Times of Israel Profiles Breitbart News’ Joel Pollak

The Times of Israel published an extended interview with Breitbart News’ Senior Editor at Large and In-house Counsel Joel B. Pollak.

The interview, “How an Orthodox journalist went from far-left activist to Breitbart editor,” covers Pollak’s own political journey, and addresses controversies about President Donald Trump and Breitbart News, including the  “alt-right”:

Should Breitbart do more to disavow the perception of being alt-right?

This game of disavowal is a losing game and the only person who wins is the person who makes you disavow something. Ultimately, the moment you play, you are participating in your own self-destruction.

I can’t tell you how many people in the Jewish world have encouraged me to come forward and disavow the alt-right, and so on and so forth.

I don’t need to disavow the alt-right. I mean, look at my life! I was the first white member of the African American club. I taught at South African townships that were entirely black and dangerous for me to be in, and if you want to get really personal — I never bring this up — but I’m married to a black South African woman who converted and my children are completely different colors, and aware of that. What do I have to disavow?

In every way I’ve spent my life helping people from other communities. When I was in South Africa I lived with a Muslim family for two years in Capetown studying Arabic and learning about Islam, and was asked by an imam for help in obtaining a construction permit for a mosque.

I have an interest in bringing people together, and that was an interest whether I was on the left or the right. I don’t feel I have anything to prove.

What I do worry about is the people on the left and, if I can call them out — the people in particular running around in the Jewish community who see themselves as the partisans and we [conservatives or Republicans] by implication are the Nazis. If you really believe, and many of them do, that a Nazi political party has taken over the country, led by a Nazi would-be-dictator, and that his supporters are also Nazis, it’s morally permissible to do anything to those people to prevent them from succeeding.

There is nothing whatsoever in the Trump Administration’s behavior that justifies these Nazi/resistance comparisons.

Read the full interview here.