#dual loyalty

by Corey Walker

A mobile billboard truck contrasting Abdul El-Sayed as representing “Michigan’s future” with Rep. Haley Stevens as representing “Israel’s future” was spotted in Metro Detroit, injecting a dual-loyalty insinuation into one of the country’s most closely watched Democratic Senate primaries.

According to observers, the truck travelled around midtown and downtown Detroit in an effort to influence voters as they head to the polls to decide the Democratic Senate nominee.

Although it is not clear that the truck was commissioned by the El-Sayed campaign, observers noted that the truck represented another signal that antisemitism has become a central feature of the competition. El-Sayed, a physician and former Wayne County health official, has accused Israel of genocide and apartheid, called it a “rogue state,” and argued that its government and the Hamas terrorist organization are both “evil.”

If these hostages are American why did they join the IDF?

I don’t consider you an American if you join to fight for a foreign nation.

“Dual loyalty” is feeling the heartbreak of this and also of that…

Loyalty may not be the right word. It’s dual pain, dual heartbreak, care, love. It is to hold everyone’s humanity. And it’s hard. It’s so hard to have humanity here. It’s exhausting, and it feels like time after time the world is just asking you to let go. It’s so much easier to “choose a side” – it almost doesn’t matter which side, just choose, and stick to it, and at least reduce the amount of pain you hold. At least feel part of a group and less alone in all this.

[Trump] also issued a shocking insinuation that America was not the home of its Jewish citizens. The audience of pro-Trump Jews was so enamored of their host that they seemed not to notice, but when Trump introduced Vice President Mike Pence, he did so by way of Pence’s support for the Jewish State, or “your country” as he called it.

“I want to thank Vice President Mike Pence,” the President said, to great applause. “A tremendous supporter, a tremendous supporter of yours. And Karen. And they go there and they love your country. They love your country. And they love this country. That’s a good combination, right?”

The President’s remarks are deeply offensive. They take the classic anti-Semitic canard that Jews have dual loyalties to their home country and to Israel and go one step further, suggesting that Jews have only one loyalty — to Israel.

Not only that, but the President contrasted the singular loyalty of American Jews to Israel with the love shown by Vice President Pence, who is able to love both America and Israel.

Amazingly, his audience of right wing Jews applauded. Their applause for the President’s casual anti-Semitic remark is staggering, not least because some in the audience had called Linda Sarsour an anti-Semite for saying something similar just weeks ago.

Sarsour also deployed the dual loyalties canard when she noted that attacks against some in her camp were “not only coming from the right-wing but some folks who masquerade as progressives but always choose their allegiance to Israel over their commitment to democracy and free speech.”

...Trump’s remarks are not surprising. It’s clear by now that he has replaced American Jews with Israel. When asked by a reporter after the Pittsburgh massacre what he intends to do about rising anti-Semitism, he boasted about how much he’s done for Israel.

Not only is it deeply insulting to Jews, but it’s insulting to any American who believes, in line with our Constitution, that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.”

Trump’s view of American Jews betrays his narrow, ethno-nationalist view of the world. If you believe that at its core, a nation’s identity stems from that of its ethnic majority, you will view America as a white, Christian country, and you will view the Jewish State as the country of the Jews. In this, Trump joins Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and President-elect of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro, all of whom put a premium on ethno-nationalism and have embraced measures that privilege the ethnic majorities of their nations over their minorities.

...But when he went off script, his view of Jews as being of Israel rather than the U.S. was exposed, and with it, an ethno-nationalist view that is fundamentally at odds with America as the country that’s been most good to the Jews throughout our bloody history.

Let us have no tolerance for anti-Semitism on the left, and none from the President of the United States.

This is our home, Mr. President. Before your German and Scottish ancestors set foot in our immigrant country, the American Jewish community was already making America great. So we must insist, not only for our sake, but for the sake of all minorities in all countries across the world from Hungary to Brazil to the U.S. to Israel, that America is our home. And we intend to fight for it.

Nor is Israel as a beacon in a sea of barbarism a Jewish issue, which is precisely why the “dual loyalty” allegation against members of the tribe in other countries is a complete lie. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of those Arab citizens of Israel who side with their country’s mortal enemies.

Their allegiance isn’t to the state in which they live and in whose parliament their representatives serve, but rather to various radical Muslim groups. Even many members of Israel’s Knesset belong in this category.

Take Joint List Party leader Ayman Odeh, for instance. In a video message earlier this month that he delivered from the Old City of Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate, a riot hotspot, Odeh called on Arab-Israeli youth not to serve in the police or other security forces, which “are humiliating our people, humiliating our families and humiliating all those who come to pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque.”

He then urged those already enlisted in the “occupation forces” to “throw the weapons back in their face and to tell them that ‘our place is not with you. We will not be part of the injustice and crime.’”

His reference to the “occupation” is an expression of loyalty with the peace-rejectionist Palestinians who mourn the nakba, the “catastrophe” of Israel’s establishment in 1948. They make no bones about their intention to “liberate Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” a mantra about eliminating the Jewish state in its entirety.

“Dual loyalty,” then, isn’t exactly the problem of Odeh and his ilk; treason would be a better term for it.

Haman’s accusation against the Jews also plays a role in Esther’s decision. When Haman asks Achashverosh for permission to destroy the Jews, instead of mentioning them by name, he says, “There is a certain nation, scattered and dispersed among the other nations in all the provinces of your kingdom, whose laws are different from any other nation and who do not obey the king’s laws and it is not in Your Majesty’s interest to tolerate them” (Esther 3:8). Haman’s covert accusation was that Jews’ loyalties lay with their own people, rather than with the government.

Haman’s plot comes directly after Mordecai refused to prostrate himself before Haman, in violation of Persian law. This rivalry actually predated the bowing incident; when Haman and Mordecai were both generals in the king’s army, Haman sold himself as a slave to Mordecai after he foolishly wasted all of his soldiers’ supplies. Simply put, Haman’s accusation of dual loyalty was a cover for his own insecurities.

Dual loyalty, unfortunately, is an anti-Semitic conspiracy that still persists to this day. The Anti-Defamation League found that 44% of Americans agree with the statement that Jews stick together more than other Americans, 24% agreed that they are more likely to be loyal to Israel than to America and 12% agreed that Jews do not care what happens to anyone but their own kind. Worldwide surveys produced an even more frightening response, with an estimated 41% of respondents believing that Jews hold more loyalty to Israel than to their own respective countries.