Defending himself against the latest accusations of making improper sexual advances, Donald Trump this week struck out at Hillary Clinton in a way that had possibly anti-Semitic overtones, observers suggested.
At a rally Thursday in West Palm Beach, the Republican Party’s candidate for president said supporters of Hillary Clinton, his Democratic challenger, are part of an international cabal to defeat him.
“Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plan the destruction of global sovereignty in order to enrich these global interest powers, her special interest friends and her donors,” Trump said. He also spoke of a “global power structure” and “global financial powers” that have “robbed the working class.”
While his remarks did not name Jewish bankers as part of the pro-Clinton conspiracy, they were reminiscent of charges of Jewish control of banks that were a staple of anti-Semites in earlier decades, said Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.
“Whether intentionally or not, Donald Trump is evoking classis anti-Semitic themes that have historically been used against Jews and still reverberate today,” Greenblatt said in a statement. “Mr. Trump has focused on the very issues and themes that obsess conspiratorial anti-Semites.
“They believe that there is an elite group of Jews who control the media, the government, and banking, and who are trying to destroy white America,” Greenblatt said. “They also believe that most of Hillary Clinton’s donors are Jewish.”
Simon Schama, a Columbia University historian who served as narrator of a 2014 PBS documentary series, “The Story of the Jews,” wrote in a tweet that “just in time for Sukkot here we go with the secret international banking conspiracy straight from the anti-Semitic canon. Sieg Trump”
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