The New Jews?

“Be brave.”  Is what a mother about to be deported in a Denver immigration sweep ordered by the Trumpistas said to her children in 2017.  The family will apparently be broken, to make a political point.  I’m not sure why the children of this particular illegal alien aren’t being deported, as well, or why they don’t serve as anchor babies for her, but such detail relating to individual situations gets lost in the sweep of history.

“Human beings are sacrificed to abstractions; a holocaust of individuals is offered up to ‘the people.’  Is what a man named Benjamin Constant  wrote in The Spirit of Conquest in 1813.  I found that at page 218 in Hugh Honour’s book, Romanticism (1979), and he in turn was quoting the historian Isaiah Berlin in his Four Essays on Liberty (1969) at page ix.  So it’s fair to say that, despite an intriguing Wikipedia entry, old Benjamin Constant and his ideas haven’t exactly made a big or lasting impression on the global consciousness.

So, under the Trump regime, who will be the new Jews? Right now, the leading candidates, in my opinion, are the illegal immigrants and the Muslims.  If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on the illegal immigrants, for a couple of reasons.

One is legal.  Islam is a religion, and religious groups have a wide variety of Constitutional and legal protection, ranging from hate crime legislation to the First Amendment of the Constitution.  And most Muslim immigrants in the United States are here legally.  As legal resident aliens, they have most (not all) of the legal protections of U.S. citizens.  So, Muslims are a harder target.  And bullies avoid hard targets.

By contrast, illegal immigrants are the furthest thing from a protected class under U.S. law.

A second reason is cultural.  You may fear and hate your enemies, but at some level you respect them.  I mean, Islamic terrorists did manage to bring down the World Trade Center, and, man, that's huge, just yuge.  Even if you’re tough enough to blow off the loss of human life, like when he mentioned the 3 trillion dollars the Iraq War cost but forgot to say anything about the cost in blood, the Towers of the World Trade Center were valuable New York real estate.  Gone.  Poof.  All that cash flow from all those leases.  Clearly Islamic terrorism is the most serious threat to the American way of life that the Republic has ever faced.  So let's use them to keep the country on a war footing and scapegoat somebody else.

On the other hand, if you consider the attitudes towards illegal immigrants voiced by Trump, it is the contempt of a hate spewing nationalist for sub humans.  They illegals are criminals.  They are rapists.  They are filthy.  They spread disease.  Their cartels have tentacles across the civilized world.  Their very presence soils the fabric of our community and corrupts the purity of our Nation.  Anyone who can’t hear the echoes of a Central European Jew baiter from between the World Wars is tone deaf.  I mean, does someone have to invent the Protocolos de los Jovenes de Cuszco to connect the dots?

-->