Those who have been telling us that Islam, not just revolutionary Islamism, is a lethal threat to Western civilisation should now feel satisfied: the president of the United States, and his main advisers, agree with them.

In the tweeted words of Donald Trump’s national security adviser, General Mike Flynn, “fear of Muslims is rational”.

Stephen Bannon, the former executive chairman of the alt-right Breitbart News, who is Trump’s chief political strategist and a member of the National Security Council, has stated that the “Judeo-Christian” West is engaged in a global war with Islam.

Trump has promised to put “America first”, borrowing the slogan of American isolationists in the 1930s, whose most famous spokesman, aviator Charles Lindbergh, was a notorious anti-Semite who blamed Jews and liberals for pulling the US into a war with Hitler, a man whom he admired.

Lindbergh believed that “we can have peace and security only so long… as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races”.

So “America first” has racism in its DNA. Are the views concerning Islam that are now entrenched in the White House in any way similar to the anti-Semitism of the 1930s? Have Bannon, Flynn and Trump simply updated old prejudices and replaced one set of Semites with another?

Perhaps they were not even replaced.

Trump’s failure to mention Jews or anti-Semitism in his statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day seemed distinctly odd.

And his campaign’s warning against prominent Jews, such as George Soros, who were claimed to be part of a global conspiracy to undermine America, did not go unnoticed.

Still, there are some obvious differences between the 1930s and our time.

read more HERE:   http://jordantimes.com/opinion/ian-buruma/new-anti-semitism

The writer, professor of democracy, human rights, and journalism at Bard College, is the author of “Year Zero: A History of 1945”. ©Project Syndicate, 2017. www.project-syndicate.org