Iowa Rep. Steve King treated America to yet another display of his talents as America's foremost sayer of terrible things last Friday when he told the majority of Jewish Americans that
they were being Jewish wrong. Now Steve King is
standing by those comments, and expanding on them.
In a phone interview with BuzzFeed News, Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa defended comments he made on Friday questioning how American Jews could be Democrats and support President Obama.
King, expanding on the comments, said much of the backlash occurred because “everyone in the discussion knows I’m right.”
Steve King's original assertion was that Jewish Americans are simply not being properly Jewish if they support Democrats or Barack Obama, because Steve King supports Israel but Democrats, Obama, and "leftist" Jewish Americans do not. He maintains this position.
Asked why he thought Jewish Democrats supported the president, King said many were secular and didn’t have ties to Israel.
“I think many of them no longer have ties to Israel,” said King. “They are secular, they are Democrats by political affiliation and by their nature they are leftist.”
“Many are leftists first,” he said.
I have never known a Jewish American, whether deeply religious or otherwise, who has ever had positive things to say about right-wing politicians telling them how to be Jewish. Note that it comes up a lot, because a good bit of American hard-right Christianity revolves around telling Jewish people what to think and why they should think it, but responses are invariably more or less along the lines of Rep. Steve Israel's twitter responses to King, which only resulted in King tripling down by saying Rep. Israel was not a "real man."
I don't need Congressman Steve King questioning my religion or my politics. I demand an apology from him & repudiation from GOP. #dangerous
— @RepSteveIsrael
@RepSteveIsrael: Real men make such requests face 2 face & man 2 man. I defend Israelis from Leftists & misogynists.
— @SteveKingIA
I hereby pledge that if Rep. Steve Israel wanders up to Steve King on the House floor and punches him square in the face, I will chip in for his bail money. But there is a much deeper (and more loathsome) dynamic at work here, and it goes directly to Steve King's deepest theories on what he considers being a
true American or being a
true Jew to require. Below the fold:
Hard-right American politicians chastising Jewish Americans for supporting Israel incorrectly is always informative, because it is consistently a transparent stand-in for their positions on how they believe all Americans should "support" America. The premise asserted by far-right American politicians and pundits who believe Americans cannot be truly "American" unless they support politically far-right policies is, identically and always, that religious or secular Jews worldwide do not truly "support" Israel unless they support politically far-right policies endorsed by far-right Israeli political figures. You might have grown up in America, but that does not make you a true American. You might have grown up in Israel, but that does not mean you support Israel. There are qualifiers, and the qualifiers are always mandatory support for the policies and politicians of the far-right, period. Oh—and note that "leftists," to use King's word, are anti-American or anti-Israel by definition. This is a profoundly important point, and serves as the shortened definition of both his philosophy and his movement.
It goes like this: You are a True American if you support Steve King and his conspiracy theories about Latino American teens being predominantly drug mules. You are a True Supporter of Israel if and only if you support far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's overtly racist election eve theories of Arabs flooding the voting booths. The patriotic position, then, is open xenophobia.
You are a True American if you support the far-right position that Iranian's technical ability to at some point produce a nuclear weapon must be met with a preemptive American attack, and the sooner the better; you are only a True Supporter of Israel if you support hardline Israeli politicians who demand the precise same thing. The patriotic position is to embrace the doctrine of preemptive war. The patriotic position was to embrace the doctrine of preemptive war during the last conflict, too, and to steadfastly continue to support it even now, and to claim that the current outcome is either a desirable end or would have been, had not Barack Obama or the American left somehow sabotaged it.
Note that these requirements of patriotism are premised explicitly as support for the far right, not to the nation itself. In this nation, supporting the presidency and administration policies was considered the duty of every True American, at least from the years 2000-2008; now being a True American means, according to Rep. Steve King and (even more conspicuously, today) Sen. Ted Cruz, opposing the American president and devoting yourself to working against him in all respects.
Similarly, Israeli hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu has been traveling the world of late not just proclaiming himself to be the only legitimate Israeli voice but claiming to speak for All Jews, Everywhere, but it goes without saying that if the government of Israel had in these most recent elections shifted to a more centrist or left-leaning makeup, freeing Netanyahu to pursue an alternate career as televised conservative has-been, then being a True Supporter of Israel would suddenly require, according to Rep. Steve King and Netanyahu both, steadfast opposition to those new official Israeli policies until such time as a right-wing movement was able to regain power.
This is not new, in other words. What Steve King thinks about American Jews is not surprising, or unusual. He believes patriotism in this nation and in particular allied nations consists of pledging your unquestioned allegiance to far-right positions and governments, otherwise you are not a patriot but a leftist. Rep. Steve King says so directly. (In this Rep. Steve King is advocating for, and there is simply no other word that can be used here, a form of fascism. Much could and probably should be written about the increasing appeal of proto-fascist rhetoric among the hard-right, currently awash with xenophobic and nationalistic fervor and blended with ever-expanding demands on what the only legitimate religious beliefs of America ought to be and how to most effectively assure their legal enshrinement over all the others, but that is a weightier topic than Steve King by himself is worth. Suffice it to say his thoughts on patriotism and national identity have ample historical precedent.)
But now we've gone and done it, because we already have treated Rep. Steve King's latest spiteful drooling with some seriousness. In my defense, he is an actual sitting member of the United States House of Representatives, not your racist uncle rambling on about how The Blacks should vote or why The Jews consistently vote against his interests.
So let's clarify. Steve King explaining to Jewish Americans that they must "support Israel" in a certain way does not have a damn thing to do with Judaism or Israel. It doesn't. It has to do with Steve King's open hostility towards "Democrats" and "leftists" and Barack Obama, as he himself asserts in those very quotes, and Steve King explaining to every last sub-demographic in the nation that their sub-demographic are not true patriots or true whatever-you-may-have unless they comport themselves according to how Steve King, lily-white conservative Iowa xenophobe, believes they should comport themselves and support whatever Steve King supports. That is the sum total of his message here, as it is every other time Steve King opens his mouth.
You could replace this theories on "Jews in America" with similar language muttering about the improper voting records of black Americans, or Latino Americans, or poor Americans, or rich Americans, and you could probably find an old Steve King speech for each of them blasting the members of those groups as not properly patriotic specifically because they do not support one or more of Steve King's stated policies. It is what he does. It is who he is. He is Steve King, leader of the anti-immigrant caucus, who made his career demanding English be the sole language of the United States, who considers brown teens to be drug mules and American Jews to be "leftists" who "no longer have ties to Israel" of the sort that Steve King demands of them. He is, let us be clear, a shitstain.
But he is a shitstain who matters, because he, Ted Cruz, and a phalanx of others represent a political movement that considers legitimate patriotism to consist exclusively of doing what they demand be done, and who consider legitimate religion to be the one they follow, and none other. That is dangerous. They are very mean dogs behind a very rickety fence, and the boards are getting looser all the time.