{"id":74765,"date":"2019-11-25T17:05:15","date_gmt":"2019-11-25T15:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=74765"},"modified":"2019-11-25T08:45:55","modified_gmt":"2019-11-25T06:45:55","slug":"02-05-46","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=74765","title":{"rendered":"New York Times Tries Explaining Away British Labour\u2019s Antisemitism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>New York Times Tries Explaining Away British Labour\u2019s Antisemitism<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Ira Stoll<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Britain\u2019s opposition Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn leaves his house in London, Aug. 6, 2018. Photo: Reuters \/ Toby Melville.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

A\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0news article<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0reports about how \u201cBritain\u2019s Jews Are Feeling Politically Homeless\u201d amid the rise of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.<\/span><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0reports that British Jews \u201cflinch at handing power to Mr. Corbyn, seen by many as the only person who can stop Brexit, pained as they are by an avalanche of anti-Semitism accusations against the party.\u201d That\u2019s an odd formulation; it\u2019s not the\u00a0accusations<\/em>\u00a0that are causing the pain but the antisemitism.<\/span><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0article\u2019s low point is this breathtaking paragraph: \u201cScholars say certain strains of anticapitalism have historically risked casting Jews as a class of rich conspirators oppressing working people. Some of Mr. Corbyn\u2019s supporters also stridently oppose Israel, occasionally resorting to anti-Semitic tropes to make their points.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

These \u201cscholars\u201d go unnamed by the\u00a0Times<\/em>, their identity undisclosed to\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0readers. The larger problem, though, is the confusion of cause and effect. Blaming antisemitism on anticapitalism is backwards. It\u2019s just as plausible that the antisemitism is the cause of the anticapitalism as that the anticapitalism is the cause of the antisemitism. Anticapitalism is, like antisemitism, so irrational that it defies logical explanation. But one possible explanation for why some people hate capitalism is that these people hate Jew, so they hate capitalism, which is a system that allows Jews to prosper.<\/span><\/p>\n

If my logic here about capitalism seems speculative, it may be clearer for readers to follow in the case of Israel, where the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0makes a similar, parallel error, again getting the story backward. It\u2019s not, as the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0suggests, that anti-Israel sentiment \u201coccasionally\u201d spills over into antisemitism. Hating Jews isn\u2019t, as the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0portrays it, some unfortunate if somewhat rare side effect of hating Israel, like, say, an upset stomach from ibuprofen. In the non-Times<\/em>\u00a0reality, antisemites hate Israel\u00a0because<\/em>\u00a0they hate Jews, and because Israel is the Jewish state. It\u2019s not the anti-Israelism that causes the antisemitism; it\u2019s the antisemitism that causes the anti-Israelism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Veering into antisemitism doesn\u2019t help opponents of Israel \u201cmake their points,\u201d as the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0describes; it undercuts the validity of those points, discrediting them.<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition, it\u2019s also not only \u201csome of Mr. Corbyn\u2019s supporters\u201d who \u201cstridently oppose Israel\u201d; Corbyn himself has\u00a0made a career of it<\/a>.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

What other hatreds are there where the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0makes such effort to make excuses for the haters, to find the most charitable possible way of explaining away the hate?<\/span><\/p>\n

I suppose it\u2019s encouraging to see the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0covering the story of antisemitism in Europe. But if the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0is going to be offering these sorts of apologies\u2014they were just resorting to antisemitism \u201coccasionally,\u201d to \u201cmake their points\u201d against Israel\u2014it almost might be better for the Jews and maybe also for the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0if the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0ignored the story altogether. After all, for a lot of people who follow this issue, mention of strident opponents of Israel \u201coccasionally resorting to anti-Semitic tropes to make their points\u201d first brings to mind not supporters of the British Labour party, but the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0itself, which apologized earlier this year for publishing what the paper eventually conceded was\u00a0an antisemitic political cartoon<\/a><\/strong><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Ira Stoll<\/strong> was managing editor of\u00a0The Forward\u00a0and North American editor of\u00a0The Jerusalem Post. More of\u00a0his media critique, a regular\u00a0Algemeiner\u00a0feature, can be found\u00a0<\/em>here<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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New York Times Tries Explaining Away British Labour\u2019s Antisemitism Ira Stoll Britain\u2019s opposition Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn leaves his house in London, Aug. 6, 2018. Photo: Reuters \/ Toby Melville. A\u00a0New York Times\u00a0news article\u00a0reports about how \u201cBritain\u2019s Jews Are Feeling Politically Homeless\u201d amid the rise of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. The\u00a0Times\u00a0reports that British […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74765"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=74765"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74778,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74765\/revisions\/74778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=74765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=74765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=74765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}