The Daily Caller had nothing to do with an anti-Semitic cartoon that appeared this week next to Google search results for an op-ed about Jews, Germany and the White House press secretary, according to the group’s editor in chief.
“That photo is Google’s mistake. We chose a fairly boring photo of Sean Spicer to accompany the piece. We’ve reached out to Google and asked them to swiftly correct the image,” the DC’s Vince Coglianese told the Washington Examiner Wednesday.
The op-ed, titled “Spicer’s Right: German Jews Weren’t German,” was published Tuesday evening. Its author, David Benkof, who is himself Jewish, argued that the White House press secretary was not wrong when he drew a distinction this week between Adolf Hitler’s “own people,” and the German Jews he murdered during the Holocaust.
“The Holocaust pretty much disproves the already-shaky claim that German Jews — who lost their citizenship seven years before the gas chambers were operational — were Germans,” Benkof wrote.
“I’m not excusing Hitler gassing them Heaven forbid, but Spicer was right that they weren’t Hitler’s own people,” he added. “In fact, few of those gassed had any connection to Germany at all. The carnage was largely suffered by Polish and other Eastern European Jews; even counting Austria fewer than three percent (180,000) of the six million victims were from the Reich.”
If you came across Benkof’s op-ed in a Google search, you would see the anti-Semitic cartoon illustrating that search result, leaving the impression that the either the author or the Daily Caller had included the image in his piece.
How did this happen? Perhaps because Benkof, to illustrate the anti-Semitism he’s encountered, linked to the cartoon.
“I’ve personally been the victim of some ugly examples on the Daily Caller comments sections and on Twitter,” he wrote.
The Daily Caller’s team was not at all pleased Wednesday by the development.
“It looks like Google crawled the image Benkof linked to and made it the feature, for some reason. Google’s looking into it,” a person familiar with the issue told the Examiner.
