Long after Trump is removed, impeached, or otherwise forced to vacate the White House, the hatred he has spawned by his public embrace of racism and bigotry will still be with us. Possibly his most abominable legacy will be poisoning the minds of younger Americans, those whose value systems were developed during his presidency.
Al Jazeera reported yesterday on this incident at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College.
New York City - A Jewish professor's office at a university in New York City has been vandalised with anti-Semitic graffiti, including swastikas and an anti-Semitic slur, underlining recent concerns of a rising number of hate crimes against Jews in the United States.
The professor, Elizabeth Midlarsky, is 77 years old. She teaches and researches about the Holocaust. The report from the student newspaper describes her reaction upon seeing this:
“I was in shock,” Midlarsky said. “I stopped for a moment, because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
New York City has seen a 22 percent increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2018. What made this act particularly loathsome was that it was perpetrated in the intimate setting of the professor’s own office. As the school’s newspaper article describing the incident notes, only those with valid college ID’s are permitted entry into any of the college's academic buildings. So the perpetrator was either an employee or a student.
A disturbing number of similarly anti-Semitic defacements have appeared at other college campuses over just the last two weeks:
The incident comes less than two weeks after someone at Duke University in North Carolina spray-painted a red swastika on a mural honoring the victims of last month's Pittsburgh synagogue massacre.
And last week, the Cornell Daily Sun reported that three swastikas were found over nine days at Cornell University's campus in Ithaca, New York.
Overall, the incidence of anti-Semitic acts have skyrocketed over the past two years, particularly on college campuses. The one at Columbia was covered today by the New York Times and NBC News. Curiously, only Al Jazeera (a media outlet based outside the U.S.) bothered to note that Professor Midlarsky herself attributed the vandalism to the increasing climate of anti-Semitism spreading across this country, a climate being nakedly encouraged and stoked by Donald Trump.
Ginna Green, chief strategy officer of Bend the Arc, a Jewish social movement based in New York City, told Al Jazeera that the latest act of vandalism was a reminder that communities "remain under threat by white nationalism in our government and our neighbourhoods".
Green said Trump's embrace of white nationalist ideology and rhetoric has created the conditions for anti-Semitic harassment and violence.
"By not only failing to condemn white nationalism, but actively encouraging it and adopting it as his worldview, Trump sends a message to his supporters that these horrific acts are acceptable."
For those who have any doubt about the connection between Trump and this increase in hate crimes and acts of anti-Semitism, the demonization of Hungarian (and Jewish) billionaire George Soros—by not only Trump but the entire Republican apparatus that preceded the last election—should put those doubts to rest. Soros was blamed by Fox News and the White House itself for funding the so-called migrant “caravan" that Trump warned was a mortal threat to the safety of this country. The attribution of the “caravan" to Soros was the direct impetus for an anti-Semitic monster deliberately murdering eleven people last month at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Bernard Harcourt (also a professor at Columbia), writing for the New York Review of Books, believes Americans have underestimated the degree to which Trump has fanned the flames of white nationalism—and its constant partner, anti-Semitism—in this country, through his speeches and actions that constantly seek to place blame and malign specific groups of Americans—typically Jews, Muslims, leftists and anyone who is not white.
Note how these claims of white genocide and Jewish power resonate in Trump’s discourse. His last campaign ad in 2016 vilified three opponents, all Jewish: George Soros, the former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, and the CEO of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein. Last August on Twitter, Trump adopted white nationalist propaganda that the South African government is engaged in a genocidal campaign against white farmers.
Harcourt warns that once allowed to fester and bloom in a nation, the hatred and prejudice spawned by the acceptance of white nationalism is extremely difficult to contain. What we see happening across the nation’s colleges suggests that it has already begun to take root.
Update: in the few hours since this Diary was originally published, a mural in downtown Los Angeles celebrating African-American history has been defaced--with swastikas.