Anyone reading the hyperbolic language of Amotz Asa-El in his recent Jerusalem Post article “Make America Sane Again” must have been struck at how similar it was to the hysterical language of the Democrat leadership and their supportive American media in their efforts to destroy one of the most successful US Presidents, and without doubt the most profoundly pro-Israel American leader ever, in order to prevent him from winning the 2024 US Election.
The author began his screed with the intro, it’s a fact,” by describing former President Donald Trump as a” wacko, crook, and proven agent of chaos.”
Were they really facts?
Nowhere in his hit job did the author give Trump credit for turning around an American economy ruined by Obama, bringing his country to be an energy independent and economically and diplomatically strong United States capable of leading the free world from the front, rather than from behind.
Trump took steps to rectify Obama’s expensive and dangerous appeasement of Iran by laying down important sanctions on that threatening regime, while also rectifying the Obama-Biden anti-Israel legacy that included the damaging UNSC Resolution 2334 designating Judea & Samaria and parts of Jerusalem as “illegally occupied Palestinian territory.”
In his article, the author echoed the hyperbolic rhetoric of the Democrat leadership that has been haunting, taunting, and persecuting Donald Trump with a dangerous series of lies, exaggerations, and unproven legal indictments from the day he descended the Trump Tower escalator to declare his candidacy for the presidency of the United States.
Using the lie spread by the Hillary Clinton campaign that Trump was literally in bed with the Russians, a lie that was later exposed as an expensive campaign hoax to incriminate Trump with the lie that he frolicked with Russian prostitutes, something that Biden’s son was videoed doing on a very real laptop that 51 of Biden’s top intelligence officers claimed to be “Russian disinformation” was repeatedly used to besmirch Trump, a trick sadly used by the writer of the Jerusalem Post article.
You begin to see the danger of the misuse of language for political advantage.
This can be seen in Asa-El’s flattering portrayal of Rex Tillerson and James Mattis, positioning them as the good guys under a bad president.
Had the author done his homework he would have learnt that Tillerson stood as an obstacle to Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
In Ambassador David Friedman’s excellent book, “Sledgehammer,” Tillerson wrote a lengthy assessment detailing ten risks why the President should not announce Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. On the Opportunities side of his assessment the page was blank.
Friedman writes on pages 102-103 that Tillerson presented talking points which contained “glaring errors” such as the incorrect date of 1996 when Israel liberated Jerusalem from the Jordanian army in 1967.
Even more egregiously, Tillerson claimed that “the United States never takes sides on Jerusalem” even though, as Freedman informed the president the US had passed a law in 1995 with an overwhelming bipartisan majority declaring Jerusalem to be the undivided capital of Israel.
When David Fredman wanted to have the US State Department recognize American citizens born in Jerusalem as being born in Israel, it was Tillerson that stood in his way.
Yet Amotz Asa-El promotes Tillerson over Trump. Why, if not to unfairly demean the most pro-Israel President?
This writer promotes an anti-Israel Mattis who, in a meeting in front of President Trump and in the presence of Ambassador Friedman, admitted that he had been to Israel many times, but “almost never to Jerusalem because the US defense establishment in Israel was based in Tel Aviv.”
According to Jared Kushner, Tillerson insisted that what Mahmoud Abbas told the US Administration in English was the same as he told his own people in Arabic despite being shown the evidence to the contrary.
Kushner writes in his book “Breaking History” that Tillerson actively prevented him from playing a Middle East role, hereby slowing down progress to the Abraham Accords until after Tillerson was fired.
Yet Amotz Asa-El elevates Tillerson over Trump even though, according to page 164 of Kushner’s book, “Tillerson’s tenure was a failure by any measure.”
The man that Amotz Asa-El promoted in his anti-Trump article was fired because his bad judgment went against the positive agenda of the president he was there to serve, a president with an agenda that benefitted Israel, our Arab Abraham Accord partners, and the free world.
Perhaps this points to the author’s own bad judgment?
This is guilt by hysterical accusation as in the indictment of Trump for a phone call to the Ukrainian president. This indictment was based on Democrat Adam Schiff’s non-existent whistleblower accusing the president of a criminal quid pro quo, making demands for personal gain. Trump proved his innocence when he produced the transcript of his phone call, but the stigma stuck. For people opposed to Trump he is guilty no matter the lack of evidence, no matter that he can prove his innocence.
What is troubling about this indictment, as with other anti-Trump accusations, is that we are beginning to see that the Democrats are guilty of the very crimes they throw at their political rival, as with the rushed visit to Ukraine by then Vice President Biden to get a prosecutor fired who was investigating his son and the corrupt energy company that employed him by threatening to cut off US aid to that country. Biden hubris was seen in a video of a bragging Biden boasting, “Son of a gun, within six hours, the prosecutor got fired!”
That was a very real criminal quid pro quo for personal gain. But nothing to see there, folk. After all, this was a Democrat Vice President, now a protected President.
Donald Trump is facing an exaggeration of charges that by all estimates may put him in prison for hundreds of years together with his lawyers, his advisors, and anyone close to him, brought against them by those perilously clinging to power based on weak law but strong accusations.
Whatever their claims, whatever justifications they try to use to cover their character assassination, we are not witnessing a virtuous act of democracy in America but something very devious and troubling.
We are witnessing the end of democracy in America. And it is beginning to happen here in Israel.
To hell with the facts, to hell with the truth. Let’s invent charges against the “Crime Minister.” Or, in Trump’s cases, the “Crime President.”
And let’s employ methods we would call undemocratic if we saw it happen in other countries.
Let’s arrest and charge anyone standing in our way.
You see where I am going with this.
According to Amotz Asa-El, Republican voters “are bargaining their soul to Trump.”
This type of rhetoric places Trump as deserving of any punishment that can be inflicted upon him.
His supporters, the voters who see him as a positive and popular president for their country, must be denounced and shamed by using all sorts of demeaning names. Names like “domestic terrorists,” “white supremacists,” racists,” “a basket of deplorables.”
This sort of people would support a reprobate, a dictator, a dishonorable leader. Therefore, it is virtuous to remove their figure head and arrest the ringleaders of those who support him for the sake of our democracy,
But what is happening in America is precisely what is going on here in Israel.
Aren’t the Tel Aviv protesters calling the duly elected Prime Minister a “crime minister,” even as the cases against him are collapsing, while these oh so virtuous protesters are led by an actual crime minister, Ehud Olmert.
Do these people not see their own hypocrisy?
The hysteria of language and political action is being employed in Israel by an elite left who saw in the results of the 2022 election that they don’t have the numbers to regain power democratically.
The majority hear their exaggerated language and witness the anti-democratic actions of an elite left prepared to ruin the country financially, leave the country defenseless, in the name of “democracy.”
Amotz Asa-El’s rhetoric was applied to an American experience and expresses the hysteria of a Democrat establishment trembling in fear of losing power in the next election to a resurgent Trump. But we hear the same increasingly hysterical language in Israel from protest leaders who refer, in their delusion, to bodies floating on the Yarkon River as did Ehud Barak in his attempt to take over the country in a military-type coup.
And they do it, they claim, in the name of democracy.
May America and Israel be saved from people who control such levers of language in order to keep or regain power, for these are the people who are the real danger to our country.
Let us pray that they lose both in America and in Israel for the sake of our political sanity, our freedom, and our democracy.
Barry Shawis International Public Diplomacy Director, Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.