, for the truth, and for freedom. My most recent surgery took place during Barack Obama’s campaign for the Presidency in 2008, and I did phone banking for the then-Senator from my hospital bed. I am ready and willing to pay this price, and I hope many are willing to join me in this uncomfortable, inconvenient cause. And know that I will gladly stand and march and fight even for those who will do the same against me, and I’ll endure days of recovery time and of bitter pain for you, too. This is about more than Republicans and Democrats, and more than Right and Left. This is about right and wrong, and if you choose to defend and propagate lies and tyranny, history will not look at you very kindly, and if I live long enough, I’ll be the one to write it down so our children and their children will mark down those who stay seated and silent alongside those who fought to propagate dishonesty, corruption, and meanness, and not with those who stood against an autocrat and risked the consequences.

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Playing with Fire: Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is Risking the Future of Israel and the Jewish People

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is playing with fire by imploring Jews all over the world to leave their homes and move to Israel. His recent statement that he speaks for ALL worldwide Jewry is not only arrogant, but absolutely untrue, and regardless of whether or not Netanyahu and Likud win re-election in two weeks, the fact that many Israelis – both Jewish and otherwise – will vote against Bibi (as Netanyahu is also known) shows that a good many Israeli Jews don’t want him to speak for them either. Anti-Semitism is nothing new, and it has existed as long as there has been a Jewish people, but the most dangerous threats to the Jewish people have mostly come about since the rise of the modern conception of the nation-state during the 19th century. The birth of nationalism (which, throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, became increasingly fanatical) led to dark questions about whether the Jewish people were truly loyal to the nations that they called home, or if they had extra-national ties to other Jews that trumped any true national devotion. Desperate and failing regimes had an easy scapegoat to explain any societal ills, and whether the populace was poor, starving, or angry about a corrupt government, the response was often the same: ‘Blame the Jews! Those dangerous and untrustworthy others are the cause of all of our problems!’ I believe there are three major historical examples where the loyalty of the Jews of different nations was questioned and where it led to dangerous consequences for the Jewish people: those are the Dreyfus Affair in France, the publication of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ in Tsarist Russia, and perhaps worst of all, the ‘stabbed in the back’ legend that planted dark seeds in the soil of Germany after its loss in World War I that grew into the Holocaust under one of the infamous fallacy’s true believers: Adolf Hitler.

The Dreyfus Affair that would soon expose a deep, calcified anti-Semitism that lay at the heart of French society, began in France in 1894 when Jewish French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested (and rapidly tried and convicted by a military court and sentenced to life in prison) on the charge of treason for selling state secrets to Germany; the only problem was he was absolutely innocent of all the charges. The complete and utter lack of proof did not matter to the French officer corps that decided Dreyfus’s fate: it had simply decided that because Dreyfus was Jewish, his allegiance to France was tenuous and he must be guilty. The Officer Corps even refused to alter its opinion when it discovered in 1896 that Dreyfus was innocent and that the real traitor was Major Ferdinand Esterhazy; the resulting attempt by the army to cover up the exculpatory evidence exploded in the French press, as famous writers like Emile Zola lined up behind Dreyfus and accused the Officer Corps of blatant anti-Semitism for its attempt to hide the evidence which proved his innocence. France was split between liberals who rallied to defend Dreyfus and conservatives who either were members of the Catholic, traditional officer class or who sympathized with them, but the pressure grew to the point that the French President pardoned Dreyfus in 1899 even though it would take seven more years before the anti-Semitic officers would finally clear Dreyfus’s name and withdraw the conviction and all the charges. However in spite of Dreyfus’s vindication, the reflexive reaction of the elements of society who sought to bury him and tar his name laid bare the dark and powerful vein of anti-Semitism that lay in the heart of France and that has never truly disappeared even to the present day.

Published in Russia in 1903, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” may be the most infamous forgery in history. Purporting to reveal a secret meeting of powerful Jews in which they discussed plans for Jewish global domination, the book was popular among anti-Semitics all over the world, including among Americans like Henry Ford, who helped expose the book to a wider audience in the US. While the book was revealed as a forgery as early as 1921 – when it was proven to have plagiarized many of its passages directly from Maurice Joly’s “Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,” – the fact that it was a lie did not lessen its popularity in anti-Semitic circles, and even today the translated book is still a bible of sorts for Jew haters everywhere. The lies put forward in “Protocols,” have remained fruitful into the present and whenever one hears comments (either serious or joking) that the Jews dominate the world through secret control of finance, the media, manufacturing, and more, he or she is feeling the continuing ripples of this century-old canard. In its day, “Protocols” helped spark many Russian pogroms in the final decade and a half of the Tsar’s rule and led  to violence, death, and destruction for Jews all over Eastern Europe; needless to say, it was also quite popular with Hitler and the Nazis

The ‘Stabbed in the Back’ legend in post-World War I Germany is perhaps the most deadly lie about Jewish disloyalty in history. Because of the brutal effects that Germany endured as a result of losing World War I and signing the Treaty of Versailles, many angry and ashamed Germans needed to come up with a reason to explain their hardships, and they found one in the lie that the ‘undefeated’ German Army was on the brink of winning the war in 1918 when Jewish traitors in Berlin betrayed Germany and sold it out to the Allies. Since the German army was still on French soil when the war ended and no Allied forces had set foot in Germany, the people chose to ignore the myriad causes of Germany’s loss and convinced themselves that the only reason that they lost the war was because they had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by traitors at home; specifically, they were betrayed by Germany’s Jews. For angry veterans like Corporal Hitler, it was far more convenient to blame the Jews than to look inwardly and admit the failures of the Kaiser, the generals, and themselves. Hitler bought into the ‘stabbed in the back’ lie without reservation and it confirmed for him the belief that Jews were not and never would be true Germans, but rather an internal enemy of the state itself, which caused Hitler to resolve to remove the Jews from all phases of German life.

Now we have Benjamin Netanyahu claiming to speak for all of the world’s Jews and calling for the Jews of Europe and elsewhere to undermine their home governments by recognizing his status as the true voice of the Jewish people and then moving to Israel. What reason could he possibly have for suggesting that non-Israeli Jews basically become the insurgent element that the anti-Semites of the recent past have vilified us as? I believe it is all for his immediate political survival and that he either does not notice or does not care that his short-sighted actions – and short-sighted actions have been a hallmark of Netanyahu’s rule – are bringing back many of those old lies about the lack of patriotism and loyalty of Jews. Bibi seems to be saying, “You Jews may live in the USA, Europe, or elsewhere, but in truth you’re all Israelis and your first loyalty must be to us,” which is untrue, subversive, and dangerous. He is pumping life into the old myths that were so catastrophic for the Jewish people, and forcing every Jew to make a choice by basically asking: “Are you an American Jew are a Jewish American?” The order of the words may not matter to some, but there is actually a difference between being an American (or European, or anywhere outside of Israel) Jew and a Jewish American. An American Jew is someone who is an American above all, in spite of his or her religious or cultural identification as Jewish, views Israel as a foreign country that takes a backseat to the United States; he or she may support Israel, but the USA comes first. A Jewish American is someone who is Jewish first and, and while he or she may not necessarily support Israel over the USA (or at all), their loyalties might indeed be tested if the alliance between the United States and Israel was dissolved. A Jewish American may agree with Bibi and feel that a preemptive strike against Iran is preferable to peace talks, and that the USA must be involved in such a military action from the start. An American Jew is more likely to side with President Barack Obama than Bibi, and to feel that going to war as a first option against a nation with almost 80 million people in order to aid the war-mongering Administration of a nation of just over 8 million people (not all of them Jewish) is a terrible idea.

If the peace talks with Iran fail – which, based on his speech to Congress last Tuesday and all his past statements and deeds, is what Bibi is aiming for – it would mean that a military ‘solution’ to dealing with Iran’s nuclear program would become far more likely, and Israel simply cannot fight that battle alone and win. Due to that fact, it means peace is by far the best option here, because the only way Israel even might win a war with Iran without active U.S. involvement would be to use nuclear weapons against Iran, and if Israel were to launch first strike nuclear warheads against Iran, it would completely end American support of Israel while simultaneously turning it into a universally despised rogue state trailing even North Korea in the eyes of the international community. However, as long as Bibi believes that all Jews are in favor of every action that his regime takes, he will continue to act as if there will be no negative repercussions to trying to destroy any legitimate chance at peace, undermining President Obama’s attempt to negotiate a peaceful settlement, and encouraging Jews to leave their homes for Israel. Netanyahu seems to believe that his political future, the future of Israel, and the fate of the Jewish people as a whole are the same thing and that only his victory can secure them.

I am Jewish, I support Israel, and I have many friends there; I believe its survival is as vital today as it was in 1948, but I am an American, my brothers serve in the American military, and regardless of how much I care for Israel, I believe that heading into war with a nation of 80 million on Israel’s behalf would be catastrophic. I think the best course for the USA is to make it absolutely clear to Netanyahu that we are not giving him a blank check of support and that if he chooses to initiate a war with Iran, he’ll be on his own; maybe if we make that clear to him, he might think twice before pursuing aggressively pro-war policies. Israel cannot go to war with a nation as large as Iran without U.S. help and, unless Iran strikes first, we must deny Bibi that help if we are to have a legitimate chance for peace. If Iran strikes first then Israel should be able to count on vigorous U.S. support, but not only would a U.S.-Iranian war be a disaster for Americans, such a war would be far worse for Israel because it would devastate the nation in the short-term and threaten the long-term U.S.-Israeli alliance since, once the bodies start to pile up, how long will it be before Americans turn against the war and then against Israel entirely? How long after that will it be before Americans start looking for a scapegoat and find one in the millions of Jewish people who live here? Bibi is playing a very dangerous game here, and if he’s not careful it will be the Jewish people, whether Israeli or not, who are going to get hurt.