On June 12, 2004, NPR's Scott Simon interviewed Richard Ben Cramer on the topic of the latter's newly released book How Israel Lost: The Four Questions. Though panned by numerous critics who faulted its deceptive depiction of Israel's security needs, Simon chatted appreciatively with the author, urging him to repeat from his book an anecdote about religious Jews that was evidently apocryphal and meant solely to ridicule the religious establishment in Israel. Simon did not stop there. He concluded with a remarkable question posed to the guest that may be a window on NPR attitudes about Israel.
The political cartoonist Pat Oliphant's cartoons rely on classic images: Democrat as donkey; Republican as elephant. Recently, however, he evoked a more distrurbing image—one more commonly associated with Nazi propaganda or anti-Semitic rants of extremist Islamist clerics, in his portrayal of Jews as dogs.
"Jews who fled Arab lands now press their cause" by Chronicle Staff Writer Jack Epstein, highlights the much overlooked plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. At a time when Palestinian activists are renewing their demand that Palestinian refugees and their descendants "return" to Israel — often a thinly veiled call for dissolution of the Jewish state — articles on the plight of Jewish refugees offer essential context and help provide balance to the media's general Mideast coverage.
Three San Francisco Chronicle staff-writers teamed up to author an impressive piece on the scope and severity of European anti-Semitism. The page-one Dec. 14 article detailed "the phenomenon of extreme criticism of Israel morphing into bigotry against Jews as a people."
The European Union's Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia commissioned a study of European anti-Semitism. When the report concluded that much of the anti-Jewish violence in Europe is perpetrated by Muslim immigrants, the EU shelved the report. Jewish groups protested by publishing the report online, and the EU relented and released the report, but they continue to insist that it is flawed.
On Dec. 8, the San Diego Union-Tribune published James O. Goldsborough's latest inflammatory column, this one entitled "Israel and the rise of anti-Semitism." The piece blames Israel and Jewish groups for causing anti-Jewish violence, while ignoring the role and responsibility of the mainly Arab/Muslim perpetrators.