Don’t insult the Leader’s wife, especially if you happen to be Jewish.
Julia Ioffe, one of the leading feature writers in the country, formerly of The New Republic and freelancer for the New Yorker and New York Times, wrote a relatively innocuous, mildly positive article about Trump’s third spouse for GQ Magazine last week. Melania Trump (who was interviewed for the article), however, took strong exception to some of Ioffe’s details about her Slovenian family and the Trumps’ personal life, and drew from her husband’s playbook in responding on Social Media by denouncing the article and personally attacking Ioffe, who happens to be Jewish.
This apparently prompted some of Trump’s panting and drooling Brownshirts to express their undying loyalty to Melania by filling Ioffe’s inbox and voicemail with anti-Semitic slurs and attacks, the likes of which Russian-born Ioffe says she hasn’t seen since growing up in Putin’s Russia:
It was truly vile garbage. There was an image of Ioffe depicted as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. A cartoon of a Jewish man being shot in the head. Others called her phone and played speeches of Adolph Hitler. And the white supremacist website Daily Stormer ran an article titled, “Empress Melania Attacked by Filthy Russian Kike Julia Ioffe in GQ!”
The attacks on Ioffe are just the latest in a continuing pattern of Trump-inspired anti-Semitism directed at Trump’s Jewish critics, particularly journalists, and provide a unique window into what life for Jews critical of Trump would be like with a Trump Presidency. Last December Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who is Jewish, wrote a column critical of Trump, prompting an unprecedented backlash of anti-Semitism from Trump supporters. Other victims of Trump’s self-styled S.A. include conservative commentators such as Bethany Mandel who had the temerity to call out Trump’s "legions of anti-semitic fans," many of whom also harbor white supremacist beliefs that have received Trump’s implicit blessing in his racially-charged campaign.
While some of these people can be fairly characterized as Internet trolls, never before have they behaved with such a sense of brazen purpose and audacity. The very fact that they choose this context to spread their low-rent hatred is in itself testimony to the enabling nature of Trump’s Presidential campaign. Ioffe, whose family actually emigrated from Russia to escape the anti-Semitism there, was asked on CNN about the clear connection between the anti-Semitism and Trump himself:
[A] lot of the trolls who were sending me the most obscene, anti-Semitic stuff I have frankly ever seen directed at me in my life -- a lot of them had somebody in the user pic wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat, or they had Trump as their background, or they had Trump as the, you know, user pic with like a KKK rally in the background. So you know, they were putting Trump right in the middle of all of this imagery.
As pointed out by Dean Obeidallah, writing for The Atlantic, the deliberate decision by Trump not to denounce such actions by his supporters simply encourages further, bolder action on their part. Trump has been provided with innumerable opportunities to denounce such behavior and has consciously avoided doing so. His reply to Wolf Blitzer, asking about the attacks on Ioffe, was as laconic as it was uncaring: “I don’t have a message to the fans.”
This is the result:
The consequences to civil discourse and social behavior in this country in the event of a Trump presidency is one of those pesky intangibles that the major media never seem to fret much about. But all of these vile purveyors of hate accustomed to slinking around anonymously on Twitter would suddenly find themselves validated and encouraged to act upon their beliefs, whether directed against Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans, Muslims, Gays, Liberals or any other group that they may find “blameworthy” for the country’s problems. Their thin-skinned, hyperbolic reaction to even the mildest forms of criticism of their hero should set off alarm bells for all Americans:
In the deeply disturbing response to her piece, Ioffe said she sees a frightening future of what freedom of the press – and the country – might look like under President Trump.
“What happens if Donald Trump is elected?” Ioffe said.
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“This is not a heavily critical article. There is nothing in it that is untrue,” Ioffe said. “If this is how Trump supporters swing into action what happens when the press looks into corrupt dealings, for example, or is critical of his policies?”
If there is one thing uglier than these slurs against an American journalist, it’s what we can fairly expect in the event of a Trump Presidency.