New York Times Columnist: ‘Why Does Donald Trump Keep Dissing Jews?’

The New York Times‘ Frank Bruni published a column Sunday in which he accused President Donald Trump of “dissing” Jews.

His examples include Trump’s “initial, strange silence” about antisemitic attacks and bomb threats earlier this year (most of which turned out to be hoaxes by a Jewish Israeli-American, a fact Bruni omits). He also cites the omission of a specific reference to Jews in a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day (where the connection to Jews is quite obvious), and visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, that Bruni deems too short.

Oddly, Bruni made no mention of Trump’s visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem — the first by any U.S. president in office. There could be no more powerful statement of solidarity with the Jewish people. It was not enough for Frank Bruni.

Bruni also slams Trump for declining to visit the Warsaw Ghetto memorial last week on a brief trip to Poland — though he has to admit, grudgingly, that Ivanka Trump visited the site, and that Trump spoke about the Jewish victims of the Holocaust in his speech in Krasinski Square.

Bruni’s attack is beyond petty. It is false, divisive, and essentially partisan.

Barack Obama spent two decades worshipping in, and contributing to, an antisemitic church; he visited the German city of Dresden on the same trip as a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp, thereby affirming a moral equivalence that white supremacists and Holocaust revisionists have tried to create for decades; and gave billions of dollars to the antisemitic Iranian regime. The liberal columnists of the New York Times did not seem to be alarmed.

Did Obama visit the Jewish Quarter of Prague when he visited the city in 2009, or the Theresienstadt concentration camp nearby? No, and no. Did Frank Bruni care?*

Did he protest when Obama skipped a ceremony to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz? Of course not.

Worse than Bruni’s inflammatory charge, his selective memories or his double standards is his reduction of Jewish Americans to the status of special pleaders rather than citizens — perpetual victims who are presumed to be insulted by every slight, however imaginary.

There’s more than a hint of antisemitism in that.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

* First Lady Michelle Obama visited Prague’s Jewish Quarter.