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Is Anti-Semitism Becoming Mainstream?
(JNS) Josh Hasten - At a panel in Jerusalem this week on "The Mainstreaming of Anti-Semitism," David Hazony, executive director of the Israel Innovation Fund, said, "What you are seeing on campuses is only a thin slice of the anti-Semitic beast that has emerged in our public life around the world in the last six months, in the last year. All of a sudden, the New York Times' editorial-page cartoons; all of a sudden, columns; all of a sudden, valedictory addresses, commencement speeches, congressional convocations, politicians - all of a sudden in America, you've got synagogues being shot up, synagogues being torched. All of a sudden, what we thought had been hidden, gone away, has come roaring back." Dan Diker, who heads the political warfare and BDS program at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, displayed the recently published anti-Semitic New York Times political cartoon and noted, "We have been living with the new normal - the normalization of the demonization of Jews and the Jewish state. And I would argue that the ongoing, decades-old long demonization and dehumanization of the Jewish state has been misunderstood as political criticism when, in truth, it has been the new virulent form of anti-Semitism." Ricki Hollander, senior media analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), recalled that when CAMERA tried to set the record straight after several articles in the Times referred to violent rioters at the Gaza border as "peaceful protestors," the corrections editor refused, even while acknowledging that some of the rioters were armed, saying, "So what if they were armed? They were also demonstrators." Hollander explained that "When a newspaper standards editor twists herself into a pretzel to defend their biased reporting, we see how deeply entrenched is this anti-Semitism that masquerades as criticism of Israel."