During an interview with CNN's Brian Stelter, The New York Times' Bari Weiss laid into the media's handling of the recent spate of anti-semitic attacks that happened in the Democratic-run state of New York. Stelter asked Weiss, who wrote a recent book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, if she agreed with the arguments made by people like Ben Shapiro and Ivanka Trump who say the press has been too slow to recognize the dangerous uptick in anti-semitism taking place in the excelsior state.
"Absolutely yes," Weiss began. "When a white supremacist walked into the synagogue where I became a bat mitzvah in Pittsburgh, a Tree of Life, and said 'all jews must die,' everyone recognized that for what it was, which is that he was motivated by hatred of jews plain and simple. For some reason, people cannot seem to get their heads around the fact that when someone machetes their ... neighbors, when someone is breaking people's noses, when someone is punching people in the street, when someone is ripping off someone's kippah, it's motivated by the same thing."
Weiss also agreed with the recent assessment by Vox's Jane Coaston that "many of the anti-Semitic attacks aren’t coming from the far right, but from non-white people immersed in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that are just as baseless, virulent, and dangerous as those spread by white nationalists."
"Imagine after the horrific massacre at the Walmart in El Paso," Weiss explained, "which was motivated by hatred of immigrants and Hispanics, if the press had said that this massacre was the result of communal friction, that it was complicated, that it needed proper context, that the problem was really gentrification or economic inequality or even racism, the moral bankruptcy of that would be immediately apparent to everyone. And yet that is the kind of thing that we are hearing about the violence that is breaking out in places like Crown Heights, Borough Park, Williamsburg, Jersey City, and now Monsey with the machete attack. We’re not hearing the kind of moral clarity that we hear when the attacker is a white supremacist, and the question is why? And that is a question the press needs to answer for itself."
So add anti-Semitism to the long list of problems that are only being exacerbated by our failed immigration policies.
