TEL AVIV – President Donald Trump’s executive order last week targeting anti-Semitism is a “game-changer,” the U.S. special envoy for combating anti-Semitism Elan Carr told a crowd in Tel Aviv Tuesday night.
“We’re saying enough is enough,” Carr said at the event organized by Israel’s largest speakers’ forum, the Tel Aviv International Salon.
The executive order, which Trump signed last Wednesday, prohibits discrimination in “federally assisted programs” including college campuses. It also adopts the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism.
Carr noted that the move was just one of many that Trump has made “on behalf of the Jewish people,” and he went on to list the administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the subsequent move of the embassy there; defunding the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA; cutting funds for the Palestinian Authority’s so-called pay-for-slay program; recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; and most recently, the declaration that it does not view West Bank settlements as a contravention of international law.
With regards to the latter Trump was simply “correcting a historic injustice,” Carr said.
Carr called anti-Semitism an “ancient recurring human sickness” that principally stemmed from three diverse groups: militant Islam, far-right ethnic supremacists, and radical left-wing Israel-haters.
These groups, which on the surface are “fundamentally incompatible, are united in their hatred of Jews,” Carr said.
The first group, militant Islam, is the most widespread in the Middle East and Europe and is behind the overwhelming majority of anti-Semitic incidents.
The anti-Semitic attacks in Poway, Pittsburgh and Jersey City were the result of the second group, far-right “violent” anti-Semites who spend their time in “venomous, vile chatrooms.”
Carr, an officer in the United States Army Reserve who has spent 20 years in the military, compared his visit to Jersey City in the aftermath of the attack on the Jewish grocers to that of his deployment in Iraq. “I spent a year in Iraq and I’ve not seen anything like this,” he said. “It was like a warzone — the amount of bullet holes.”
The third kind, anti-Semitism from the far left, can occur even among Jewish groups themselves. Carr pointed to Jewish Voice for Peace, a radical anti-Israel group that supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. “JVP openly traffics in anti-Semitism,” Carr said.
While anti-Israel hatred from the left has been labelled the “new anti-Semitism,” according to Carr it is nothing more than “medieval hatred, repackaged and rebranded.”
Carr also referred to anti-Semitism in politics, in particular on the campaign circuit ahead of the 2020 elections.
“What happens is that there’s local anti-Semitism and people use it when they run [for office],” Carr told Breitbart News. “The key is vociferous condemnation.”
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