IsraellyCool: Tablet Mag Goes Full Antisemite
With the news of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s fall from grace clogging the news cycle, it was only a matter of time before we would see antisemitic articles stressing the fact he is Jewish, and somehow connecting it to his despicable behavior.Shmuley Boteach: A shameful attack on Elie Wiesel
And none is worse than this article from Neo Nazi site The Daily Stormer.
Excerpt:
At first squint, Harvey Weinstein seems like a very familiar type. Isn’t he the old, same old, another rich, entitled, powerful man with a bad dye job abusing his might to coerce women into sex? Isn’t Harvey just like Roger Ailes, or Bill O’Reilly, or, for that matter, Bill Clinton? But look at the details of the case and you’ll see that the answer is no. Harvey is different. Harvey, sadly, is a deeply Jewish kind of pervert.
As despicable as you may find Ailes, O’Reilly, and the other grabby goyim, you’ll recognize their behavior fits a pattern as old as time itself, as trite as Fox’s complaints about the “war on Christmas”: Men crave sex, and the worst of them will obtain it by whatever means necessary. These despicable gents have power and influence, and they aren’t above promising a lucrative gig—or threatening to take it away—to get laid. In these transactions, women are nothing but objects, and any “consent” is just an illusion. Morally, the men are no better than the pimps who crowd into James Franco’s character’s bar on The Deuce, the new HBO show; psychologically, they are no more complex than the johns. Cash in, cum out. The women are collateral damage.
Only it was not really from The Daily Stormer. It is from Tablet Mag, an American-Jewish publication.
What makes this even more infuriating is I have always found Tablet to be proudly Jewish. We are not speaking about the Jewish Forward or Ha’aretz here, which are constantly providing grist for the antisemites’ mill. In fact, one of its writers, Yair Rosenberg, constantly writes about antisemitism and describes himself on Twitter as a “troller of Nazis.”
This article will no doubt be spread far and wide by the same Jew haters Yair Rosenberg likes to write about and troll. I call on the managing editor of Tablet to remove the article immediately and issue an apology to its readers and Jews everywhere.
Quite a few questions arise from Ron Rosenbaum’s twisted and shameful attack in Tablet magazine on Elie Wiesel, the most famous Holocaust survivor.A Misleading Picture of Today’s Anti-Semitism
First, what was the motive of the magazine’s editors in publishing the piece? It would be one thing if the column was of high literary quality and rhetorical merit.
But endless repetition alone demonstrates how this was a thoughtless hit piece, designed to disparage Wiesel in the most degrading way possible. How many times do we have to hear Rosenbaum’s description of Wiesel as “a golem of grief,” a man with “eyes circled in gloomy Dantean darkness, the Man in Black, the Johnny Cash of the death camps,” or read about Wiesel’s endless “cloud of gloom.”
We get it Ron. You believe that one of the most revered personalities of the 20th century and the man whom President Obama – whom you claim to have supported – called the “conscience of the world,” was a charlatan who utilized a melancholic affectation to increase stature. And my, aren’t you clever with all your colorful descriptions.
The second question is why Rosenbaum decided to even write his piece, given how much he insists Wiesel doesn’t matter. Rosenbaum’s column hammers home how much Wiesel “had passed his moment of real relevance,” “fewer paid attention to his stoic mien,” adding, “He was no Simon Wiesenthal.”
Ouch.
There is an article running in this month's issue of JLife (Orange County Jewish Life) by Lisa Armony, who is the director of the Rose Project, a financial arm of the Jewish Federation and Family Services of Orange County (California). It is entitled, Anti-Semitism in Charlottesville. Beginning with the recent incident in Charlottesville, Armony gives us a recitation of the history of anti-semitism in the 20th century. It is not what is in Armony's article that I take issue with. It is what is not in the article.
I do not dispute the facts of what Armony writes. Furthermore, I have no intention whatsoever of coming to the defense of people like Richard Spencer, David Duke, the KKK or neo-Nazis. They are all despicable and should be rejected by every decent American. However, there is a glaring omission here. Armony fails to write one single word about Islamic anti-semitism and the role it plays in today's anti-semitism. I happen to know Ms. Armony, and I have personally told her what I write below. In fact, we had a conversation last January at the Temple Bat Yahm in Newport Beach when that synagogue hosted an interfaith event dedicated to fighting racism, anti-semitism and Islamophobia. The event was dedicated almost as much to bashing President Trump, his supporters, and the alt-right. Here is what I wrote about the event at the time.
As laid out in the above link, Ms Armony refused to present my written question to the panel during Q and A. The question asked who was responsible for anti-semitism at UC Irvine, where I formerly taught part-time. The correct answer would have been Students for Justice in Palestine, the Muslim Student Union and their invited speakers over the past several years. Indeed, it is the pro-Palestinian lobby on college campuses all over the US which has made campus life an unpleasant experience for so many Jewish students. Though not Jewish myself, I have seen it first-hand and have spoken out about it for some ten years. When the above meeting was ended, I made it clear to Ms. Armony that the worst purveyors of anti-semitism today are not neo-Nazis or skin-heads; rather it is Muslims (not all, of course). Armony told me that this was not the time or place to bring that up. Of course not. Present at the event were some prominent Muslim leaders from Orange Country including Imam Muzammil Siddiqi, who, in recent years, has lent out his Islamic Center of Orange County for Muslim students from UC Irvine to assemble their mock "apartheid wall" for display at UCI during the annual anti-Israel week of events every May, a most inconvenient fact, which I brought to his (and everyone else's) attention during a followup event at UCI featuring many of the same people.