WASHINGTON — On December 18, 2019, Donald Trump became the third president in American history to be impeached when the House of Representatives charged him with committing high crimes and misdemeanors.
The impetus for the impeachment was twofold: the revelation that Trump had pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate one of Trump’s possible political opponents, former US vice president Joe Biden; and Trump’s refusal to cooperate with a Congressional inquiry — and his order to his subordinates not to cooperate as well.
Following a lengthy series of hearings with dozens of witnesses, on Wednesday the House passed two articles of impeachment, one on abuse of power (passed 230 to 197), and the other on obstruction of Congress (passed 229 to 198).
But to far-right anti-Semitic extremists, there’s been something else entirely driving the president’s woes: a cabal of powerful Jews determined to oust him from office.
Last month, the founder of TruNews, a fundamentalist Christian platform that regularly publishes anti-Semitic and racist videos, raged against a “Jew coup” to impeach Trump.
Many of the officials involved in the impeachment inquiry — such as California Congressman Adam Schiff, New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, and witness to the probe Trump’s US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, among others — are Jewish.
“That’s the way the Jews work, they are deceivers, they plot, they lie, they do whatever they have to do to accomplish their political agenda,” said Pastor Rick Wiles.
In the past few weeks, that conspiracy theory has only been growing on the internet’s anti-Semitic fringe. The Unz Review, an anti-Semitic platform, ran a story titled “Trump Woos Jews, Jews Impeach Trump,” which argued that “the impeachment farce is basically a Jewish affair.”
The piece, written by the anti-Semitic Swedish writer Israel Shamir, criticized Trump for pandering to the Jews through his Israel policy, only to be betrayed by them. “Trump thought that his generosity would melt Jewish hearts, and they would let him govern in peace,” Shamir writes. “But no, the Jews accept every gift as their due.”
According to experts who track anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, over the last several months this type of rhetoric has become more commonplace among far-right corners of the internet.
“We’ve seen many anti-Semites latching onto this conspiracy narrative that Jews are playing a conspiratorial role in trying to oust the duly elected president of the United States for the Jews’ own nefarious reasons,” said Aryeh Tuchman, who directs the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Extremism.
“These are all hardcore anti-Semites who thankfully exist on the fringes of society, but the fear is that these anti-Jewish conspiracy theories will gain more traction with the broader public,” Tuchman told The Times of Israel. “This is particularly true with Rick Wiles. He has quite a large audience for his shows.”
Read the Entire Article at The Times of Israel