In 2023, the American Jewish community, which accounts for less than 3% of the nation’s total population, has been on the receiving end of two-thirds of all religion-based hate crimes in the country (1,832 out of 2,699), the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed in September.
This month, the USA Today news network contributed to the seething cesspool of anti-Jewish bigotry by peddling classic antisemitic tropes.
The nearly 3,000-word article – “‘No one ever asks a Palestinian’: Ohio residents reacting with grief and anger over carnage in the Middle East,” in Ohio’s Canton Repository – appeared December 1 in more than a dozen newspapers across the country, from The Register Guard in Eugene, Oregon to the Palm Beach Post in Florida.
Beyond grief and anger, interviewees unleashed unabashed antisemitism, with one invoking the age-old anti-Jewish myth straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion alleging a Jewish cabal controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions.
“If you have Google behind you, if you have Microsoft behind you, if you have Intel behind you, if you have Lockheed-Martin and Boeing behind you, yeah, of course you’re going to be able to prop yourself up for 76 years,” reporter Charita M. Goshay quoted Hasan Mueheisen without providing further comment. The Palestinian-American interviewee was alluding to alleged Jewish – or perhaps Israeli – control of business and tech giants to sustain the Jewish state.
If Jews really wielded that much power, then presumably they could do something about the itty problem of being the insanely disproportionate target of US hate crimes.
But neither critical thought, nor rigorous journalism, were strong points in the Canton Repository article, which enjoyed national exposure thanks to the USA Today news network.
“We will seek to promote understanding of complex issues,” USA Today network pledges in its “Principles of Ethical Conduct for Newsrooms.” Yet Goshay allows Mueheisan’s antisemitism to pass without comment or challenge, literally giving him the last word.
Goshay extends this deferential treatment to the full roster of her truth-defying interviewees. The anti-Israel accusers freely lob historic and present-day vilification of the “settler-colonialist” State of Israel, bandying about fabricated charges of “genocide, dehumanization, dispossession, and apartheid.”
At no point does the local Ohio reporter, with an out-sized national reach, make clear that the US government has repeatedly rejected the “genocide” smear and repudiated the “apartheid” canard as “absurd.”
In another stroke of ludicrousness, Palestinian-American Rima Rafidi-Kern is quoted without challenge: “We’re the original Christians.” That’s a bald-faced lie. The original Christians were converted Jews. Jesus himself was a Jew, an inconvenient reality of ancient Jewish indigeneity belying the “settler-colonialist” canard.
GOSHAY, A reporter of local Midwestern affairs, loses her way in Mideast coverage, flailing even with basic nomenclature. “Palestine – also known as Israel,” she confounds the no-longer existent Palestine Mandate with Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
She bungles the 1947 United Nations plan as “partitioning the territory between the new State of Israel, the kingdom of Jordan and Egypt, and the exclusively Palestinian Gaza Strip.” In fact, the Partition Plan had nothing to do with Jordan or Egypt. As the UN explained: “The plan envisages the division of Palestine into three parts: a Jewish state, an Arab State, and the city of Jerusalem, to be placed under an international trusteeship system.”
The proposed Arab state included not only the Gaza Strip but also the West Bank and a huge chunk of what is now central and even southern Israel (including the city of Beersheba), along with a significant patch of land in the north, encompassing Acre and Nahariya.
But in a colossal misjudgment that sealed their people’s unfortunate fate for generations, the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected the seminal Partition Plan and the surrounding Arab countries attacked the nascent Jewish state. Arab leadership in Haifa, Jerusalem, Tiberias, and other locations encouraged residents to flee, resulting in the Palestinian refugee crisis.
Goshay neglects to mention these key historical events, choosing not to intrude on her interviewees’ uninterrupted soliloquy of singular Israeli culpability for Palestinian displacement.
Moreover, Goshay piles on in her own voice: “Palestinians argue that Israel’s Zionist government has trampled on” Balfour Declaration concerns for protection of Palestinian-owned land and religious rights. “They point to the more than 700,000 Palestinians who were displaced in 1948, with many ending up in refugee camps.”
The journalist’s exoneration of Palestinians for any responsibility reaches the reductio ad absurdum in her depiction of Hamas as thwarted peace activists forced into violence by Israel. Rami Hamdan said, “Hamas began with peaceful demonstrations,” intones the credulous reporter about an organization whose antisemitic founding charter calls “to fight the Jews and kill them.”
“The Palestinian people tried the Martin Luther King way, the way of no violence; they tried it,” Goshay quotes Hamdan of Canton. Apparently, the untold early MLK chapter of Palestinian history has mysteriously been erased from all historical memory and archives, wrongly replaced instead with a bloody trail of hijackings, bombings, and terror at the Olympics.
In this alternate reality, “Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged Hamas to begin because he did not want the PLO.” So talented was the young Netanyahu that he apparently pulled off this feat from New York where he served as ambassador to the United Nations during the time of the Hamas terror organization’s founding.
Goshay’s grasp of present-day reality is equally tenuous. Apparently unaware that more than 90% of West Bank Palestinians live under their own Palestinian Authority government, Goshay broadcasts her ignorance: “Palestinians cannot purchase property in the West Bank. Palestinian vehicles are required to display special license plates, and drivers are restricted to certain roads.”
Palestinians maintain rights in the West Bank
Palestinians, of course, are free to purchase property in Areas A and B of the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority rules and where most live. Likewise, they may display flags, and Palestinian flags proudly and prominently appear at demonstrations, in funerals, on school buildings, and government institutions.
As for “special license plates,” these are what are otherwise known as Palestinian license plates. The Palestinian Authority issues Palestinian license plates to its citizens and the Israeli authorities likewise issues Israeli plates to its citizens.
While Palestinians are restricted from entering Israeli communities in the West Bank, Israeli citizens are forbidden from entering the Palestinian Authority-ruled Area A. Israelis who nevertheless enter Area A, either because they are lost or because they defy the prohibition in search of shopping or other services, often do not make it home alive.
Rafidi-Kern’s unchallenged fabrication, therefore, that Israeli settlers “can come to the houses of the Palestinians, and they claim this is theirs” is as inspired as her “original Christians” lie of biblical proportions.
SO THOROUGH is the USA Today network article’s denial of any Palestinian agency that it blames the Jewish state for Palestinian antisemitism.
“I have yet to meet a single Palestinian in my entire life who has been taught to hate Jews or anybody for their religious faith, or lack of faith for that matter. That was never taught to us as children. The only time you see someone go to that extreme is if they have faced the brutality of the occupation, which can lead somebody to escalate to that level and target specific people,” said Hamdan, without being challenged.
In fact, Palestinian children in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are systematically indoctrinated to hate Jews from a young age. Government-controlled Palestinian television teaches anti-Jewish hatred and violence. Nahoul, a giant bee on Hamas TV, urged children to shoot Jews. Assud, the Hamas rabbit, promised to eat Jews. Schools and summer camps carry the names of terrorists who slaughtered Israeli civilians; textbooks treat subjects like physics and math as an opportunity to teach Jew-hatred.
An Anti-Defamation League survey in 2014 found the world’s highest concentration of antisemitic sentiment in the West Bank and Gaza, with 93% of those surveyed embracing anti-Jewish views.
“Hate and the blame culture go hand in hand, for they are both strategies of denial,” wrote the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. “’It wasn’t me, it was them, I acted in self-defense, I am the victim, not the perpetrator.’ The murder of the innocent then becomes a holy deed.”
Does USA Today’s news network really want to export the unholy nexus of hate, blame, and violence to communities across America, lending a hand to the most ancient bigotry and supplying perceived justifications for the next hate crime perpetrator?
The writer is the director of the Israel office of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).