Trump Human Rights Message Falls Flat, Damage-Control Project Addressing Admin Anti-Semitism Failing

White House spokesperson, Sean Spicer, hits Anne Frank Center
for not praising Donald Trump, (Salon),(CNN). Replied the Frank
Center executive director, Steven Goldstein, to Salon Magazine:
"The audacity of Sean Spicer to demand from the podium that
the Anne Frank Center salute this president for his pathetic attempts
to recognize anti-Semitism. ... What universe are these
people living in?"

Remarks this week made by Donald Trump after a tour of the National Museum of African American History and Culture were as genuine as a serial arsonist's stated concerns over violations of fire safety codes.

Said Trump reading his statement from a teleprompter, "This tour was a meaningful reminder of why we have to fight bigotry, intolerance and hatred in all of its very ugly forms. The anti-Semitic threats targeting our Jewish community and community centers are horrible and are painful, and a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil."

What an ass, this anti-Semitic piece of human filth.

Fortunately, major civil rights organizations refuse to normalize Trump, and recoil at the notion they should take at face value the words of an openly racist administration dotted with open anti-Semites.

The new message of civil rights from the Trump adminstration follows a recent spate of anti-Semitic bomb threats, and desecrations in the Midwest inflicted at a historically Jewish cemetery, met with a yawning response from the young presidency.

Vice-president Mike Pence paid a surprise visit this week to the desecrated cemetery in Missouri in an effort at further damage control as perceptions harden that the administration's alliances with white supremacists and anti-Semites will continue.

Coming from east-central Wisconsin, this writer assures readers the Trump administration's continuing stroking of, and obsequious posture toward anti-Semites is accomplished willfully and is carefully crafted; which is to say anti-Semitism still plays well in rural America, emphatically in Wisconsin.

Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect condemns
Donald Trump,  (Twitter)

Feb. 21, 2017 statement from the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect executive director, Steven Goldstein:

"The President's sudden acknowledgment is a Band-Aid on the cancer of anti-Semitism that has infected his own Administration. His statement today is a pathetic asterisk of condescension after weeks in which he and his staff have committed grotesque acts and omissions reflecting anti-Semitism, yet day after day have refused to apologize and correct the record. Make no mistake: The anti-Semitism coming out of this administration is the worst we have ever seen from any administration. The White House repeatedly refused to mention Jews in its Holocaust remembrance, and had the audacity to take offense when the world pointed out the ramifications of Holocaust denial. And it was only yesterday, President’s Day, that Jewish Community Centers across the nation received bomb threats, and the President said absolutely nothing. When President Trump responds to Anti-Semitism proactively and in real time, and without pleas and pressure, that’s when we’ll be able to say this president has turned a corner. This is not that moment."
---
Feb. 22, 2017 statement of Steven Goldstein, made in reply to the White House spokesperson's public condemnation of Goldstein for his failure to praise Donald Trump in Goldstein's Feb. 21 above statement, (Salon Magazine):

"The audacity of Sean Spicer to demand from the podium that the Anne Frank Center salute this president for his pathetic attempts to recognize anti-Semitism. The imagery is callous at best and constitutes dark prejudice at worst. What has become of our democracy, that a press secretary for the president — let alone the president himself — expects applause simply for saying that anti-Semitism exists? Next President Trump will announce that the United States has achieved the first landing of a person on the moon and also expect us to applaud. What universe are these people living in"

He also said the president has repeatedly called out anti-Semitism. When? When? This weekend passed, including this Sunday, during which over a hundred graves were desecrated, and on Monday bomb threats were made to eleven Jewish community centers, and he remained silent. Then he read a statement with all the passion of a B-grade actor auditioning for a high school play. You looked at him and it didn’t look like he could even connect to the words — and this is a president who rarely reads anything prepared — and the one chance he gets to speak about anti-Semitism, he needs notes!"

"When will our nation get fed up with this president trotting out the religion of his daughter and his son-in-law as a talking point shield against the anti-Semitic conduct of his administration? So what if his daughter is Jewish and his son-in-law is Jewish? That’s like saying some of our best daughters are Jewish. By this logic, his daughter is also a woman, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a misogynist."

Trump Cultivates Strongman Image to Handle Complicated Decision-making by Surprise

They Thought They Were Free,
by Milton Mayer
 “What happened here was the gradual
habituation of the people, little by
little, to being governed by surprise;
to receiving decisions deliberated in
secret; to believing that the situation
was so complicated that the
government had to act on information which
the people could not understand, or so
dangerous that, even if the people
could not understand it, it could not
be released because of national security.
And their sense of identification
with Hitler, their trust in him,
made it easier to widen this gap
and reassured those
who would otherwise have
worried about it.”
--from Chapter 13,
“But Then It Was Too Late”

Making America Scream Again, Genocide-capable and Eyeing Islam in Defense of Liberty

When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Sec. Hillary Clinton debated in Milwaukee last February, Sanders was explicit in rejecting the Henry Kissinger school of societal destruction, in opposition to Clinton's stated admiration for, and friendship with Kissinger (Mal Contends), (Washington Post).

Said Sanders, "Henry Kissinger was one the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this county. I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger. ... So count me in as somebody who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger."

Kissinger and Nixon worked to "make the [Chilean] economy scream," engineering the 1970s coup establishing a fascist Pinochet as dictator, who presided over the torture and murder of 10,000s (Democracy Now), among other work resulting in several near-genocides of the 1970s.

Near genocides, that is torturing and killing 100,000s of human beings and destroying societies, and "atrocities management," which is always necessary.

The point is the Bannon-Trump ambitions to sow chaos in the political culture is typical of American presidential administrations though the large-scale targets have been foreign countries, and with exceptions not the American public, the prime target of the Trump adminstration.

Trump himself has for years made explicit he is working for chaos and destruction in the political culture (Schwartzman, Johnson, Washington Post), methodically working.

It's not logically necessary that a political campaign/psych warfare operation imposing chaos will implement policy and pursue action imposing chaos, but the malignant psychopaths who inflict are not often healed by assuming public office.

Write Paul Schwartzman and Jenna Johnson in the Washington Post in Dec. 2015:

He referred to Mexicans as 'rapists,' questioned Sen. John McCain’s status as a war hero, ridiculed the physical appearance of his opponents, falsely claimed that “thousands” in New Jersey cheered as the World Trade Center fell and, this week, called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States.

Despite predictions that such searing, divisive rhetoric and the resulting outcry would cripple his campaign, Donald Trump’s insults and controversial proposals have propelled him to the forefront of the 2016 presidential race—and kept him there.

And while it may seem like a lurching, chaotic campaign, Trump is, for the most part, a disciplined and methodical candidate, according to a Washington Post review of the businessman’s speeches, interviews and thousands of tweets and retweets over the past six months.

When Donald Trump talks and acts these first two weeks of his administration, he's not explaining his position about a public issue.

Trump is sowing chaos, attacking the norms of our Constitutional republic such as freedom of religion, freedom of the press, due process and equality under the law.

If Trump actually were to read, the New York Times explains this morning the "escalating crisis," induced by Trump's Muslim ban and firing the acting attorney general, Sally Q. Yates, last night (Michael D. Shear, Mark Landler, Matt Apuzzo and Eric Lichtblau, New York Times).

Reports of escalating crises are music to Trump.

We first must realize the scope of the crisis Trump knows.

Most Republicans want an authoritarian state and love the idea of imprisoning, torturing and killing human beings, including Americans, after dislocating the Constitutional niceties and human rights concerns of the snowflake. So Trump will not be opposed in meaningful ways by Republicans.

The stakes are high and rising.

White supremacists, (which are the same as white nationalists), have found in a friend in Trump's administration, the Republican Party and the normally functioning institutions of modern American foreign policy. Just a little engineering and adept project management are necessary to achieve the desired outcomes of the lunatics.

From Josh Harkinson in Mother Jones:

The Trump administration has insisted since Sunday that the president's executive order banning travel to the United States from seven predominately Islamic countries 'is not a Muslim ban.' But as Mother Jones first reported in a series of investigations starting last summer, the two top Trump advisers who reportedly crafted the immigration crackdown—Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller—have a long history of promoting Islamophobia, courting anti-Muslim extremists, and boosting white nationalists.

For nearly a year before stepping down as the CEO of Breitbart News to lead the Trump campaign, Bannon hosted a SiriusXM radio show, Breitbart News Daily, where he conducted dozens of interviews with leading anti-Muslim extremists. Steeped in unfounded claims and conspiracy theories, the interviews paint a dark and paranoid picture of America's 3.3 million Muslims and the world's second-largest faith. Bannon often bookended the exchanges with full-throated praise for his guests, describing them as 'top experts' and urging his listeners to click on their websites and support them.

One of Bannon's guests on the show, Trump surrogate Roger Stone, warned of a future America 'where hordes of Islamic madmen are raping, killing, pillaging, defecating in public fountains, harassing private citizens, elderly people—that's what's coming.' ...

It is an open question whether Trump's pivoting to genocide would invoke majority support among the American population, but Bannon and Miller cannot wait to find out.

Bannon's Project Chaos and Terror

White House website is publicly funded campaign operation

Many of Donald Trump's presidential actions are inflicting injury to disfavored classes of human beings, as intended.

Most of Trump's actions are communications for now, extended Tweets, designed to throw the political culture, the world, and populations into states of confusion and dislocation, as much as communications can accomplish these aims.

The brains behind the operation is white supremacist Steven Bannon to whom Trump is playing Goebbels.

Bannon maintains far-reaching ambitions, massive in scope, that the Trump adminstration can alter the social-psychological paradigm populations use in relating to their elected, regulatory and police governments.

Destroying earned social insurance programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, for example, will create a vacuum that will be filled by the toughest and most persistent private health insurance outfits. And politically, Bannon and Trump believe they can assign blame to the establishment and 'save' social insurance.

Against Bannon-Trump is empowering people to determine their own future by thinking. Pres. Obama is working on this mission.

Bannon and Trump do not know what they are doing in running the executive branch like a psych war campaign in that predictable consequences are unknown.

By inflicting massive dislocations and implementing crises and chaos, Bannon and Trump are betting they can profit more than anyone else, and they alone can operate in such an environment.

That Bannon and Trump will injure 100s of millions and imperil the world economy and markets are not threats to the project, this crisis environment is a milestone.

Writes Nouriel Roubini, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, reflecting the world concerns of many:

Trump’s proposals also threaten to exacerbate the situation in the Middle East. He has said that he will make America energy independent, which entails abandoning US interests in the region and becoming more reliant on domestically produced greenhouse-gas-emitting fossil fuels. And he has maintained his position that Islam itself, rather than just radical militant Islam, is dangerous. This view, shared by Trump’s incoming National Security Adviser, General Michael Flynn, plays directly into Islamist militants’ own narrative of a clash of civilizations.

Meanwhile, an 'America first' approach under Trump will likely worsen the longstanding Sunni-Shia proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran. And if the US no longer guarantees its Sunni allies’ security, all regional powers – including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt – might decide that they can defend themselves only by acquiring nuclear weapons, and even more deadly conflict will ensue.  

Bannon and Trump are like two fascists who don't really care what happens to societies because they will not have to deal with the consequences with the same intimacy as mere populations.

Racism and Sadism from the USA

Romare Beardon work on American lynchings

Targeting immigrant populations for imprisonment, expulsion and defamation is indecent.

This is precisely why Donald Trump's racist chief political advisor drafted the Muslim ban last week—as a means of appealing to white racists and discouraging minority populations from living free from fear.

Nothing sells like fascism to white racists.

When Republicans cheered for Trump to "lock her up" last year, they meant it. Republicans would like to imprison political opponents and minorities who have been and remain a problem in need of a lasting solution by a brave leader.

That this latest act of cowardice is sadism is a fact lost on most Americans ignoring the nature of the Republican enterprise. Inflicting punishment is a tenet of fascism.

See the text of "Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States," now removed from the White House website that has been turned into a propaganda site for Trump.

By Juan Cole

Picking on immigrants and refugees is the act of a sadistic bully, since they are the one fairly large group of residents of the United States whose constitutional rights are disputed. The executive order Trump signed late on Friday suspending entrance to the United States for citizens of seven countries and cancelling the US refugee program for four months is probably illegal. The 1965 immigration law forbids discriminating against immigrants on the basis of nationality. ...

The political goal of the order was to whip up anti-Muslim hatred. No immigrant from any of the seven countries Trump named has been guilty of terrorism on US soil in this century. ...

The executive orders signed this past week by Trump appear in the main to have been drafted by alt-Neo-Nazi Steve Bannon, the Rasputin of this administration. ...

In another in a series of coups, Trump on Saturday kicked the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff off of the principals committee of the National Security Council. They will attend only when their expertise is required. He then appointed Bannon to that key body, which advises the president on national security issues. Knowledgeable intelligence and military leaders will therefore often not be in a position to contradict Bannon on the NSC, giving him enormous unchecked and unelected power (NSC staffers also don’t have to be confirmed by the Senate). NSC staffers have been known to ask the CIA to do illegal things like go after Americans on American soil, and I think we may expect a lot of that sort of thing in this administration. Bannon is the CEO of the far right extremist purveyor of fake news, Breitbart, today’s equivalent of the Völkischer Beobachter, the newspaper of the national socialist workers party in 1930s Germany.

The way Bannon crafted the executive order on immigrants that the pliant Trump eagerly signed was guaranteed to be a disaster. It would have been easy enough to say that the provisions would come into effect one month hence. Instead, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was instructed to apply its provisions immediately. This step caused some over 100 passengers to be arrested on arrival and put in holding cells at the airport on Saturday, even though they had a valid visa or green card (permanent residency). Thousands of persons with valid visas or green cards (permanent residency, the last step before citizenship) who happened to be abroad on Friday were effectively locked out of the country. These included nearly 200 Google employees caught abroad on Saturday, whom the company was trying to get back into the country.

One of the first to be arrested, at JFK, was Hameed Khalid Darweesh, an Iraqi who had served as an interpreter for the US army in Iraq. Despite Darweesh’s own patience with it all, that he was one of the first to be arrested gave the Trump-Bannon piece of fascism a further black eye. Darweesh’s vital work put his own life in profound danger and he helped avoid casualties among our troops. For him to be humiliated and handcuffed and reduced to tears spoke volumes about the true nature of the executive order.

Breitbart News Says It Will Sue Media Org for Reporting White Supremacist Bent

The white supremacist website, Breitbart News, is upset major media have reported the white supremacist editorial commitment of Breitbart, the flagship journal and central platform of the racist Alt Right.

Reports Joe Concha of The Hill:

Breitbart News is preparing a lawsuit against a 'major media company' over claims that it is a white nationalist website, it said in an exclusive statement to The Hill.

The [Breitbart] website has been under intense scrutiny since President-elect Donald Trump named Stephen Bannon as a senior White House counselor and strategist. Bannon is the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, and the site has become associated with the 'alt-right' movement that helped propel Trump’s candidacy."

The Trump transition team chimed in on the controversy, taking the side of the white supremacist Breitbart News and its racist former exec chair, Bannon. Reports The Hill's Concha:

A spokesman for the Trump transition defended Bannon on Monday, calling the media coverage of his appointment 'irresponsible

Breitbart News execs and Trump apparently know as much about libel law and journalistic responsibility as they do about human biology and anthropology.

Military Civil Rights Advocate Hits Appt of White Supremacist to White House

Can always county on Mikey Weinstein to clobber the bigots.

From the Military Religious Freedom Foundation:

Friends and Allies,

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation's battle for civil liberties just became even more critical and the situation of our non-white and non-Christian troops far more dire. The President Elect is assembling his cabinet and senior White House advisors, and reports are coming in that the Chief Executive of Trump's campaign, Steve Bannon, has been tapped as Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor.

For those unfamiliar with Bannon, he's the deplorable white nationalist behind Breitbart News – a staunch bastion of the worst the alt-right has to offer and a savage opponent of every one of the civil rights we, as Americans, hold so dear.

Breitbart "News" is no more and no less than a front for the anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, white supremacist, alt-right Dominionist movement. Breitbart has attacked myself, MRFF, and the service members we represent repeatedly, sneering at those who reach out to us and insisting on the right of fundamentalist Christian leaders in the military to proselytize to troops under their command.

Bannon himself is the darling of white nationalists, alt-right leaders, and racists across the country. Richard Spencer, who coined the term "alt-right" and who is rabidly anti-Semitic, is thrilled. So is Andrew Anglin, Neo-Nazi and owner of the self-proclaimed "#1 alt-right website" Daily Stormer, although he would have liked to have seen Bannon installed as Chief of Staff.

Ken Reed, the national director of the Neo-Nazi group Aryan Renaissance Society, gleefully posted the news accompanied by hashtags reading #WhiteLivesMatter and #AltRight, while Stormfront, the oldest Neo-Nazi message board on the web, was full of messages like this one:

"Stephen Bannon: racist, anti-homo, anti-immigrant, anti-jewish, anti-establishment... Sounds perfect. Muhahahaha. The man who will have Trump's ear more than anyone else. Being anti-jewish is not illegal. Nothing you dirty stinking jews can do to keep him out."

We can expect Bannon to work in tandem with VP Elect Pence, another Dominionist, to push the white nationalist, Christian supremacy agenda on every front. These hateful, divisive "patriots" feed on fear and fury, and deliberately seek to turn one American against another, even among their own ranks. They glory in setting Christian against Muslim, white against black, and gay against straight – using their twisted definition of religious freedom as an excuse to cram their hate down the throats of those who disagree.

I ask you all to come together, to stand strong against this horrific battalion of shame being assembled in Washington, and to continue to support MRFF and our fight for equality and freedom from religious oppression. We will not back down, we will not EVER give up.


Mikey Weinstein

Neo-Nazis Praise Trump and White House Appts

From The Independent:

Andrew Anglin, proprietor of the Daily Stormer, one of the leading far-right websites and popular with neo-Nazis, declared of Mr Trump: "Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor. Make no mistake about it: we did this."

Trump Boosts Alt-Right with Top-Level WH Picks

Trump fortifies Alt Right alliance in White House

"Time to see how good Mossad really is," writes a veteran Wisconsin politico after the announcement two leading white supremacists have been appointed to two powerful White House posts

Updated - A good start for white supremacists as president-elect Donald Trump announced the appointment of white supremacists to top-level posts, "signaling an embrace of the fringe ideology long advanced by Mr. [Stephen K.] Bannon," an open white supremacist, (NYT).

White House appointees, RNC chair Reince Priebus and Bannon, differ only on style and the Alt-Right and the Republican Party have both long made clear their hostility to America as a pluralistic country with expansive Constitutional liberty guarantees.

Talk of national unification with white supremacists persists in some American political circles

The announcement of the Bannon and Priebus follows by two days the Trump transition team's notice that the Trump White House will enact a "new deal" for African-Americans with a "plan for urban renewal," (CBS News).

News releases and advisories can be found at the Making America Great Again.gov site.

The "Time to see how good Mossad really is" quote on Facebook making the rounds represents musing and genuine concern that the United States may be entering a period that spells the end of the American democratic experiment.