Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Opponents of Trump’s deportation gambit are forgetting the reason for their protests; an irrelevant consideration has distracted them.
They should prioritize defeating his effort to carry out an inhumane, illegal policy. The reason to protest is to uphold rule of law: due process and freedom of expression. Much of the protest wrongly fixates, instead, on the character of persons he has victimized.
Foreign student activists – those opposing the U.S. government’s policies around Israel – who were rounded up by ICE have become poster children for a social crusade. Rallying around them are swarms of admirers, who champion the righteousness of sincere justice-seekers whom Trump targets for abuse and scapegoating. Their personalities and histories – as they’re presented as paragons of probity – echo in the rallying cry to “liberate Palestine”!
The personal is never political, though.
The political reality is that protest has become corrupted. Instead of hammering home the point that jailing dissidents is contrary to American civic values, much public commentary and media attention, overshadowing the true priority, has fed an obsession with parading this or that person’s exemplarily decent character, showing how wrong it is to criminalize a legal resident who committed no crime but is a role model for moral decency, a bridge-builder, a blameless soul of elevated consciousness.
Defending their honor has taken the place of defending the Constitution. That justification project is a waste of energy, a diversion from what matters: making sure the law is applied fairly across the board, the guilty as well as the innocent being afforded equal treatment and due process.
This, not glorification of Trump’s victims, is the rallying cry that should animate millions of Americans and take them out on the street to say no to tyranny and fascism. Meanwhile, protesters continue to bask in their heroes’ reflected glory and are unwitting pawns of the very syndrome that MAGA (the very antithesis of what these demonstrations claim to represent) epitomizes: cult of personality. This sort of thinking and behavior is antithetical and harmful to the professed aim of preserving democracy.
A telling case is that of the reception Mohsen Mahdawi received from Vermont Senator Peter Welch. Putting out a joint statement, with his partners in the state’s Congressional delegation, that hewed strictly to basic Madisonian principles enshrined in the nation’s Bill of Rights, Senator Welch then went on to visit Mohsen in detention.1
Mohsen’s status in the cause for peace2 gave the Senator grounds for taking the time out of his busy schedule to make this pilgrimage with its photo op. Would the Senator do the same for anybody unjustly detained?
Mohsen takes on the sainted persona of a political martyr. But his valorization and that of other activists parallel – are no different in kind from – Trump’s hijacking of public concerns to serve his own private interests. For Trump, personal loyalty to himself is all that matters. He fires government officials who indicate that their primary commitment is, instead, to the Constitution. If extolling person (rather than principle) is wrong in one case, how can it be right in the other?
Amidst the furor, America’s Jews find themselves trapped. Our traditions and values tell us to encourage proper execution of law: “Pray for the welfare of the kingdom [i.e., government] for, without fear of it, each man would swallow his neighbor alive” (Pirkei Avot 3:2). Once again, American Jews are in a no-win situation.
If they go along with these protests, they let the issue of actual concern to them – namely, ensuring that they live in a country where Jews like anyone else can be assured of equal rights and protection under the law – take a back seat to the public ritual of lionizing political dissidents.
On the other hand, remaining silent in the face of Federal authorities’ lawless conduct is as much as condoning it. Trump seeks to exploit Jews’ trepidation over rising anti-Israel activity morphing into anti-Jewish hate crimes. If we play along, we become complicit with his criminality.
He’s using arrests of individuals he labels as pro-Palestine troublemakers to whip up Jews’ fear of terrorists and their enablers; he hopes, thereby, to drive a wedge between Jews and other Americans who share our religiously, historically mandated commitment to civic decency.
Furthermore, if Jews go along with that policy of arbitrary detentions and deportations, they give pro-Palestine crusaders more ammunition for their campaign to demonize Zionists.
I won’t participate in an ill-conceived protest movement against Trump’s policy, but I won’t take his bait either. For now, I’m watching and closely following unfolding events. I hope you will too.
Note: Yom haShoah, the day when Israel and Jews world-wide commemorate the Holocaust, occurs this year from Wednesday to Thursday evening, April 23-24.
Thanks. Nice to read, my thoughts exactly.