Anti-Defamation League blasts Trump for 'invoking support for Israel to defend this racism'

The Anti-Defamation League denounced President Trump’s “racist” tweets telling four Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.”

In an op-ed published Tuesday for NBC News, ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt did not mince words, calling Trump’s rhetoric “ripped straight from a white supremacist manifesto.”

Greenblatt wrote that Trump’s insistence Monday that the four congresswomen — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — hate America and Israel was troubling.

“Trump’s language was absolutely and unquestionably racist despite his denials to the contrary,” Greenblatt wrote.

The ADL, a civil rights organization founded to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people,” also noted on its website that Trump’s attack on the Democratic lawmakers “was greeted with enthusiasm by white supremacists and other extremists.”

Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, for instance, applauded Trump on his website, the Daily Stormer.

“Man, President Trump’s Twitter account has been pure fire lately. This might be the funniest thing he’s ever tweeted,” Anglin wrote. “This is the kind of WHITE NATIONALISM we elected him for. And we’re obviously seeing it only because there’s another election coming up. But I’ll tell you, even knowing that, it still feels so good.”

The ADL was not the only U.S. Jewish group to decry Trump’s attacks on the congresswomen. Israel Policy Forum columnist Michael Koplow wrote that invoking Israel to defend Trump’s “vile racism” could ultimately cause more harm than good.

Over the past two days, Trump has launched a campaign against the four congresswomen in what some have read to be a calculated effort to further divide the Democratic Party.

Those efforts have not gone unnoticed by many Jews in Israel.

“It seems the president would like to foment a civil war among Democrats, using Israel as a wedge,” Zev Chafets, a journalist and former senior aide to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, wrote at Bloomberg.

While Chafets, like Greenblatt, did not defend the views held by the Democratic lawmakers known collectively as “the Squad,” he did qualify them.

“Nothing they say about this country will be any worse than the things you can hear in Israel’s own legislature, the Knesset, every day,” Chafets wrote.

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