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The New York Times Needs to Reflect Deeply on How It Came to Publish Anti-Semitic Propaganda

(New York Times) Bret Stephens - On Thursday the opinion pages of the New York Times international edition provided a textbook illustration of anti-Semitism. Except that the Times wasn't explaining anti-Semitism. It was purveying it in the form of a cartoon in which a guide dog with the face of Benjamin Netanyahu leads a blind, fat Donald Trump wearing dark glasses and a black yarmulke. The dog-man wears a collar from which hangs a Star of David. Here was an image that, in another age, might have been published in the pages of Der Sturmer. The Jew in the form of a dog. The small but wily Jew leading the dumb and trusting American. The hated Trump being Judaized with a skullcap. What was this cartoon doing in the Times? For some Times readers - or former readers - the Times has a longstanding Jewish problem, dating back to World War II, when it mostly buried news about the Holocaust, and continuing into the present day in the form of intensely adversarial coverage of Israel. On the editorial pages, its overall approach toward the Jewish state tends to range from tut-tutting disappointment to thunderous condemnation. The real story is a bit different. The international edition has a much smaller staff, and far less oversight than the regular edition. Incredibly, the cartoon was selected and seen by just one midlevel editor right before the paper went to press. The cartoon's publication wasn't a willful act of anti-Semitism but was an astonishing act of ignorance of anti-Semitism at a publication that is otherwise hyper-alert to nearly every conceivable expression of prejudice. Imagine if the dog on a leash had been a prominent woman such as Nancy Pelosi, a person of color such as John Lewis, or a Muslim such as Ilhan Omar?
2019-04-29 00:00:00
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