Does the New York Times see Antisemitism When it Looks in the Mirror?

The recent killings in Overland Park, Kansas, though they didn’t kill any Jews were perpetrated by a man, Fraiser Glenn Cross Jr., who cited the work of “Jew journalist Max Blumenthal,” as a reason for his hatred of Jews. According to a posting at an online forum, Cross cited Blumenthal for explaining an “attempt by a foreign government Israel, to buy the presidential election.” While conservative outlets, like PJ Media, the Washington Free Beacon and Legal Insurrection reported on this sentiment of Cross, the MSM has largely ignored it.

This is a classic antisemitic trope, why was it ignored?

Could it be that there are those in the MSM who largely agree with this sentiment? To call it hatred is to acknowledge how offensive their own views truly are?

Here are seven selections from the the opinion pages of the New York Times in the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election.

The Outsourced Party, Kevin Baker, March 24, 2012

Gingrich has his own sponsors, the casino billionaires Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, hawkish supporters of Israel. Does what these individuals care about most fit in with the Republican party’s election strategy? So what?

It’s not that these individual donors believe in things — conservative Christian stands on abortion, unmitigated support for Israel and so on — that are so different from what much of the party’s base believes in.

What Sheldon Adelson Wants, Editorial, June 23, 2012

Given that Mr. Romney was not his first choice, why is Mr. Adelson writing these huge checks?

The first answer is clearly his disgust for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, supported by President Obama and most Israelis. He considers a Palestinian state “a steppingstone for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people,” and has called the Palestinian prime minister a terrorist. He is even further to the right than the main pro-Israeli lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which he broke with in 2007 when it supported economic aid to the Palestinians.

Mr. Romney is only slightly better, saying the Israelis want a two-state solution but the Palestinians do not, accusing them of wanting to eliminate Israel. The eight-figure checks are not paying for a more enlightened answer.

Why not in Vegas?, Thomas Friedman, July 31, 2012

I’ll make this quick. I have one question and one observation about Mitt Romney’s visit to Israel. The question is this: Since the whole trip was not about learning anything but about how to satisfy the political whims of the right-wing, super pro-Bibi Netanyahu, American Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, why didn’t they just do the whole thing in Las Vegas? I mean, it was all about money anyway — how much Romney would abase himself by saying whatever the Israeli right wanted to hear and how big a jackpot of donations Adelson would shower on the Romney campaign in return. Really, Vegas would have been so much more appropriate than Jerusalem. They could have constructed a plastic Wailing Wall and saved so much on gas.

50 Shades of Scalia, Timothy Egan, August 2, 2012

You can see this imbalance at work in the person of Sheldon Adelson, the orange-haired, creepy-voiced casino magnate who has promised to contribute up to $100 million to super PACS to knock out President Obama. If you wonder why Mitt Romney was reduced to a pandering stooge in Israel a few days ago, you can blame the traveling companion who held the candidate’s leash — Adelson.

Gadding of a Gawky Gowk, Maureen Dowd, August 2, 2012

Poor Mitt Romney had no such magic carpet ride. He insulted the British and infuriated the Palestinians while pandering to the Israelis and American Jewish voters, including donors like the Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson who tagged along.

Egged on by some of the same neocon advisers who brought us the Iraq pre-emptive invasion, Romney offered “Go ahead, make my day” diplomacy, signaling he would support Israeli action to pre-emptively strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The Romney Package, Bill Keller, August 12, 2012

On foreign policy, Romney has so far largely bypassed his party’s mainstream in favor of advisers with a decidedly neoconservative bent — confrontational, unilateral, with a missionary urge to spread American-style democracy and a particular affinity for Israel’s hard-liners. Romney’s more conventional insiders call it the “Bolton faction,” for John Bolton, among the most hawkish of George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda” interventionists. Bolton is now on the Romney team, but Dan Senor is the one who has Romney’s ear. At 40, he is next-gen Bolton, smoother, TV-savvy, post-cold war in age but cold war in spirit. (He co-founded a think tank with the Soviet-era neocon William Kristol.) Senor helped choreograph Romney’s recent foreign debut, in which the candidate needlessly offended the British and the Palestinians.

Buying the Election?, Joe Nocera, October 8, 2012

What feels different now is that the sums are so large, and that it has the potential to influence not just Congressional and Senate candidates but the presidential candidates as well. If Romney wins, will he really be willing to take a position on Israel that is different from Adelson’s? One suspects not.

“This can’t be good for Democracy,” Bennet told me in an e-mail. It’s not.

Each one of these pieces argued that money – often Sheldon Adelson’s money – was distorting Romney’s or, more generally, the Republican agenda to be too pro-Israel against American interests. (Keller’s mention of Adelson appears later in the column, though not in the section I quoted.)

If there’s a reason Blumenthal thought he could get away with writing his conspiracies, it’s because his views aren’t that far removed from those of one of America’s most read newspapers. His views don’t differ significantly from the editorial pages of the New York Times.

To a large degree this form of Jew hatred is tolerated if not considered uncontroversial. But as Charles Asher Small argues, tolerating it leads to violence.

Today, our policy-makers and members of the human rights community are reticent to speak out against the scourge of contemporary global antisemitism. In this horrific case, where a known Nazi has been apprehended, it is easy to know how to respond. Not all acts of antisemitism are dealt with so simply. They are often met with silence or attempts to look away, so as not to confront the haters for ideological, political or economic reasons. When reports emerge of vicious anti-Semitic slogans sung by the leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Regime or by the Muslim Brotherhood, we should condemn them, but too often we do not. …

Let us be vigilant and uproot this ideology that creates an atmosphere of intolerance and empowers haters everywhere. Regardless of the race, nationality or religion of those who espouse an antisemitism that incites to murder and genocide—let us all speak clearly in one united voice for human rights and basic human decency. Our voice must never be muted for political interests. For it is not possible to stop hate at our borders—these ideas know no quarantine. The message that we must send is that racism, in all of its forms, must be fought every time it rears its dangerous head.

Will the New York Times and other members of the MSM come to terms with the fact that the sentiments of the Protocols of the Elder of Ziyon, have no place in public discourse? Or will they continue to tolerate the continued demonization of the Jewish state and its supporters?

Cross, by the way, did not kill any Jews.