The Anti-Semitic Media Fights Anti-Semitism Jew-haters exploit a massacre of Jews. Daniel Greenfield
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271794/anti-semitic-media-fights-anti-semitism-daniel-greenfield
The fake news media has made it official.
Criticizing George Soros, an anti-Semite and alleged Nazi collaborator, is anti-Semitic. The Washington Post alone ran two dishonest screeds, “Conspiracy Theories about Soros Aren’t Just False, They’re Anti-Semitic” and “A Conspiracy Theory about George Soros and a Migrant Caravan Inspired Horror.”
The former comes from Talia Lavin, a former New Yorker fact checker who had to resign after falsely claiming that a wheelchair bound ICE agent’s Afghanistan platoon tattoo was Nazi insignia. Seeing her potential for smearing people, Media Matters hired her as a “researcher” on “far-right extremism”.
What wasn’t good enough for the New Yorker was good enough for the Washington Post, which brought in a disgraced employee of Media Matters, an organization funded by George Soros, to accuse Soros critics of anti-Semitism. The Post did not see fit to inform readers of the fact that its pro-Soros screed was funded by a Soros group, only describing Lavin as “a writer and researcher based in Brooklyn”.
Also the Washington Post is a series of conflict of interest smears and lies based in Washington D.C.
To criticize Soros, according to Lavin and numerous carbon copy pieces being circulated by special interests across the media echo chamber, is to be linked to The Dearborn Independent, Father Coughlin, and the entire history of anti-Semitism in America. All of which, to Lavin, are associated with the right.
Except that Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism was spawned by his anti-war activism. And Coughlin was a socialist opponent of free markets, who started out as a passionate supporter of FDR, before turning on him for being too friendly to capitalism. Then he started the National Union for Social Justice whose credo was that, “that social justice should replace the practices of modern capitalism.”
Despite his anti-Semitism, Coughlin had far more in common with Bernie Sanders, than Trump.
Lavin has whitewashed the anti-Semitism of Alice Walker, who believes that the earth is run by reptilian space aliens (some of whom may be Jewish), and recorded an exchange in which a Muslim woman told her, “May God protect you from the Jews.” Walker responded, “It’s too late, I already married one.”
No anti-Semitism to see here because Walker, like Lavin, hates Israel.
That’s the duality in the media’s exploitation of the murder of Jews and appropriation of anti-Semitism for its own, often anti-Semitic, political agendas. Anti-Semitism isn’t the hatred of Jews, it claims. It’s opposition to the Left. That’s why Alice Walker can get away with saying blatantly anti-Semitic things. It’s why Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and the leaders of the Women’s March can pose with Farrakhan.
There is no anti-Semitism to the left of the Left. Only to the right.
“Trump’s Ideology Is Anti-Semitism Without Jews,” Jonathan Chait writes in New York Magazine. That’s a more accurate description of how the Left divorces anti-Semitism from the hatred of actual Jews, appropriating Jewish identity, while excluding its own anti-Semitism from criticism and condemnation.
And that is an anti-Semitic act.
Last year, Politico ran a bizarre piece claiming that a Chabad Jewish synagogue was the nexus of the vast Trump-Putin conspiracy. The article proved quite popular with white supremacists. It was condemned by the ADL, but the media, as usual, saw nothing wrong with spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
It also saw nothing wrong when the New York Times ran an infographic listing members of Congress opposed to the Iran Deal, based on whether they were Jewish or represented Jewish districts at a time when anti-Semitic dog whistles were being deployed by the White House and its media allies.
Jonathan Weisman, the perpetrator of the New York Times ‘Jew List’, bizarrely went on to write a book accusing Trump of anti-Semitism. In his latest piece, “It’s Time to Wake up to anti-Semitism on the Right,” he argues that anti-Semitism on the left should be ignored in favor of anti-Semitism on the right.
Echoing him, Ben Schreckinger, the author of Politico’s Jewish conspiracy theory, has been warning about the threat of the alt-right.
If you legitimately oppose anti-Semitism, then you don’t think it should be ignored anywhere. Not from Alice Walker, David Duke, Louis Farrakhan, Richard Spencer, the KKK, the Women’s March, Stormfront or Politico. Instead the Left insists that anti-Semitism in its ranks doesn’t exist and should be ignored.
There’s only one reason to do that.
Anti-Semitism and accusations of anti-Semitism are both weapons in the arsenal of the Left. It trades in homophobia and accusations of homophobia, in sexism and accusations of sexism, in racism and accusations of racism, and in anti-Semitism and denunciations of it, when it suits its political agenda.
Take George Soros, please.
The media claims that discussing the power and influence wielded by Soros is an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory”, but discussing the power and influence of Sheldon Adelson, is good journalism.
What’s the difference between the two? There’s really only one answer.
Soros funds the media’s political allies and Adelson funds conservatives. If the two men switched sides, then criticism of Adelson would be anti-Semitic and reporting on Soros would be good journalism.
The defenses of Soros and attacks on Adelson running in the media side by side reveal how the media selectively deploys anti-Semitism and accusations of anti-Semitism in the service of its political goals.
That’s how we end up with opponents of George Soros, an anti-Semitic bigot, whose critics have included Holocaust survivors like Elie Wiesel and Abe Foxman, being accused of anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism is a tactic. Dead Jews are just talking points used to immunize a lefty donor from scandal. Trump’s anti-Semitism is as necessary, as it is imaginary. Chait gets closest to what his political movement really means when he accuses Trump of practicing, “Anti-Semitism Without Jews”.
What Chait really means, but can’t quite say, is that the Left has redefined anti-Semitism to mean opposition to its own political agendas. Accusations of anti-Semitism don’t even require actual Jews.
National Socialist anti-Semitism distorted Jewish history and identity, but International Socialist anti-Semitism appropriates Jewish identity even while still continuing to practice anti-Semitism.
The Nazis gloried in their anti-Semitism, the Communists claimed to oppose anti-Semitism even as they were killing Jews. There is something deeply perverse in a movement that hates and kills Jews, and appropriates them as a cause, destroying Jewish communities and hijacking their identities.
The Nazis sought to dominate, subjugate and even exterminate those they deemed to be ‘inferior’. International Socialism is not nationalistic; it views everyone as dispensable and disposable. There are no superior races, because everyone is inferior. It is however willing to occasionally pander to the racial prejudices of anyone, black nationalists, white racists, Islamist activists, and to their anti-Semitism.
It is simultaneously racist and anti-racist, sexist and egalitarian, Jewish and anti-Semitic.
In the secular replacement theology of the Left, it has displaced the Jews. It’s also replaced black people, women, gays and any identity groups whose interests it claims to represent. To be protected by the Left is to have your identity appropriated by it with an unseen power of attorney brandished by its activists.
Elizabeth Warren is truly Cherokee. George Soros is a victim of anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism has never been limited to any political movement. And any movement that claims anti-Semitism doesn’t exist in its ranks should be treated with great suspicion.
Ideology does not shield us from any evil or sin. The follies and flaws of human nature are distributed across all the spectra of human life. What protects us from them is the very awareness of our flaws.
A political movement is most dangerous when it appears to exempt its members from that awareness.
The Left’s denial and appropriation of anti-Semitism are two sides of the same ugly coin. Every time the Left accuses its political opponents of anti-Semitism, its own hatred of Jews grows even worse.
Comments are closed.
