Trump's Executive Order on Jewishness

I. Trump's Executive Order on Jewishness
American Jews are not and have never been a nation unto themselves. They are an ethnic group within this republic. Classifying political speech about Jews according to national origin is confusing, unclear, and really scary. Trump has very little understanding that being against a policy of the Israeli government is not de facto anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, President Trump has chosen to issue an executive order to define Jewishness.

It is easy to envision a situation in which legitimate criticism of Israel including criticism by Jews, is determined to be anti-Semitic, and could risk the funding of the very institutions needed to  foster productive discourse. Colleges that do not have these conversations are likely destined to have one-sided pro-Israel conversations. The Israeli government may want American Jews to become Israeli ones, but making Jews a separate nationality doesn't help the cause. Grouping Jews as no other religious group has been treated in this country, making Jews  clearly "dual citizens" raises the trope of dual loyalty.

The executive order takes indirect aim at the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement that has generated intense controversy on college campuses. Title VI bans  discrimination on race, color, or national origin in programs and activities for which colleges and universities receive federal funding. Trump's executive order will extend the ban on funding to discrimination based on anti-Semitism. The left-leaning Jewish group, J-Street, said in a statement that the order "appears designed less to combat anti-Semitism than to have a chilling effect on free speech, and to crack down on campus critics of Israel. We feel it is misguided and harmful for the White House to unilaterally declare a broad range of nonviolent campus criticism of Israel to be anti-Semitic, especially at a time when the prime driver of anti-Semitism in this country is the xenophobic,white nationalist far-right."

Even James Loeffler, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia, who generally supports the Trump action, says: "Everyone recognizes that Jews are a complicated amalgam of ethnicity and religion, and treating them a a kind of quasi-racial group can have negative consequences." He shares the concerns of those who believe that executive order could be used to infringe on the First Amendment rights of those who would voice controversial political speech about Israel  and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "Clearly, given the administration's political position on this issue, it's not unrealistic to see this as coming out of that context,"concludes Loeffler.

II. Trump at National Jewish Council
President Trump told the American Israeli Council: "A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You're brutal killers, not nice people at all, but you have to vote for me --you have no choice. You're not going to vote for Pocahontas. I can tell you that. You're not going to vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let's take 100% of your wealth!"

III. Blood and Soil in India
"This past November,India's Prime Minister Modi announced that he was suspending Article 370 of the constitution,which grants autonomy to Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state. The change for Kashmir upended more than half a century of careful politics, but the Indian press  reacted with nearly uniform approval." [1]

After the announcement, apart from the military presence, the streets of Kashmir were lifeless. At Khanach-e-Moula, the magnificent  eighteenth-century mosque, Friday prayer were banned. Schools were closed. Cell-phone and Internet services were cut off.

"Muslim-Hindu harmony was central to the vision of India's founders, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawahabal Nehru,who laid the foundation for a secular state. India is home to all of the world's major religions; Muslims constitute about fourteen percent of India's population. The division of the subcontinent, known as Partition, inspired the largest migration in history with tens of millions of Hindus and Muslims crossing the new borders. Even though India's Muslims were typically poorer than their fellow citizens, many Hindus felt that they had been unjustly treated by the central  government."

"In Gujarat, Modi had focused on big-ticket projects, wooing car manufactures and bringing electricity to villages; as Prime Minister,he introduced a sweeping reform of bankruptcy laws, and embarked on a multimillion-dollar campaign of road construction."

"The lack of journalistic scrutiny has given Modi insurance freedom to control the narrative. Many of the pro-Modi posts have turned out to be crude fabrications. Pratik Linde, of "Alt News," has pointed out that the photos claiming to depict dead Pakistani militants actually showed victims of a heat wave." 

"The most notable of Modi's actions, along with revoking the special status of Kashmir residents, has been a measure to strip citizenship from as many as two million residents of the state of Assam, many of whom had crossed the border from the Muslim nation of Bangladesh decades before."

"In September, the government began constructing detention centers for residents who had become illegal overnight. Most of them were members of Bajrang Del, a branch of the R.S.S. Ostensibly a youth group, Bajrang Del has been implicated in a rash of murders of Muslims throughout the country. According to Fact Checker, an organization that tracks communal violence by surveying media reports,there has been almost three hundred hate crimes motivated by religion in the last decade -- almost all of them since Modi became Prime Minister. In many areas, any Muslim man seen with a Hindu woman risks being attacked."

"Many Kashmir residents still refuse to accept Indian sovereignty, and some recall the promises made by the United Nations in 1948, that a plebiscite would determine the future of the state. Indian authoritarian law allows security forces to detain any Kashmiri for any reason for up to two years."

Footnote:
[1] Dexter Filkins, "Blood and Soil in India," The New Yorker, December 9, 2019.