The Media's Anti-Semitic Hate Machine

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
25 August '10

The Nazi propaganda rag Der Sturmer may have gone out of publication around the time that the Fuhrer's ashes were smoldering in his bunker beneath the Wilhelmstrasse, but its motto is present today in almost every liberal newspaper in the Western world. Der Sturmer's daily invocation of "Die Juden sind unser Unglück!" or "The Jews are our misfortune!" is omnipresent in the media coverage of almost anything involving the Middle East or Islamic terrorism.


The theme is much the same now as it was then, the Jews are responsible for all our problems. The presentation is of course much more subtle, but then Der Sturmer was considered vulgar even by much of the Nazi hierarchy, which preferred the more staid Völkisch Observer. Today's papers prefer to be in the Observer mode, the Storming they leave to the "plausible deniability" blogs of an Andrew Sullivan or a Glenn Greenwald, material that they pay for, but like a lot of the Nazi hierarchy and Der Sturmer, don't necessarily want to be too closely associated with.

The ideas however are not particularly original. The Jews are to blame both for the wars and for losing them, a propaganda paradox put to good use by the Nazis. The idea that the Jews were physically responsible for 9/11 is an area that the media leaves to the fringe, but the suggestion that the Jews provoked Bin Laden's anger against America shows up in countless columns and op-ed's. One is a radical conspiracy theory, while the other is a mainstream media talking point, but in terms of consciously stoking hate, what exactly is the difference. Only that the latter is vague enough to be defensible, especially when bolstered by a few selectively chosen quotes from the man himself.

By linking Islamic terrorism to some form of Israeli provocation, and from there to the support for Israel by American Jews-- the same media which would commit seppuku rather than blame Muslims for Islamic terrorism, instead blames Jews for Islamic terrorism. The steady drumbeat of such rhetoric, which exonerates Muslims but indicts Jews, for the actions of Muslims, is brilliantly perverse. And it also puts the lie to the media's defense that it avoids attributing terrorism to Islam because it does not want to stoke bigotry. In reality, the media has no problem with using Islamic terrorism to stoke bigotry. It just has a different target in mind.

Behind the media's long ugly history of misreporting terrorism against Israel, has been that one fundamental narrative, that it is not Muslims who are responsible for Muslim terrorism, but the Jews. When a Muslim terrorist attack happens in Tel Aviv, Madrid or New York-- it turns out that the Jews are the ones to blame. It really doesn't matter whether an Israeli soldier kills a Muslim terrorist, or a Muslim terrorist kills a Jewish father of four driving home from work, it is never the Muslim that is at fault. Always the Jew. Forget about even splitting the difference. There is never any difference to split. It is always Israel's "humiliation" of Arab Muslims that is at fault for provoking their righteously murderous anger. A familiar theme that recalls Hitler's constant invocation of "German humiliation" at the hands of the Jews.

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