RUTHFULLY YOURS

On February 16, the New York Times, the go-to paper for the alt-left, ran an attack editorial piece deriding President Donald Trump’s response to two reporters who queried about how his administration sought to address the scourge of anti-Semitism. The editorial insinuated that Trump was aloof about the subject and insulated himself from criticism by pointing to his Jewish familial ties and strong support for Israel. It also implied that anti-Semitism is a recent phenomenon, a product of Trump’s immigration policies.

Admittedly, the president could have responded in a more forceful and robust manner in addressing this very important issue. In at least one instance, Mr. Trump likely misunderstood the reporter’s question – which was somewhat incoherent and rambling – leading to an unfortunate, charged exchange. But the New York Times’ editorial was not only far off the mark, it was disingenuous and reeked of hypocrisy.

During Obama’s tenure, college campuses across the United States experienced an explosion of anti-Semitic acts. These incidents have been well documented by watchdog groups like the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Amcha Initiative. According to Amcha, anti-Semitic incidents are nine times more likely to occur at the universities or colleges that host groups like the Muslim Student Association and Students for Justice in Palestine or similar Muslim Brotherhood front groups.

These acts of overt Jew-hatred have manifested in various forms and have included intimidation tactics, verbal abuse, graffiti scrawls, denial of free speech or the right to peaceably assemble and increasingly, physical assaults. Often, school officials are completely indifferent to the plight of Jewish students or worse, complicit in anti-Jewish or anti-Israel incidents. In many instances, campus police have been told to stand down in the face of rowdy anti-Jewish protest, laced with anti-Semitic vitriol.

The situation for Jewish students on many college campuses has become so intolerable that some watchdog groups have invoked Title VI of the Civil Rights Act in a desperate bid to combat Islamist driven Jew-hate. Yet during its two terms of office, the Obama administration did virtually nothing to combat this malevolency. Moreover, the rise of anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses received scant coverage from radical leftist outlets like the New York Times. Obama’s inaction on the matter was effectively immune to challenge.

I moved to Europe in 1998, and it was just about that time that the New York Times went online in a serious way. I still remember sitting at an Amsterdam café one day at happy hour and having an American tourist say to me, with obvious wonder: “Did you know that you can read the New York Times online every day? The whole paper? For free?” For years thereafter, nytimes.com was the first site I went to every morning. It was, after all, the “newspaper of record.” And at the time, I was a regular contributor to it. In those days, hardly a month went by without my byline appearing in one section of the paper or another – the book review, the travel section, the op-ed page, Leisure & Arts, Week in Review. Even after I published my book on Islam, While Europe Slept, in 2006, and the phone calls and e-mails from the dozen or so Times editors I worked with mysteriously stopped coming all at once, I continued to peruse the Gray Lady while sipping my morning coffee.

Even as it became clearer and clearer that the powers that be at the Times had committed the paper to a see-no-evil position on Islam, I kept reading it, although it became increasingly maddening to do so. After a certain point I started trying to break free – but it was tough, like trying to kick heroin. A few weeks ago, unable to bear the daily onslaught of anti-Trump propaganda, I finally managed it: I stopped reading the New York Times. Hold the applause: I’m pretty sure that at some point I’ll fall off the wagon.

But for the moment it feels good. What makes it feel even better is that I’ve also been entirely CNN-free for several months now. Well, almost entirely. I’ve slipped up a couple of times. The other evening, having read and heard about the wall-to-wall Trump-hate now on display at CNN, I felt obliged to check it out. Sure enough, when I put on Don Lemon’s show in medias res, he and a panel of “experts” were discussing Trump’s latest actions and statements. Uniformly, their reactions to everything were a combination of fake outrage and chuckling condescension. In short, nothing had changed since the campaign. None of them had learned anything. None of them was thinking seriously about anything. They were all still in the same reflexive mode. Who would want to watch any of this, except to see a reflection of his or her own lockstep hatred?