Two years ago, I would have sympathized with liberals’ chagrin over U.S. President Donald Trump’s re-election. In fact, I was for a time a “never Trumper.” But then came October 7, and my litmus test for political leadership became the answer to two questions: what will you do to help Israel survive the genocidal onslaught of terror entities on multiple fronts; and what will you do to quell the unprecedented surge of antisemitism in our society?
Kamala Harris failed. Donald Trump passed, in numerous ways.
Trump’s inauguration was notable for the absence of Imam Husham al-Husainy, a Trump supporter who was scheduled to be the first Muslim leader to deliver an inaugural benediction alongside other religious clerics. His appearance was cancelled when, among other examples of his anti-Israel and antisemitic views, a 2007 video of a Fox News interview surfaced, during which al-Husainy repeatedly and angrily refused to describe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, even though it is classified as such in the United States.
The imam’s cancellation might seem trivial in the big scheme of things. But a presidential inauguration is a momentous occasion. Al-Husainy’s community no doubt felt humiliated by the snub. The decision may have negative repercussions for the GOP in the midterm elections, and pile further fuel on already anti-American Islamist fires abroad. So perhaps it’s not so trivial after all.
These factors were surely weighed before the decision was taken. It suggests that Trump was serious in his muscular promise to make combating antisemitism a priority without counting the political cost of doing so. The Trump team was signalling a hard stop to accommodating Islamist attitudes, with an implied caveat that what many other western leaders fear most when making such decisions — accusations of Islamophobia — won’t wash during Trump’s tenure.
More importantly, since 9/11, U.S. presidents have shown more concern for alleged Islamophobia than for escalating levels of Islamist anti-Zionism resting on a base of coiled antisemitism — a hatred festering in plain sight, supported by the progressive left and their institutional elites.
Following Hamas’s day of infamy in southern Israel, the pusillanimity of those elites crystallized in the December 2023 testimonies of three Ivy League university presidents in a House of Representatives hearing on campus antisemitism. All three, obviously coached by legal counsel, declared that whether or not campus radicals calling for the genocide of Jews transgressed their codes of conduct depended on “context.”
These culturally elite women represented the diversity, equity and inclusion hierarchy of values in all its relativistic squalor — squalor that was sure to continue under Harris, just as it came to fruition and toxic bloom under presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
In the “most viewed testimony in the history of Congress,” Rep. Elise Stefanik came to international attention through the incredulity, dismay and contempt she expressed at the university presidents’ legal pussyfooting. She was rewarded for her moral clarity by Trump with her elevation to U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, where any clarity on Israel and antisemitism is nearly impossible to find. In her confirmation hearing before the Senate foreign relations committee, Stefanik repeatedly denounced the UN as a “den of antisemitism,” adding that Israel would be “a huge priority for me” if confirmed.
Thanks in good part to Stefanik’s outing of the perverse values that are permitting vicious campus antisemitism to run riot, Trump signed an executive order that will allow the deportation of Hamas-supporting foreigners who are in the U.S. on student visas. Ten or 20 such deportations will act as a fire blanket on the kitchen grease-fire that’s threatening to spread all over the house.
And Stefanik is no outlier. Trump’s whole bloc of advisors and cabinet secretaries on this file are the most pro-Israel in history. Marco Rubio as secretary of state, Pete Hegseth as (probable) defence secretary, Mike Waltz as national security advisor, Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and others are all Israel super-boosters.
On the international front, Trump re-designated the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization, which Biden had revoked. But most “bigly,” Trump took on Iran by issuing Executive Order 13902. It begins: “I, Donald J. Trump, president of the United States of America, find that Iran continues to be the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and that Iran has threatened United States military assets and civilians through the use of military force and support to Iranian-backed militia groups. It remains the policy of the United States to deny Iran all paths to a nuclear weapon and intercontinental ballistic missiles, and to counter the totality of Iran’s malign influence in the region.”
This order rings the death knell on one of the stupidest theories in history, conceived by alleged brainiac Barack Obama and adhered to by his acolytes Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In capsule form, Obama’s “realignment” theory of the Middle East rested on the premise that making nice with Iran and fostering frosty relations with Israel would produce regional stability. His wilful misreading of Iran’s ambition to annihilate Israel through proxies and an eventual nuclear weapon created the terrible mess Israel is tasked with correcting. If for nothing else, we should be grateful that Trump’s victory brought an end to Obama’s risibly out-to-lunch scheme.
The bottom line is that Trump and his team consider Israel to be an asset to the U.S. and to western civilization, and believe that a win for Israel against the scourge of Islamist triumphalism would also be a win for America. Trump is right, and Obama and his ideological progeny are wrong. That’s all she wrote.
National Post
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