Brandon Martinez / Non-Aligned Media
Further expanding his proposals on restricting immigration, Trump has pledged to create an “extreme vetting” process that would keep out people with “anti-Semitic” attitudes.
In a new campaign speech Trump called for re-instating an ideological screening test for potential immigrants, invoking a similar policy implemented during the Cold War to screen out people with communist sympathies.
This time around, Trump said, the red flags will not be communist leanings but Islamist and anti-Semitic views, which often go hand-and-hand he implied.
“Beyond terrorism, as we have seen in France, foreign populations have brought their anti-Semitic attitudes with them,” Trump said while arguing for a tougher vetting standard. He went on to praise Israel as America’s “greatest ally” in the Middle East.
Trump has put his philosemitism and hawkish pro-Israel views front and center of his campaign, culminating in a searing appraisal of the Jews and Israel during his March speech at AIPAC, the powerful Israeli lobby group.
Blasting the Palestinians, Iran and Muslims in general, Trump plighted at AIPAC to “dismantle the disastrous [nuclear] deal with Iran,” a country that he, spouting Likudnik propaganda, labeled the “leading state sponsor of terror.” In September 2015, Trump headlined a Tea Party Republican protest of the Obama administration’s nuclear accord with Iran, which he has consistently criticized as “bad for Israel.”
“I have a beautiful Jewish daughter,” Trump is known to boast, lionizing his daughter Ivanka who converted to Judaism after marrying the Jewish real estate tycoon Jared Kushner. Kushner has worked on Trump’s presidential campaign, advising his father-in-law on all things Israel, including helping write the blisteringly pro-Zionist AIPAC address. During that speech Trump bragged of being the “Grand Marshal” at the 40th “Salute to Israel” parade in New York in 2004.
“We love Israel, we will fight for Israel 100 percent, 1000 percent, it will be there forever,” Trump declared in an acceptance speech for an award from the Algemeiner, a hardline Zionist outfit, who honored the real estate magnate for his services to Israel. Trump has extended those services to Benjamin Netanyahu specifically, endorsing Israel’s crazy war criminal prime minister in a television commercial during the 2013 Israeli general election. Netanyahu is a “great prime minister … a winner, he’s highly respected, he’s highly thought of by all,” Trump opined in the video. “Vote for Benjamin, terrific guy, terrific leader, great for Israel.”
Critics of Trump have pointed to his Zionist ties and rhetoric, in addition to his noticeable flip-flopping on major issues.
For all his recent anti-Clinton bluster, Trump did not always castigate the Democratic nominee as “crooked Hillary.” “They’re terrific people,” Trump said of Hillary and Bill Clinton as recently as 2013, calling the power couple “great friends.” “I like her a lot,” Trump once said, complimenting Hillary as “a terrific woman… [and] she does a good job [as secretary of state].” She would make a “great president or vice president,” Trump wrote of Hillary in a 2008 blog post. Both Hillary and Bill were seated in the front-row of Trump’s 2005 wedding to current wife Melania, and Trump has made financial contributions to Hillary’s previous Senate campaigns as well as the Clinton Foundation which he now attacks as the lynchpin of the Clintons’ “crooked” enterprise.
Moreover, in May of 2015, only weeks before announcing his run for the presidency, Trump had a friendly telephone conversation with Bill Clinton wherein the two “good pals” discussed Trump’s possible entry in the presidential race as a Republican. The two are also mutual friends with Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire convicted sex offender who was busted for recruiting underage girls as prostitutes for his lavish “sex parties.” Yet now Trump is publicly shaming Bill for allegedly abusing women and other depravities.
Trump’s pattern of abrupt and suspicious reversals doesn’t end with the Clintons. On Libya, Trump has throughout campaign debates and speeches assailed the Obama-Clinton decision to overthrow Gaddafi. But in 2011 during the lead-up to that disastrous and criminal intervention, Trump put out a video blog in which he strongly encouraged the White House to “immediately” send forces into Libya and “knock out” Gaddafi, repeating discredited Obama administration talking points about an “impending genocide” in Tripoli.
Trump has made much of his belated opposition to the Iraq war, lamenting mostly the fact that the war cost so much money, put the US into huge debt, and how the US “got nothing out of it” in the end. But Trump has never expressed true remorse for the brutal devastation inflicted upon Iraqis nor has he called for remedies – such as reparations – to compensate for their suffering. In fact, Trump has variously suggested that the US should have looted Iraq’s oil wealth before leaving, a proposition first tabled by the war’s Neocon-Zionist chief architect Paul Wolfowitz. The human cost of the Iraq debacle – millions of Iraqis dead, displaced and disfigured, an entire country gutted, forever polluted with depleted uranium and permanently destabilized – is only a vague afterthought in the oligarch’s money-obsessed mind.
Trump has even said that his military interest in Libya (when he was in favor of war in 2011) stemmed, again, from his avaricious thirst for its oil which he wants to deprive from China. “I’m only interested in Libya if we take the oil. If we don’t take the oil, I have no interest in Libya,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal in a 2011 interview. With every foreign policy decision, it seems Trump’s primary consideration is whether money will be made on the endeavor, and not whether people will be adversely affected by it. He has repeated similar themes in relation to ISIS and how the group is “making a killing” selling oil, money that Trump wants flowing into his own bank accounts and those of his rich friends.
On the issue that sets him apart from other candidates, immigration, again Trump has changed his tune over the years. Amazingly, when Mitt Romney was running for president in 2012, Trump blasted him for his “mean-spirited” rhetoric towards immigrants, calling Romney’s proposal that illegals should deport themselves “maniacal.” “The Republican Party will continue to lose presidential elections if it comes across as mean-spirited and unwelcoming toward people of color,” Trump told Newsmax in 2012, adding that Republicans “don’t care” about Hispanics and other immigrant groups. Yet now Trump has unleashed some of the most frenzied rhetoric about immigrants in campaign speeches and public statements, going much further than Romney ever did with pleas to ban Muslims and build a giant wall to keep out Mexicans who “bring drugs and crime” over the border.
Apologists will say that Trump has simply changed his views over time, but the brusqueness of the turnabout on the Clintons, Libya and immigration, warrants suspicion. Some have floated the distinct possibility that Trump was merely assigned a role to play in this election cycle – that of brash populist demagogue. His purpose: mop up middle class discontent with lingering economic and social problems caused by past administrations, channeling their anger in the wrong directions. Then, nearing voting day in November, make outrageous statements to throw the election to his “good friend” Hillary. It’s certainly a plausible theory given what’s transpired already, but confirmation of this narrative will be hard to come by.
Instead of properly identifying the root causes of problems, Trump is intentionally misdirecting opprobrium onto powerless groups (Mexicans, Muslims, etc.) or at puppet politicians like Clinton and Obama, figureheads for the Wall Street money-power and Zionist elite. On the Iraq war, Trump blames Bush and not his Jewish neocon advisors (Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Frum, Cohen, etc.) or the Israeli regime who had been conspiring together for years to bring about that war as a prelude to eliminating seven Middle Eastern regimes in 5-10 years for the nearly-exclusive benefit of Tel Aviv.
Trump has falsely claimed “thousands” of American Muslims were “celebrating” in the streets after 9/11, when in fact five Israelis – later identified as Mossad agents – were actually witnessed in jubilant celebrations on a rooftop in New Jersey, where they filmed and photographed themselves as the towers burned in the backdrop. The Israeli suspects were arrested, later telling their FBI interrogators that their joy at the sight of horrific terrorism and death stemmed from a realization the attacks would make Americans sympathize with Israel and its “cause,” somehow knowing who would be blamed before any investigation. Echoing the dancing Israelis, Netanyahu, Trump’s “good friend,” repeatedly said 9/11 was “good for Israel” and “swung public opinion” in the country’s favor.
Another chummy friend of both Trump and Netanyahu is Larry Silverstein, the Jewish real estate mogul who suspiciously purchased a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center complex six weeks before 9/11, promptly bringing in his own security team who may have been involved in placing explosives throughout the buildings, and then profited billions from their destruction via insurance payouts. Silverstein was financially tied in with the Israeli Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), an Israeli think-tank staffed by the very Zionist neocons who spearheaded Bush’s war policies against Iraq and Afghanistan which 9/11 enabled. In one of that group’s strategy papers authored in 1996, Saddam Hussein’s downfall was slotted as the primary goal among Israel’s “strategic objectives” for the region approaching the 21st century. But accomplishing that and other Middle East invasions, the same largely Jewish neocons lamented in a 2000 PNAC paper, would be a difficult task without the advent of a “New Pearl Harbor” type trigger incident that could be seized upon to sway the American public into an interventionist, war-hawk mood.
Overall, Trump is holding up the failed and unfixable two-party system and the illusory left-right paradigm that the elites have crafted, thusly keeping Americans subdued in the thinking that voting actually matters. It is this dangerous delusion and its perpetuation by Trump that is most troubling. The US elites are brainstorming new, creative ways to maintain their horrid crony capitalist system in place, and what better way to dissuade popular revolt then by sending in an “outsider” like Trump to storm into the arena promising to “make America great again,” just as Obama sold the masses on “hope and change” in 2008.
Beyond the obvious deficiencies laid out above, there is one fatal flaw in Trump’s campaign slogan: America was never great, so she cannot possibly be great again.
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