there is no evidence that foreign aid to israel swung a single vote in the election, that the election was in any way about iran or that arabs or muslims held any substantive sway in michigan or anywhere else. these are all anti-semitic narratives. el-sayad benefited from the same decrease in republican turnout in michigan that existed elsewhere in the country and that nobody saw coming but he also dramatically underperformed relative to other candidates. if white republican turnout wasn't so low, he might have actually lost. he got extremely lucky.
however, trump is taking the bait on this because he's an idiot. it's all the jews' fault. of course. predictable; typical.
if the thinking was that the ads were directed at two or three neighbourhoods in the detroit metro area in an attempt to peel off a tiny swing vote in an in the margins election and would have no national implications, that was wrong. that's never how race baiting works in politics.
i don't oppose aid to israel. israel is a democracy and, despite narratives to the contrary, they are one of the most responsible recipients of us military money. the worst behaved recipients of us money are non-democratic countries like ukraine, egypt, saudi arabia, syria, the philippines, myanmar, bangladesh and a list of brutal countries in africa. what these countries do with us, canadian and european aid money to hold some plots of land from the chinese or russians is truly despicable. israel is, relatively speaking, an exemplary and paradigmatic example of the application of human rights. but i'm not exactly a proponent of it either. it's not a ballot issue for me.
what's more concerning is the potential for the issue to become a rallying cry on the far right. it's already an extremely serious problem in the centre-left, but the centre-left isn't the far right and doesn't think or act like the far right.
the last thing the world needs or wants is a wounded donald trump to be blaming all his problems on the jews, but that's where we're going with this. racist fake liberal advertising needs to take a lot of responsibility for setting that up and jews that facilitated it need to pull their heads out of their asses. this won't end well. what the fuck are you thinking?