CNN, NYT Contributor Wajahat Ali Smears Trump as an ‘Antisemitic President’

Appearing Tuesday on CNN Tonight with host Don Lemon, network contributor and New York Times contributing op-ed writer Wajahat Ali claimed President Donald Trump accusing Jewish-Americans of being disloyal demonstrates he is an “antisemitic president.”

A partial transcript is as follows: 

DON LEMON: Gosh Wajahat, accusing Jewish-Americans of dual loyalty — Is that what he’s doing? It’s an antisemitic trope here. What would happen if “The Squad” said something like that?

WAJAHAT ALI: If “The Squad” said something like that, the entire country would be in an uproar and basically they would want to deport Rashida Tlaib to Michigan, that’s where she’s from. This dual-loyalty trope has been used against marginalized communities in America. Irish-Catholics, their loyalty was always tested. Jewish Americans to this day. Muslims for the past 18 years.

What Donald Trump is doing is what Donald Trump has always done. I keep the receipts. This is nothing new. He’s telling 80% of Jews in America that they’re not loyal to who? To him? To America? To Israel? He also said this in the White House when he invited American Jews for Hanukkah, he said Israel is your country. This is the same president — by the way, [white supremacists] who said when the Jews will not replace us, right, when the KKK marched in Charlottesville, he said very fine people on both sides.

He’s the same one who promoted the white supremacist conspiracy theory of George Soros, a Jew funding the caravan of immigrants and rapists. And that was the same term — invasion — used by the terrorists who walked into the Tree of Life synagogue and killed 11 people. This is the same man who over the past month has retweeted these extremists, Katie Hopkins, who said Jews were responsible for their own massacre in the Tree of Life synagogue because their chief rabbi was pro-migrant. What I’m telling everyone today is a very radical idea that Donald Trump is a racist president. He’s also an anti-Semitic president. He promotes white supremacist talking points and what I want to tell all my Jewish cousins from other mothers is that the Muslims are with you, and we see through this.

We’re not going to let him use Jews and Israel and anti-Semitism as a wedge to divide us along religious and racial lines. We’re in this together. We know he attacks black women, Muslims, women, Latinos, immigrants, and Jews and we know that white supremacists are the number-one domestic terror threat in America coming for all of us. We’re going unite, we’re going to have our disagreements about Israel. That’s fine. But we’re going to unite against the common threat that is coming against all of us which is white supremacy and Donald Trump, you will not win.