Politico has used the occasion of the Jewish New Year to accuse Donald Trump of fomenting antisemitism in America.
As Seth Mandel of Commentary notes, the timing of the article is odd: most of the Jewish “targets” of the piece will be offline.
But in the waning hours before the holiday, there is time still to point out the obvious, glaring flaw in Ben Wofford’s article: it completely ignores the obvious and explicit antisemitism that is directly connected to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Examples abound. There was the Democratic National Committee’s attempt to attack Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who is Jewish, over his religion. There is Hillary Clinton’s embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement, whose platform accuses Israel of “genocide” — an antisemitic claim that turns the victims of the Holocaust into its perpetrators. And there is Clinton’s efforts to promote the writings of Max Blumenthal, an antisemite who is the son of her close associate, Sydney Blumenthal.
On a policy level, Clinton backs the disastrous Iran deal, which has sent billions of dollars — including ransom money — to a regime that not only promotes Holocaust denial and the hatred of Jews, but which continues to target Jews around the world in terror attacks. And as First Lady, she embraced Yasser Arafat’s wife as the latter accused Israel of using poison gas to kill Palestinian women and children. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton faithfully carried out President Barack Obama’s policy of “distance” from Israel, whose latest snub involved “correcting” a White House press release about Shimon Peres’s funeral to deny that Jerusalem is, in fact, the capital of Israel.
That is not a record of standing up to antisemitism. On the contrary, Clinton has encouraged it.
Wofford’s case rests entirely on the claim that there are antisemites who support Trump. He ignores the antisemitism among Clinton’s supporters.
Lena Dunham, for one, published an article last year titled: “Dog or Jewish Boyfriend? A Quiz.” The father of the Orlando terrorist turned up behind Clinton at a recent rally in Florida. And it is no accident that pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activists were in full force at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. They know their party.
The Politico article treats antisemitism as if it were a new phenomenon, emerging in the 2016 campaign. Has Wofford been on a college campus recently? Antisemitism has been exploding, primarily as a by-product of vicious anti-Israel campaigns.
At the University of California Davis last year, Muslim students taunted Jewish students with shouts of “Allahu akbar” at a student government meeting. Later, swastikas were found spray-painted on a Jewish fraternity. That was long before Trump.
There is certainly antisemitism on the right — largely online, tweeted by anonymous trolls. The antisemitism on the left is real and concrete.
But Democrats show little interest in stopping it; indeed, their primary concern is how best to turn the vehement activists of the anti-Israel, antisemitic far-left into volunteers and voters.
Not a word of that made its way into Politico’s story, which is best described as a partisan smear — and an attempt to cover up the real nature of antisemitism in America today.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.