The “Trump Anti-Semitism” Charge Exposed as a Smear

Do you remember the massacre at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh of 11 mostly elderly worshippers attending Shabbat morning services?

Do you remember the massacre at the Tree of Life (L’Simcha) Congregation in Pittsburgh of 11 mostly elderly worshippers attending Shabbat morning services?

I ask that provocative question because in just three weeks, since October 27, the story has more or less vanished from the media. Briefly, there was a storm of commentary in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and other left-liberal media outlets. Most of it took the form of soul-searching about anti-Semitism, placing the blame squarely on President Donald Trump, and urging Jewish Americans to oppose him politically and to ostracize his supporters—especially his Jewish supporters.

When that ran out of steam, the media moved on. The midterms were coming.

I don’t recall on exactly which channel, or show, but almost simultaneously with hearing news of the tragic outrage, I heard a commentator blaming it on Trump. That was the first time I heard mention of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) 2017 “national report” that claimed a huge increase in anti-Semitic attacks during President Trump’s first year in office.

Almost as soon as the shooting ended, the Atlantic came online with an article by Franklin Foer accusing Trump of inciting anti-Semitism and calling for the shunning of Trump’s Jewish supporters.

With that, the media were off and running. Almost as soon as the shooting ended, the Atlantic came online with an article by Franklin Foer accusing Trump of inciting anti-Semitism and calling for the shunning of Trump’s Jewish supporters:

“Any strategy for enhancing the security of American Jewry should involve shunning Trump’s Jewish enablers. Their money should be refused, their presence in synagogues not welcome. They have placed their community in danger.”

In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, the ADL had reported, there was a 57 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in America. New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, who first labeled Trump’s supporters “white nationalists” during the 2016 nominations, reliably denigrated Trump as a white nationalist: “Casual conspiracy theorizing with an anti-Semitic tinge is now the GOP baseline.”

When every left-liberal print, TV, and online commentator and editorialist had invented a slightly different way to brand the President and his supporters anti-Semites, the news cycle rolled on.

When every left-liberal print, TV, and online commentator and editorialist had invented a slightly different way to brand the President and his supporters anti-Semites, the news cycle rolled on.

It managed to miss, as it conveniently does, the other side of the argument, which, by its nature, must follow after the allegations. Usually, at least in the left-liberal media, it does not catch up with them. (The exception, for which the media execrate President Trump, are his tweets, which are fired back at accusers almost at once. The media would prefer that he send them press releases—or write to their letters columns.)

After flying to Pittsburgh to show the Israeli government’s solidarity with the Jewish community in the wake of the massacre, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Naftali Bennett, stopped in New York City to participate in a Council of Foreign Relations roundtable discussion of anti-Semitism.

Questioned on the ADL data, Bennett said: “I’m not convinced those are the facts. We need to look at the facts. I understand that the ADL themselves have stated there is a drastic reduction in violent anti-Semitic events, but that has for some reason been hidden from the public discourse?”

What could he possibly mean?

It seems that just three days after the Pittsburgh tragedy, Prof. David Bernstein, executive director of the Liberty & Law Center, George Mason University Law School, had written an article in the online Jewish publication, Tablet. Entitled: “Correcting the ADL’s False Anti-Semitism Statistic,” it did not beat around the burning bush:

“… no sound empirical data exists that shows an increase in anti-Semitism during the Trump administration … while the data that does exist, like a much-cited ADL study, proves no such thing.

“Undoubtedly many readers are silently protesting, ‘What about the ADL statistic showing a  57 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017’ a figure reported by NPR, The New York Times, the Post. …

“In fact, that’s not what the study shows and despite the way it has been portrayed in the ADL’s own press release, the actual findings don’t even purport to show any such thing.”

Above all, it is an object lesson in how one strategic propaganda tale can wag a thousand media dogs and smear an entire political party.

I will not repeat Prof. Bernstein’s analysis, here. The article is well worth reading not only for that analysis, but as a disturbing warning-flag about today’s ADL (more on that later). Above all, it is an object lesson in how one strategic propaganda tale can wag a thousand media dogs and smear an entire political party.

I offer just a sample of problems pointed out by Prof. Bernstein:

• The data doesn’t describe anti-Semitic incidents; it describes reported incidents, incidents someone perceived as anti-Semitic.
• The report includes 163 bomb threats against Jewish institutions by an Israeli mental patient.
• The report states that anti-Semitic incidents on university campuses increased nearly 100 percent over 2016 (from 108 incidents to 204), but the vast majority were by far-leftists and Muslims (probably not too many of them Trump supporters).
• The basic fallacy is best exposed by the actual data it does contain … actual data related to violent anti-Semitic attacks. And it turns out that those measurable, real attacks decreased 47 percent in 2017.
• Whereas in 2016 there were 37 violent anti-Semitic attacks against Jews in America, in 2017 there were only 19 violent anti-Semitic attacks. Bernstein points out the obvious: “Physical assaults are … the most objective sort of incident to document, which adds to concerns about the robustness of the rest of the data.”

There is much, much more in Prof. Bernstein’s article (along with the full reply from ADL that Tablet invited).

But the ADL report was problematic from another point of view. Almost in the same week, Commentary, the venerable opinion journal founded by the American Jewish Committee, had run an expose of ADL Executive Director Jonathan Greenblatt. In “The Shame of the Anti-Defamation League,” author Seth Mandel charged that the new ADL head (who came to the position in July 2015 from the Obama administration) had turned American Jewry’s premier institution for fighting anti-Semitism into a left-liberal campaign headquarters to attack Republicans, defend the left’s political agenda, and attack Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Greenblatt, charged Mandel, had little criticism of influential left-liberal anti-Semites like Congressmen Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Andre Carson (D-IN) or Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour. But he routinely exaggerated anti-Semitic incidents emanating from the neo-Nazi end of the political spectrum—and blamed Republicans.

Alone among the U.S. media, as far as I can tell, Breitbart News gave prominence to the views of Caroline B. Glick, chief columnist for the Jerusalem Post. She also is adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and directs the Israeli Security Project at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Glick is a journalist worth following, an American from Chicago who emigrated to Israel after college, joining the Israel Defense Forces and becoming an IDF captain (1994-1996). In 1997 and 1998, she served as Assistant Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

She said that left-wing Jews blaming President Trump for inciting the mass murder are “dishonoring the dead” and “dishonoring the cause of fighting anti-Semitism.

In an interview on Breitbart radio on November 2, five days after the Pittsburgh massacre, she said that left-wing Jews blaming President Trump for inciting the mass murder are “dishonoring the dead” and “dishonoring the cause of fighting anti-Semitism.

“It would’ve been good if the Jewish community in the United States and the national leadership, instead of pronouncing these milquetoast things that we all need to be more civil in our tone, would say, ‘No, we have to be less civil to anti-Semites. We have to be less civil to people who want to annihilate the Jewish people [and] the Jewish state.’

“But what we’re finding, particularly among left-wing Jews, is that they’re using it to attack the administration and trying to conflate the Nazi who committed this massacre with President Trump. Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth.”

She said: “This is pure prostitution. This is people who are not honoring the dead. They’re dishonoring the dead … when they turn it into a means to try to batter a president who has been extraordinary both to the Jewish state of Israel and the Jewish people more generally in his regard and esteem for them.”

And:  “You have several Democratic nominees for Congress who are running on openly anti-Zionists platforms. Anti-Zionism is out-and-out anti-Semitism. It calls for the annihilation of the largest Jewish community on Earth, in Israel. … [Trump] is the most supportive president Israel has ever had, [and] they’re calling him an anti-Semite?”

Glick said: “What’s most shocking is that the Jewish leadership such as it is in the United States is not calling them out on it.”

And she added, “[On television, there is] one commentator after the other trying to blame this massacre on a president who truly [and] uniquely … doesn’t have any prejudice whatsoever towards Jews, at all. None. He’s not blemished by it one bit.”

I admit to satisfaction in quoting Ms. Glick at length, given the depth of commitment she has demonstrated, in action, to the survival and security of the Jewish people. The entire podcast of the radio interview, as well as text, can be found, here.

Those whose conception of Breitbart News is inflammatory headlines followed by large-type bursts of National Enquirer-type news might take note of this 2,100-word interview with Ms. Glick. As far as I know, Breitbart is the only U.S. media organization that reported her views on the synagogue tragedy. And the length of the interview is not usual for Breitbart’s coverage.

Naturally, left-liberal media have taken notice and have a strategy for shutting up an increasingly influential alternative source of news and opinion. The New York Times in a Sunday Magazine story on November 11 about the threat of white nationalist terrorism directly paired Breitbart News with the neo-Nazi site, The Daily Stormer, as mouthpieces for the “alt-right.”

Be careful, convincing readers that Breitbart is ‘neo-Nazi’ is exactly what the real neo-Nazis are hoping to do, too. But they need your help.

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About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway contributes to Savvy Street on political economy, science, and trends in fiction, film, and culture. Walter Donway’s most recent book is Donald Trump and His Enemies: How the Media Put Trump in Office (Romantic Revolution Books: New York, September 2017). His Amazon profile can be found here