On Saturday, Apostle Wayne T. Jackson of Great Faith Ministries, a black church in Detroit, wrapped Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in a Jewish tallit, or prayer shawl, brought straight from the Holy Land of Israel for the purpose.
If there were ever an image that could confound the false caricature of Trump as a neo-KKK antisemitic demagogue, that would be it.
Which is precisely why Trump’s die-hard detractors are seething.
The Times of Israel, covering the reaction on social media presented “both sides” of the issue: “…[W]hile some mocked the image of a Protestant presidential candidate receiving a Jewish tallit from a Christian pastor, others saw the incident as pandering to both Jewish and African-American voters.”
Over at Tablet magazine, an online publication devoted lately to the Trump-Hitler analogy, the hitherto sober-minded Yair Rosenberg seemed to have trouble digesting Trump in a tallit, offering a short and corny listicle full of in-jokes, ending with the wishful thought that “pro-Nazi Twitter” might be having just as hard a time accepting the idea of black/Jewish Trump.
The day before Trump’s Detroit visit, Rosenberg had published an article arguing that because far-right-wing types would be gratified by a Trump win, anyone voting for Trump would be voting for “the mainstreaming of anti-Jewish and anti-minority bigotry into the American government and the country’s political discourse.”
Why that illogic applies to Trump, and not to Hillary Clinton, given the many antisemites in the Black Lives Matter and “Palestine solidarity” movements who would be gratified by her victory, Rosenberg did not explain.
Indeed, the most salient case of outright antisemitism in the 2016 presidential campaign has been the effort by senior Democratic National Committee officials to use Bernie Sanders’s religion — or lack thereof — against him for Clinton’s benefit.
And for all the “alt-right” phantoms that NeverTrump and the Clinton campaign have conjured, the left-wing tyranny of political correctness is a real and concrete thing, closely aligned with the anti-Israel fanatics who are bringing elite antisemitism back into vogue on American campuses and elsewhere.
Notably, Trump’s poll numbers have improved as the Clinton campaign has escalated its Trump-as-Hitler-KKK attack.
Perhaps there are enough Americans who are sick of the Thought Police, and willing to oppose four (eight?) more years of the same.
Amen to that.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.