On Monday night, Melania Trump sparked an uproar at the Republican National Convention when it was revealed that an entire section of her speech had been plagiarized from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention address.
Side by side: Michelle Obama ’08 and Melania Trump ’16.
(h/t @jarretthill who caught this). pic.twitter.com/luDv8YOLkP
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) July 19, 2016
Melania Trump plagiarized Michelle Obama tonight, and here’s the video to prove it: pic.twitter.com/gCDeJL04zY
— Yair Rosenberg (@yair_rosenberg) July 19, 2016
In the aftermath, some blamed the speechwriters. Others blamed Melania herself. And then there was former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, an avid Trump backer, who blamed the Jews.
Writing on his personal web site, Duke laid out the devious Judaic conspiracy in careful detail:
Israel’s Mossad has a motto: it is “By deception Thou Shalt Wage War.”
We know the Jewish establishment of both the NeoCon right and Democratic Left despise Donald Trump. Jewish pollster Finkelstein says that Donald Trump is the most unpopular candidate for President among Jews since David Duke’s race of 1992!
Nobody could have been so stupid as to make about five or six common quotes out of Michele Obama’s Demo convention speech just a few years before and put it Melania Trump’s speech and not think it would get exposed!
This is a con job, sabotage, political character assassination plan from the get go!
Also, it seems as though the operative set up Melania, by leaking it to other Jewish media insiders who repeatedly asked her about the speech before she gave it prodding her to suggest that she came up with most of it but was helped a little by the speechwriter.
I would bet a gefilte fish that this was sabotage. I would also bet a bagel it was orchestrated by an Israel Firster who wanted to damage the American Firster.
Duke’s fulmination is clarifying on a variety of points. First, it makes clear that the white supremacist has never actually eaten gefilte fish, because he thinks it’s something someone would want to win in a bet.
Second, Duke’s outburst underscores again the fact that while many so-called anti-racists on the left dismiss Jews as white and privileged, the racists never did get the memo. To Duke and his ilk, Jews are foreign contaminants in the white gene pool as much as blacks or Mexicans. This means that when anti-racists insist that Jews are white and aren’t as in need of protection as other minorities, they are really just compounding the abuse heaped upon those Jews.
Finally, Duke’s rant is a reminder of why anti-Semites ultimately lose: they can never take responsibility for their own mistakes. By offloading failure onto the Jews, they avoid any reckoning with the real reasons for their missteps, and stymie any hope of improvement in the future. In this refusal to hold themselves to account and preference for blaming scapegoats, anti-Semites resemble Donald Trump, which is no doubt one of the many reasons so many have been drawn to his campaign.
Memo to David Duke: This wasn’t us. Your beloved Trump and his team are just really, really bad at their jobs.
Previous: Donald Trump Bizarrely Likens David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan to ‘Federation of Jewish Philanthropies’
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Related: Trump’s Jews
Yair Rosenberg is a senior writer at Tablet. Subscribe to his newsletter, listen to his music, and follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
