An American rabbi says thank you to President Trump
President Trump, I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your protection of a vulnerable people that has been massacred throughout the ages.
By SHMULEY BOTEACHPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands with US President Donald Trump after signing the Abraham Accords, at the White House earlier this year.(photo credit: TOM BRENNER/REUTERS)
By now everyone is piling up on US President Donald Trump. They’re calling him a loser. They’re reveling in his defeat. They’re saying America has been saved from the ogre.But I, for one, will not join in this in this pileup. While I accept the results of the election, in bowing to the majesty of the American democratic tradition, I also submit to Jewish values that tell me to show gratitude to a true friend of our people.Trump was always a controversial figure. He could at times be deeply divisive, and he reveled in being a counterpuncher. But I will remember him as a staunch friend of the world’s most persecuted nation.To be a Jew is to almost expect bigotry, double standards and prejudice. To be a Jew is to accept the unbelievable fact that in the lifetime of my parents six million Jews were murdered by firing squads and poison gas. To be a Jew is to live with the almost daily vilification of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.Onto the stage of tragic history rose President Trump with an unfailing defense of our people at every turn, for he proved to be the greatest friend of Israel ever to occupy the Oval Office.Trump fundamentally changed the tenor toward Israel at the disgustingly unfair United Nations, where demonization of Israel was a 70-year tradition. He hired the most pro-Israel people ever to serve in an American administration. From Nikki Haley to David Friedman to Jason Greenblatt to Jared Kushner to Avi Berkowitz to Mike Pompeo and, of course, Mike Pence, Trump’s subordinates had Israel’s back at every turn.They shut down the corrupt Palestinian Authority quasi-embassy in Washington because of its Mahmoud Abbas’s constant incitement against Israel. They held Hamas accountable for its genocidal ambitions and actions against Jews and defunded UNWRA. They recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s eternal capital, and they recognized the Golan Heights as being forever sovereign Israeli territory.Israel has had many friends in the White House, from John F. Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan and, of course, George W. Bush. But Trump easily outdid them all.But he was also the protector of Muslim life, as he demonstrated in Syria, when he fired American missiles at the butcher Bashar Assad, who gassed Arab children and was given a pass by Barack Obama. Trump did this even as he was vilified by his opponents as a hater of Muslims.If he was hated by the Arabs and Muslims, as his American opponents would have you believe, how is it that only Trump was able to forge peace between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan? Obama could not pull it off. To the contrary, the Arab nations despised Obama’s policies of appeasement of genocidal Iran and, due to Obama’s policies, began to see Israel as a kindred spirit rather than as an enemy.Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for possibly beginning the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but was given scant praise by his critics for this incredible achievement.Most notably, he took America out of the execrable Iran deal, which legitimized a regime that hangs gays from cranes and stones women to death. He stopped the immoral payments to a regime that is the foremost purveyor of terrorism around the world.It is fashionable to attack Trump now that he has lost the election, even as he lost by the thinnest of margins and garnered more than 70 million votes. But I will not be one who joins the demonization of a true friend of my people.Rather, I will thank him and ask his successor, Joe Biden, who has a long history of friendship with the Jewish people and Israel, to embrace his predecessor’s 180-degree shift toward Israel and continue to champion the Middle East’s only democracy.Gratitude is a dying virtue in our world, which puts partisan loyalty before basic decency and values. To be sure, Trump, like the rest of us, is a flawed man, and he, like all presidents who preceded him, made many mistakes. For such is the price we all pay for human leadership.But on the subject of Israel and the Middle East, as well as other notable accomplishments, especially the growing of the American economy, he was exceptional and deserves to be recognized as such.President Trump, I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your protection of a vulnerable people that has been massacred throughout the ages.May God bless you and keep you, and may the country that you have served for the last four years be fair and thankful in their assessment of your legacy. And may President-elect Biden follow in your trailblazing footsteps of friendship to Israel and the Jewish people.The writer, “America’s rabbi,” is the international best-selling author of more than 30 books and is the founder of The World Values Network. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @RabbiShmuley.
