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 Network contributed to the seething cesspool of anti-Jewish bigotry by peddling classic antisemitic tropes.
Cartoon from the Palestinian Al-Quds newspaper, Oct. 16, 2023 (Courtesy of ADL)
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.
Read the rest of Tamar Sternthal’s Dec. 26 Op-Ed in The Jerusalem Post.