Michael Oren: The Altneu Antisemitism: Part II
Thanks to Clarity with Michael Oren
Ancient antisemitic tropes have now thoroughly, if often unconsciously, entered acceptable daily discourse. Part I of The Altneu Antisemitism introduced the process through which this pernicious trend progressed. Now, in Part II, I’ll provide further examples of old forms of Jew-hatred are reappearing in seemingly innocuous forms.
Previously, we’ve seen how, according to the mainstream press, Jews not only revel in assassinating journalists, we delight in murdering kids. That defamation can be traced to the Gospel of Matthew and its account of the massacre of 144,000 infants—the first Christian martyrs—by the Judean king Herod. Not coincidentally, virtually all the alleged victims of medieval blood libels were children. And not so innocently, the press often portrays Israel as perpetuating that sinister tradition.
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In May 2021, for example, following a round of Gaza fighting, The New York Times devoted its entire front page to the thumbnail photos of 67 Palestinian youths allegedly killed by Israeli forces. The article, headlined “They Were Only Children,” was based on unverifiable information from “Palestinian officials.” It made no effort to investigate which of the children were the victims of short-falling terrorist rockets or had been used as human shields. The images were accompanied by heartrending bios of each of the dead. The Times had never before published such a montage, not even for the many thousands of children killed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the implication was clear. The Jewish state deliberately targets kids.
More than a quarter of the dead registered by Lebanon’s Health Ministry have been women or children. At least 231 children have been killed and 1,330 injured, according to the ministry. Over the past three weeks, an average of 3.5 children have been killed and 9.5 wounded per day, according to a review of Health Ministry data. In the past two months, at least 400,000 children have been displaced from their homes, the U.N. children’s agency estimates.
Never, to my recollection, has the Post reported on the number of Israeli children who have been killed, wounded, or displaced in this war. Never has Post admitted the fact that, in utter contrast to Israel, the terrorists try to kill the maximum number of children. And while imputing to the Jews precisely the barbarism exhibited by those aiming to massacre us, the Post implies that Jews enjoy being barbaric. After all, as BCC anchor Anjana Gadgil told former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, “Israeli forces are happy to kill children.”
The blood libel was most shamelessly leveled by a New York Times op-ed, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza,” posted on October 9. Published, apparently, to compensate for the Times’s recounting of Hamas’s atrocities the previous October, the article accuses Israel of deliberately shooting Palestinian children in the head. Accompanying the text were graphic x-rays purportedly of Israeli bullets lodged in anonymous youngsters’ heads. Once again, the newspaper made no effort to authenticate these accounts or to question whether the photos were real. They weren’t, as military and forensic experts from around the world quickly confirmed. The IDF’s high velocity 5.56 caliber bullets would have flattened upon impact, they submitted, and left a devastating exit wound. The bullets in the x-rays were perfectly preserved, as were the skulls.
Still, not all the reports suggesting Israel’s proclivity for pedicide can be labeled antisemitic or even anti-Israel. In common, though, is their use of Israel as a filter for resuscitating, amplifying, and purifying medieval accusations and presenting them to the public as facts. And unlike the old antisemites who might be exposed, shamed, and educated, the Atlneu ones are proud of their positions and immune to enlightenment. On the contrary, any attempt to challenge the Altneu views is liable to meet with censorship or worse, especially if the challenger is a Jew.
So discovered CBS Morning co-anchor Tony Dokoupil after interviewing the iconic Black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book, The Message. Dokoupil was particularly inquisitive about the longest chapter in which the author, based on a single, ten-day visit to Israel and the West Bank, demonizes Israel as a white racist state whose supporters dominate the media and suppress Palestinian voices. As pointed out by Coleman Hughes in his Free Press review, there is nothing new about the book’s classic antisemitic themes, only the reaction to Dokoupil’s questioning of them. Why had Coates failed to mention even one of the thousands of terrorist attacks against Israel, he asked, or its enemies’ serial attempts to destroy it? “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish State that is a Jewish safe place and not any of the other states out there?”
For the temerity of posing these questions, Dokoupil was pilloried by CBS for his rude and hostile conduct and for failing to meet the company’s “editorial standards.” He and his colleagues were forced to run a gauntlet of the network’s Race and Culture Unit, DEI department, and the standards and practices team. Apart from Shari Redstone, the chairwoman and CEO of CBS’ parent company, few rose to defend him. Some, not so subtly, pointed out that Dokoupil, whose ex-wife and two children live in Israel, is Jewish. So is Redstone.
This is the Altneu antisemitism, an implicit prejudice that adduces Israel as evidence of Jewish vindictiveness, avarice, and barbarism, and transforms ancient anti-Jewish myths into contemporary realities. It is a post post-Holocaust practice in which the Jew-hatred once considered marginal and unsavory has become mundane and socially acceptable. Fighting it may often appear impossible.
Yet fight it we must. The Altneu antisemites may not be educatable but not so the Jews. We must teach ourselves to recognize Jew-hatred in its new, normative form and condemn it for the racism it is. We must continue to press all levels of government to endorse the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism that clearly connects it with anti-Zionism. We must boycott news outlets and institutions that promulgate vile Jewish stereotypes and, when possible, challenge them legally. We must demand that our leaders, when confronted with charges of Israeli genocide or a surfeit of Jewish power, refute and denounce them immediately. The Altneu antisemitism demands an Altneu Defense.
