October 21, 2020: Is the Trump era about to end?

By Michael Regenstreif

I’ve just reread my “From the Editor” column written exactly four years ago today, and published in the October 31, 2016 edition of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.

The subject of that column was the U.S. presidential election, in particular the candidacy of reality TV show star and real estate mogul Donald Trump.

“It’s been like watching a train wreck these last 16 months. Horrifying for too many reasons but impossible to look away from,” I wrote in a column that assumed Hillary Clinton would be elected president.

Even though my assumption that Trump would lose the election in 2016 turned out to be wrong (Clinton won the popular vote by millions of votes but Trump won the presidency in the Electoral College), there is much in that column that could have been written today.

“It is astounding that the least qualified candidate (at least in modern times) to ever win a major party’s nomination for the U.S. presidency, a man with no experience in public service (and, apparently, little experience in paying federal taxes), still maintains a base of support of about 40 per cent of the American electorate despite all that he has said and done – and all that has been revealed about him,” I continued.

“As it has become obvious to all that he is losing the election, Trump has ramped up his attacks … most appallingly, on democracy itself.

“Trump has been complaining that the American electoral system has been ‘rigged’ against him and that the only way he can lose the election is if it is rigged. And he absurdly claims the American media has entered into a conspiracy against him,” a claim that Trump continues to echo four years later.

“It is a tradition in Western democracies that when the votes are counted and the winner of an election is determined, the defeated candidate(s) concedes the loss and the government proceeds to an orderly transition of power. But Trump is refusing to say he will concede a loss; only that he will accept the result if he wins,” a refusal he has repeated again in 2020.

“And, as a candidate for the most important office in the world, he has shown almost no real understanding of the myriad important issues he would face on both domestic and international fronts,” I concluded four years ago.

And while I was appalled at Trump’s attacks on democracy during his first presidential campaign (and again in this one), his attacks on democratic norms and institutions have been unrelenting during his time in office. Just a few of many examples include his vicious and baseless attacks on the mainstream media, and on people ranging from Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the highly respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to his Democratic opponents, former vice-president Joe Biden (who Trump says is the head of a “crime family”) and Senator Kamala Harris (who he calls a “monster”). On the world stage, Trump has repeatedly attacked the leaders of allied democracies while praising some of the world’s most brutal dictators, and he has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Climate Accords during the global climate-change crisis, and from the World Health Organization during COVID-19 pandemic, the worst worldwide health crisis in a century.

Speaking of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump’s policies have been a major factor in the United States having 20 per cent of the cases and 20 per cent of the deaths around the world despite having just four per cent of the world’s population; and even led to his own COVID case and many cases among his family, staff, inner circle and followers due to his lax masking and distancing behaviour, and his hosting of super-spreader events at the White House and on the campaign trail. Still, despite COVID striking literally in his own home as cases of the disease continue to spike higher and higher, he continues to claim the pandemic is all but over – thanks to him.

According to a new poll released earlier this week by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the vast majority of American Jews, 75 per cent, are set to vote (or have already voted) for Biden over Trump at 22 per cent – and that is not withstanding the fact that Trump has attempted to make Israel a wedge issue in the campaign stating that Jews who do not vote for him are disloyal to Israel.

“I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat – it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty,” Trump said in remarks to the press in the Oval Office last year. He has also told American Jews that Benjamin Netanyahu is “your prime minister.”

Despite actions including moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights and helping to broker diplomatic relations between Israel and two Arab Gulf states, Bahrain and United Arab Emirates, a majority of Jewish voters (54 per cent to 42 per cent) indicated in the AJC poll that Biden would be better than Trump at strengthening U.S.-Israel relations.

As well, according to the AJC poll, the same proportion of Jewish voters (75 per cent to 22 per cent) that would vote for Biden over Trump also said Biden would better handle antisemitism than Trump.

Antisemitic incidents in the United States have increased greatly with perpetrators of hatred emboldened by the atmosphere Trump has, knowingly or unknowingly, seemed to encourage. These have included the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre in 2018 in which 11 Jews were murdered and six more wounded, and the Poway synagogue mass shooting in which one Jew was murdered and three others, including the synagogue’s rabbi, were wounded. Memories of Trump’s initial description of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville in 2017 as “very fine people” after their chilling chants of “Jews will not replace us” remain strong for American Jews; as do his recent refusals to condemn the followers of QAnon, a discredited far-right conspiracy theory movement that incorporates old antisemitic tropes among its beliefs.

So, is the Trump era about to end? Two weeks before the American election in 2016, the polls indicated a Clinton victory over Trump and now, two weeks before the 2020 election, polls indicate a Biden victory. Looking deeper at the polling, particularly in the swing states that Trump won by tiny margins four years ago, I suspect the ultimate result this time will be different than it was last time.

February 10, 2020: Israel’s election and Trump’s peace plan

By Michael Regenstreif

It’s been three months since I last wrote about the political situation in Israel. In my November 11 column, I noted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader, had failed to form a governing coalition in the weeks after the September 17 election – Israel’s second inconclusive election of 2019. The mandate to attempt to form a government had passed to Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz.

“It is unlikely that Gantz will be any more successful than Netanyahu in putting together a coalition that commands at least 61 of the Knesset’s 120 seats,” I predicted, noting two possibilities: a unity government alternating the premiership or a third Israeli election in less than a year.

Attempts to form a unity government failed. Blue and White insisted that it would not form a unity government with Likud under Netanyahu as long as Netanyahu faced the possibility of criminal charges in several corruption cases. They would have been open to an agreement with Likud if the prime minister stepped aside, at least until he was cleared of criminal wrongdoing. Netanyahu, for his part, refused to accommodate the demand.

So Israelis will go to the polls on March 2 for the third time in less than a year – and the country remains under a Netanyahu caretaker government with a limited mandate to act in many areas.

Polls taken in late January once again suggest a stalemate similar to the previous two elections (assuming that Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Liberman once again refuses to support anything but a unity government).

The situation with Netanyahu’s indictments came to a head last month. The prime minister had been trying to engineer a vote in the Knesset that would have given him immunity from prosecution while still in office. On January 28, with it obvious that a majority of the Knesset would not support him, Netanyahu withdrew the immunity request and Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit immediately filed charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery against Netanyahu.

The charges were filed as Netanyahu was in Washington for U.S. President Donald Trump’s unveiling of what he’d promoted for three years as the “Deal of the Century” for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Although embraced enthusiastically by Netanyahu, the Palestinians, who did not participate in its drafting, have rejected the plan.

Here in Canada, Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne released a statement that Canada “will carefully examine the details of the U.S. initiative for the Middle East peace process,” but reiterated, “Canada has long maintained that peace can only be achieved through direct negotiations between the parties. We urge the parties to create the conditions for such negotiations to take place.”

However, it is very interesting to note that ambassadors from three small Arab countries – Bahrain, United Arab Emirates and Oman – attended the White House event unveiling that plan. I would agree with analysts who suggest their attendance signals that the Palestinian issue has become less important to them than threats from Iran. Opposition to Iranian hegemony in the Middle East has opened the door to improved relations between Israel and parts of the Arab world.

The timing of the plan’s release was telling. It came on a day when Trump was on trial in the U.S. Senate for impeachment from office for abuse of power, and Netanyahu, due to face voters five weeks later, was charged with criminal offences that, if he is convicted, could lead to a prison term. It’s hard not to see the timing as an attempt to change the conversations in both the United States and Israel – and, to some extent, it did, at least briefly.

I don’t expect anything to change very soon based on the Trump plan. First, there needs to be an Israeli government with a real mandate to govern. And while it’s a foregone conclusion that Trump won’t be removed from office after his Senate trial, he may or may not be in office a year from now following the U.S. election in November.

September 2, 2019: The news is now stranger than fiction

By Michael Regenstreif

My column in our August 19 issue discussed the explicitly racist attacks of U.S. President Donald Trump on four rookie members of the U.S. House of Representatives, all of whom are women of colour. In the days and weeks after that issue went to press, there have been some downright bizarre developments to the story.

Two of the congresswomen, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who both support the anti-Israel BDS movement, were scheduled to visit East Jerusalem and the West Bank in August. In July, despite a law allowing Israel to bar BDS supporters from entering the country, Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States (who is known to be extremely close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), announced, “Out of respect for the U.S. Congress, and the great alliance between Israel and America, we would not deny entry to any member of Congress into Israel.”

That changed on August 15 when Trump tweeted, “It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib to visit. They hate Israel & all Jewish people, & there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds.”

Immediately following Trump’s tweet, Israel announced that Omar and Tlaib would not be allowed to visit after all. Although Netanyahu and his ministers claimed the change had nothing to do with Trump’s tweet, few analysts believed that.

The decision was immediately condemned by mainstream American Jewish organizations including AIPAC, Jewish Federations of North America, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Israel Policy Forum, and J Street as contradicting democratic values.

Barring Omar and Tlaib may well have provided more PR value to the BDS movement than the visit itself would have.

Then the story got even weirder. On August 20, Trump proclaimed, “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat; I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” (According to the Pew Research Center, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton received 71 per cent of the Jewish vote in 2016, compared to 24 per cent for Republican candidate Trump. In the 2018 midterm elections, after two years of the Trump administration, 79 per cent of the Jewish vote went to Democratic candidates, compared to just 17 per cent for Republicans.)

Trump invoked the antisemitic trope about the loyalty of Jews – one of the most common expressions of antisemitism throughout history. In the following days, Trump doubled-down and tripled-down on the trope elaborating that Jewish Democratic voters (in other words, Jews who don’t support Trump) are disloyal to the Jewish people and to Israel.

“In my opinion, if you vote for a Democrat you’re being very disloyal to Jewish people, and you’re being very disloyal to Israel. And only weak people would say anything other than that,” he declared on the White House lawn.

And in a tweet, Trump quoted and thanked talk radio conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root for his “very nice words”: “President Trump is the greatest President for Jews and for Israel in the history of the world, not just America, he is the best President for Israel in the history of the world and the Jewish people in Israel love him like he’s the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God.”

The nightly news – in these Trumpian times – is, indeed, stranger than fiction.

August 19, 2019: A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian

By Michael Regenstreif

No matter what one may feel about the policies of “The Squad,” four women of colour elected in 2018 to their first terms in the United States Congress, or even the antisemitic tropes that were tweeted by one of them, there was no denying the explicit racism employed by U.S. President Donald Trump in his attacks on them last month.

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Trump tweeted on July 14.

And that was only the beginning of Trump’s tweet storm.

Just for the record, three of the four congresswomen Trump was attacking – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib – were born in the United States. The fourth, Ilhan Omar, was born in Somalia and was brought to the U.S. legally as a refugee when she was a child. Omar became an American citizen in 2000 when she was 17.

By the way, earlier this year when Jewish organizations and congressional colleagues came down hard on Omar for employing antisemitic tropes in criticizing Israeli government policies toward the Palestinians, she did apologize for them – even writing an op-ed in the Washington Post describing Israel as the “historical homeland” of the Jews and reiterating her support for a two-state solution to the conflict, calling for “internationally recognized borders, which allow for both Israelis and Palestinians to have their own sanctuaries and self-determination.”

So, while Omar did come to understand why Jewish people were hurt by her words, and apologized for them, Trump has shown no such understanding.

Even leaders of some of the U.S.’s closest allies took the unusual step of calling out the American president for remarks he made about domestic political opponents.

“The prime minister’s view is that the language used to refer to these women was completely unacceptable,” said the spokesperson for then-prime minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she rejects Trump’s racist comments and stands in solidarity with the congresswomen he targeted.

“That is not how we do things in Canada. A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, and the diversity of our country is actually one of our greatest strengths and a source of tremendous resilience and pride for Canadians, and we will continue to defend that,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Trudeau’s comments were inspiring to hear at that time. Our Canadian Jewish community, and so many other ethnic and religious communities in Canada, have thrived in a country that takes justified pride in its multiculturalism.

But, and it’s a big but, “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian” is not necessarily true when Quebec, our second-largest province, encompassing nearly a quarter of our population, uses the notwithstanding clause to override the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to prevent people working in the public sector from wearing kippot, hijabs, turbans and other expressions of religious belief, including Stars of David, under its Bill 21.

For example, Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan is a Sikh whose religion mandates that he wear a turban – a turban that he wears in the House of Commons, a turban that he wore as a Canadian military officer serving on deployments to Bosnia and Herzegovina and three times to Afghanistan, and a turban he wore during an 11-year career as a Vancouver police officer and detective. Now, though, because of that turban, Sajjan cannot be a police officer in Quebec.

With a federal election two months away, are Trudeau and the other federal leaders and candidates willing to defend our diversity – in both official languages – and ensure that “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian” is more than just a platitude?