The New York Times really unleashed a doozy by publishing a column originally titled, “Attacks on Jews Over Israel Are a Gift to the Right.” The Gray Lady has since modified the headline, at least online, but it actually captured the gist of columnist Michelle Goldberg’s piece rather well. By this telling, even when conservatives are lamenting unprovoked assaults against the innocent, it is the conservatives who somehow are the bad guys.
Truth be told, Goldberg doesn’t make much of a point other than equating right-wing Zionists and antisemitic anti-Zionists by saying both groups conflate “the Jewish people with the Israeli state.”
Oh, and she makes sure to mention that a recent spate of antisemitic assaults on American Jews are bad because, well, in progressive parlance, conservatives can pounce on them.
“This wave of anti-Semitic violence will increase the difficulty of that work,” Goldberg writes of recent left-wing efforts to “to open up space in the Democratic Party to denounce Israel’s entrenched occupation and human rights abuses.” Goldberg then continues, “The Zionist right claims that to assail Israel is to assail all Jews. Those who terrorize Jews out of rage at Israel seem to make their point for them.”
Of journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon’s observation that the rhetoric against Israel of radical U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar may incite domestic antisemitism, Goldberg crafts a straw man.
“But by this logic, those of us concerned about hate crimes against Asian-Americans shouldn’t denounce China’s genocide of the Uighurs,” Goldberg writes. “Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is often so shocking that just describing it neutrally seems defamatory; when Human Rights Watch decided, last month, to accuse Israel of the crime of apartheid, it was because the facts on the ground left it little choice.”
The Israeli government is not perfect, but to deem a democracy, run by a government that includes multiple Arab Muslims in office alongside Israeli Jews, an apartheid state is an assault on language. To put it into context, more Arabs (14), including Muslims, Druze, and Bedouins, serve in the 120-member Knesset than the number of Jews who live in the entire nations of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Jordan combined.
Furthermore, criticizing the genocidal Chinese Communist Party, a dictatorship that surveils, tortures, and murders its own citizens, including the ethnically Han Chinese, is not the same as Omar siding with Hamas, a literal terrorist organization, over Israel, which came under unprovoked fire this month. Nor is criticism of the CCP tantamount to the activists, including members of the “Squad,” who endorse a one-state solution, an actual genocidal proposal to wipe the only Jewish state off the planet.
But the real problem isn’t Jews being slaughtered and assaulted in the streets or even propagandists such as Goldberg printing lies in the paper of record. No, the real problem, according to Goldberg and her headline writers, is the fact that evil conservatives are willing to condemn the evil that is antisemitism.
