The destructive political opportunism that has broken out on the right has really proven to be a boon for the left. The latest to jump on the bandwagon is The Tablet, which decided to rehash its discredited attack on David Horowitz from several years back to cash in on trending topics.
The Tablet, which charges readers to make comments, really ought to be paying them to read its content. Armin Rosen's attack on David Horowitz is clumsy, poorly written and exists for no other reason than to exploit a trending story while recycling old content. Rosen accuses Horowitz of being "loopy and disorganized", but the epithet far better describes Rosen's rant. It's a bad sign when you have to embed a Tweet in the first few paragraphs of your article. It's an even worse sign when you admit, as Rosen does in para 2, that you don't actually care about your topic.
"In context, “renegade Jew” was clearly intended as a blunt ethnic slur, and had apparently little to do with the substance of Horowitz’s loopy and disorganized attacks on Kristol," Rosen writes.
The context however is ridiculously clear.
"I am a Jew who has never been to Israel and has never been a Zionist in the sense of believing that Jews can rid themselves of Jew hatred by having their own nation state. But half of world Jewry now lives in Israel, and the enemies whom Obama and Hillary have empowered – Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas - have openly sworn to exterminate the Jews. I am also an American (and an American first), whose country is threatened with destruction by the same enemies. To weaken the only party that stands between the Jews and their annihilation, and between America and the forces intent on destroying her, is a political miscalculation so great and a betrayal so profound as to not be easily forgiven."
Horowitz is accusing supporters of third party candidates of undermining American interests and Jewish safety. Describing that as anti-Semitism is about as wrong as any accusation can possibly get.
Rosen then whines about, "a series of bizarre asides about a phantom U.S. intervention in Egypt which did not in fact occur, at least not in real life as the majority of the non-David Horowitz community understands it."
The "phantom intervention" would involve a series of moves taken to undermine the Egyptian government and boost the Muslim Brotherhood over a period of years. I suppose Obama stating that Egypt's leader must step down was some sort of "phantom" event.
After a few tepid attacks of this sort, Rosen pivots to rehashing the Tablet's discredited attack on David Horowitz from 2012. Horowitz had already responded to it back then.
Tablet assigned the profile of me to a 24-year-old Nation writer and credulous supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Its text is as accurate a portrait of me as the caricature they chose to accompany it (I suspect even Ahmadinejad would get a more respectful treatment from the Tablet editors). I wasted my time with this young man, and am sorry I did.
Aside from the bias, the profile got the most elementary facts wrong.
Aside from the ideas, among the obvious facts he could have checked but didn’t, my Center never occupied a “tony high-rise” let alone on the 12th floor, as the author claims — and never “in downtown L.A.”
My present staff is not three but fifteen and my Center far from being in pathetic decline (as he also suggests) has three times the budget it did in 2000 and about ten times the following or more (the Alinsky pamphlet I wrote has been read by 2.5 million people, but you would never guess it from his description); there is no security guard in our present offices, the Olin Foundation no longer exists,...
Four years later, the Tablet not only failed to correct the story, but decided to awkwardly rehash it instead.