Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XLV: Electing Trump (and Making Russia Pay For It)

I already did an entry in this series where people blamed the Jews for Trump's election (it ... did not take long). But this one is a little different. It's not a claim that Jews voted for Trump (spoiler alert: we didn't). It's a much more nested little argument from John Schindler, a former NSA intelligence analyst who thinks that all this talk about Russian interference in the election might just be a smokescreen distracting from the real culprits.

“What if the real secret of the Trump campaign isn’t that it’s a Kremlin operation, rather an Israeli operation masquerading as a Russian one?”

— John Schindler (@20committee) June 5, 2018

Oh, those sly dogs.

The hook here is an interview George Papadopoulos's new wife did with the Daily Caller, where she claimed that he only plead guilty to charges brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller "to avoid facing charges that he was an agent of the Israeli government."

Mueller hasn't corroborated the account. But Schindler sure took it up and started running ... hard:

[T]here are strange Israeli footprints all over the Trump-Russia story. Quite a few of the shady figures close to the president and his business affairs are American Jews of Soviet heritage who possess connections to Israel. Felix Sater and Michael Cohen are only the best-known of this dubious crew. Those men are also connected to Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish community center on Long Island that is part of the worldwide Chabad movement—which just happens to possess close links to Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin.

For the record, Cohen was born in Long Island to a Holocaust-survivor father -- I wonder if that's what "Soviet heritage" (is "Soviet" an ethnicity now?) means in this context? While he clearly has significant family ties to the Ukraine, I've actually been able to find little in his family history that suggests particularly "Soviet" leanings.

To be honest, it wouldn't surprise me if Israeli intelligence had contacts with the Trump campaign during the election run-up -- he was such an inviting target that it's hard to imagine them passing up the chance. And to the extent the evidence leads in that direction, we should follow it fearlessly.

But the claim that the entire thing was an Israeli plot of whom they made Russia their patsies? That's on quite a different level.