Adam Johnson

They can simply make an argument that, yes, there's a bias, but it's good that it's a bias because Israel's good and Palestinians are ontologically evil.

And again, one is welcome to find that argument convincing.

I find it a little pat.

Well, I'll back up and discuss the first part because I think they're related, which is there has obviously been a huge pro-Israel propaganda apparatus premised on this constant victim mentality.

So even though they have wildly more technologically superior to the Palestinians and obviously to a great extent the Lebanese they're bombing, again, despite the fact that they are backed up by the largest empire in the history of the world, they must paint themselves as terrorists.

victims under siege by a kind of left-wing Islamo conspiracy theory that hates Israel because of anti-Semitism or anti-Americanism or some kind of brain worm.

And this is what these pro-Israel groups, specifically the so-called Anti-Defamation League run by Jonathan Greenblatt, have been very good at framing criticism of Israel as a form of racial prejudice towards Jewish people as such.

And this is why they've kind of used these turnkey anti-discrimination policies on campus to go after campus protesters.

and why they use the language of anti-Semitism to shut down criticism because what's the worst thing you can call a liberal, a racist, a bigot?

And for good reason.

Nobody wants to be a bigot.

That's a good instinct to want to have.

And they exploit that instinct to chill criticism for what was obviously a nihilistic campaign of mass death and destruction that anyone can see.

And this is why I document the disproportionate coverage of anti-Semitism using Islamophobia as a reference because even if you use the ADL's definition of anti-Semitism,

Every one of these government mandated studies at universities, specifically Harvard, found an equal amount of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred, as we just saw, of course, in the Islamic Center in San Diego just yesterday.

And yet the coverage we got was almost exclusively about anti-Semitism.

The New York Times, under our study for the first six months, ran 82 headlines focusing exclusively on anti-Semitism, only eight on Islamophobia.

They had five that were both.

Washington Post was 54 for anti-Semitism, five for Islamophobia.

AP was 75 articles on anti-Semitism and four for Islamophobia.