The New York Times has ignored a hate campaign waged in the media against Bari Weiss, one of its own writers, who was targeted for calling out left-wing anti-Semitism by, among others, the Women's March. Its reporting on Israel comes from an Electronic Intifada alum. Its storied history includes covering up the Holocaust and later genocidal efforts by Islamic terror groups that are fond of Hitler.
So yes, it's a perfect time for the old gray lady to ask, "Anti-Semitism Is Rising. Why Aren't American Jews Speaking Up".
If not quite a crisis, it feels like a proto-crisis, something to head off, especially when the rise of anti-Semitism is combined with hate crimes against Muslims, blacks, Hispanics and immigrants. Yet U.S. Jewish leaders — the heads of influential, established organizations like the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Federations of North America — have been remarkably quiet, focused instead, as they have been for decades, on Israel, not the brewing storm in our own country.
Much of the anti-Semitism actually comes from Muslims. As amply documented by groups like Canary Mission that track anti-Semitism on campus. Alt-right anti-Semitism on social media is ugly, but it's a lot less significant than Jewish students being intimidated, terrorized and assaulted in person on college campuses.
And then there are the mosques calling for the mass murder of Jews.
It was another Friday night in the Islamic Center of Jersey City. And its imam, Sheikh Aymen Elkasaby, had some thoughts about the Jews.
“So long as the Al-Aqsa Mosque remains a humiliated prisoner under the oppression of the Jews, this nation will never prevail,” he screamed belligerently in the World Trade Center bomber’s old mosque.
"Count them one by one, and kill them down to the very last one. Do not leave a single one on the face of the Earth."
On another Friday this year, in the Islamic Center of Davis, Imam Ammar Shahin implored, “Oh Allah, liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews.”
“Oh Allah, count them one by one and annihilate them down to the very last one.”
But that's not what Jonathan Weissman wants to talk about. And he accuses Jewish organizations of ignoring the problem, even as he bases his article on ADL stats.
"Posobiec has been one of the promulgators of fake news, including the “Pizzagate” story that claimed that Hillary Clinton helped run a child sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor and the claim that a young Democratic National Committee staff member, Seth Rich, was murdered by the Clinton campaign."
I'm not even going to bother fact checking this, but what does Pizzagate or Seth Rich have to do with anti-Semitism?
Weissman wants us to ignore the nearly daily murders and attempted murders of Jews in Israel to talk about Pizzagate. And he claims that it's Jewish orgs that are unserious about anti-Semitism.
The rest is a muddled mess.
Jonathan Weissman wants synagogues to talk about anti-Semitism, yet he doesn't talk about anti-Semitism. He wants to talk about how horrible the right is. But it's largely untethered to any Jewish issues.
"And Jewish leadership must reflect its congregants, who are not sheep," Weissman writes.
It's insulting. All the more so coming from the editor at a paper that is quite happy to ignore anti-Semitism when it comes from its political allies.