Instant Amnesia for 'Branch Offices' of Anti-Semitism

Among my Jews, the reaction to President Donald Trump’s public denunciation of anti-Semitism this week was: big talk, but a little late and a little unconvincing.

And it didn’t seem to matter that the president used words like “horrible” and “painful.”

“A pathetic asterisk of condescension,” the U.S.-based Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect said in a statement.

“We’ve only just reached the stage today – thankfully, if belatedly – of hearing President Trump acknowledge the issue and call it by its rightful name – anti-Semitism,” said American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris.

I read these remarks (and others) and immediately thought: Oy. Now comes the onslaught from the other side, whose voices will cry, “Are these Jews never satisfied? Aren’t ‘horrible’ and ‘painful’ powerful enough words to satisfy them?”

And, sure enough, from White House spokesman Sean Spicer to Trump apologists like Kayleigh McEnany, the president’s defenders professed shock and bafflement that the president’s words weren’t fully embraced.

This is known as Instant Amnesia.

The Trump defenders have willfully forgotten a campaign in which their man welcomed the support of such alt-right bigots as Breitbart News and now embraces the poisonous advice of Stephen Bannon.

They’ve willfully forgotten how this White House marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a statement that somehow failed to mention the Jews – despite the subsequent revelation that they rebuffed an effort by the State Department to include such mention. They’ve willfully forgotten the Trump-Binyamin Netanyahu press conference when Trump was asked about the spike in anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. and he responded, astonishingly, by boasting of his electoral college victory.

They’ve willfully forgotten the next day, when a reporter from a Jewish magazine asked Trump about bomb threats against Jewish community centers, and Trump cut the question short, blasted the reporter, said he hated the question, and proceeded to defend himself.

When a new wave of bomb threats was coupled with massive vandalism at a Jewish cemetery in the St. Louis area, Trump was finally pressured into issuing this week’s belated statement.

But maybe the Trump defenders have willfully forgotten something else: the Jews are fully aware that, as this president belatedly bemoans anti-Semitism, he unleashes the cops to round up immigrants, and he threatens to build a wall to keep out Mexicans, and he drafts new rules for keeping out Muslims.

And all of these are just “branch offices” of anti-Semitism, and they’re all part of a deeply troubling pattern of White House bigotry.