ANTI-SEMITISM: A CASE STUDY IN MEDIA BIAS

For two days now, media have been jumping all over a tweet put out by Donald Trump which, over a field of $100 bills, showed Hillary Clinton, and a six-pointed star (the shape of a Mogen David – also known as a Jewish Star) in which  was written “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever”.

We are being told (I have no personal verification here) that this material originally was put out by a clearly anti-Semitic website.

Once media noted the shape of the star, and Trump opponents quickly exploited the opening by claiming this showed Trump himself to be an anti-Semite, the graphic was immediately changed, with a circle replacing the star.

But the suggestions that this shows the real, anti-Semitic Donald Trump have continued unabated.

So, is Donald Trump an anti-Semite who intentionally used this graphic to assure his fellow Jew-haters he was one of them?

Let’s start with the fact that putting the graphic up was, at best, a huge mistake.  Frankly, the kind of mistake professional campaign staffs rarely make.

A candidate should never use anything from an outside source before fully checking that source, because, if it has any negative associations, they will immediately will be pinned on the candidate as well.

But this begs the issue of whether Donald Trump is an anti-Semite.  So let’s hit that one head on.

Speaking as a Jew, who has no tolerance for anti-Semitism at all, the fact that Donald Trump is a vociferous supporter of Israel, has apparently fully accepted his daughter’s marriage to a Jew and her conversion to Judaism, and in fact is relying heavily on both of them in his campaign pretty much settles the issue.

Add in the fact that no one (at least no one I have seen) can come up with any other instance of Mr. Trump’s so-called anti-Semitism, and it seems to me that it should settle the issue for any reasonable person.

But, reason notwithstanding, the media frenzy continues.  Trump has supplied the opening and they’re off to the races.

Just like they would be if it were Hillary Clinton, right?

Uh….right?

Well, actually, no.

We’ll start with the fact – I call it a fact, because there are three witnesses who attested to it, all of whom were Clinton people – that in 1974, when Bill Clinton lost his bid to become Governor of Arkansas, among the insults Ms. Clinton screamed at his Jewish campaign manager, Paul Fray, was “You fucking Jew Bastard”.

You can read all about this by clicking here.

We can speculate about Donald Trump’s use of the six-point star graphic; on whether it was done intentionally or whether his staff people even realized it could be taken that way (it wasn’t an actual Jewish star, only an outline – the same outline that would depict a sheriff’s badge).

But it’s hard to misunderstand “You fucking Jew bastard”.

Maybe some media venue, somewhere, has mentioned this while going after Trump, hammer and tongs, for his short-lived tweet.  But, if so, I haven’t seen it.

However, in fairness, you might say “Well, maybe she said that, but it was in the heat of the moment.  And, besides, that was 42 years ago.  It’s ridiculous to bring it up today.”.

OK.  Then let’s move to the present.

Remember sidney blumenthal?  He is the lying worm of a Clinton acolyte who President Obama explicitly told Hillary Clinton NOT to hire in any capacity, but who, the emails clearly show, she was in full contact with throughout her years in that position?

sidney blumenthal has a son.  His name is max blumenthal.  And, though he and his father are ancestrally Jewish, max blumenthal hates Israel with a passion rarely seen outside of hamas headquarters.  He openly writes about it.

And, based on what you are about to read, his father clearly shares those views.

sidney blumenthal, the emails show, has sent son max’s wit and wisdom to Hillary Clinton multiple numbers of times.  That is not in dispute.  But what we have not seen – what there seems to be no example of – is any email of Ms. Clinton’s disputing a word that blumenthal wrote or asking sidney to stop sending this material to her.

WHY NOT?

Rabbie Shmuley Boteach, writing for the Jerusalem Post, put out an extensive, fully referenced commentary on this.  You can read it by clicking here, and I hope  you do.  But, for the meanwhile, let me give you just a small taste:

Blumenthal is one of Hillary’s closest advisers and a longtime family friend. He was a senior adviser during Bill Clinton’s presidency and served again as senior adviser for Hillary’s failed 2008 run for the White House.

Blumenthal was clearly a man whose advice Hillary trusted and she was willing to pay him $10,000 a month for his services. However the information coming to light paints a troubled picture.

What they show is a slew of anti-Israel writings and opinions, many of which originated from articles written by Blumenthal’s own son, Max Blumenthal.

Max is a writer and self-declared “anti-Zionist,” known for his active support of the BDS movement and his calls for the dismantling of the State of Israel. He trolls pro-Israel writers, as I can personally attest. Max’s widely panned 2013 book Goliath, Life and Loathing in Greater Israel is full of anti-Israel rants, omissions and outright lies. In it, he repeatedly compares the Jewish state to Nazi Germany, and advocates that the majority of Jews currently living in Israel must be removed from the land to make way for a Palestinian state. Mimicking the Islamic State’s acronym ISIL, Max created the hashtag #JSIL – Jewish State in the Levant. To Max, the democratic State of Israel and Islamic State are morally equivalent entities.

His opinions are seen as radical leftist claptrap even by Left-leaning detractors of the Jewish state. The Nation columnist Eric Alterman – himself a critic of Israel’s presence in the West bank – described how the book “could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club.” J. J. Goldberg of The Forward described Goliath as an “unpleasant book.” By contrast, David Duke, the racist former Klu Klux Klan leader, praised Blumenthal’s book.

What is truly concerning is that Sidney Blumenthal has not only failed to ever condemn his son’s anti-Israel writings, but has actively advocated for and defended the warped, outrageous ideas conveyed therein. In fact, after learning of Alterman’s critique of Max’s book, Blumenthal began sending out emails attacking Alterman and supporting his son’s shoddy and repugnant anti-Israel scholarship. One such email included an article from the radical anti-Zionist website Mondoweiss (which loved the book and for which Max has written for in the past) attacking Alterman’s review.

So what do we have here?

On the Trump side, we have a stupid tweet, apparently from an anti-Semitic web site,  with its offensive component changed in an hour or two.

On the Clinton side, we have a decades-old frontal attack on a Jew for being a Jew.  And one of Ms. Clinton’s closest confidants feeding her a slew of Israel-hatred material – material he would never have sent if he didn’t believe it as well – which, at least to my knowledge, there is no evidence that she ever rejected or disavowed in any way.

And that, folks, is before we get to the woman who, arguably, is Hillary Clinton’s single closest confidant, huma abedin, and her family’s association with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Tell me:  which of these two sides is more newsworthy?  And has been for months and months?

Then tell me side which our supposedly “neutral” mainstream media has made into a front-page quality story, and which has been virtually entirely buried?

If ever there were a case study in media bias, this is it.  You’ll never find a clearer one.

Mainstream media:  sometimes I think  Websters’s should just make things official, and add “Hillary-2016” as one of its definitions.