From The New York Times’ Editorial Board’s Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses, published on Saturday, June 14th:

The United States is experiencing its worst surge of anti-Jewish hate in many decades. Antisemitic hate crimes more than doubled between 2021 and 2023, according to the F.B.I., and appear to have risen further in 2024. On a per capita basis, Jews face far greater risks of being victims of hate crimes than members of any other demographic groups.

This was the second paragraph of this nineteen-paragraph piece. (The first was a laundry list of recent crimes, the Boulder man setting Jewish people on fire, the couple shot outside the Jewish Museum in D.C., etc.) The first six paragraphs in total could have had a home at any so-called “right-wing” media outlet, given that they were so bold, so factual. It was shocking. For the entirety of reading them my eyes were widening thinking… Did they actually write this? This can’t be real!

Heck, the editors even conceded, however obliquely, that Joe Biden might’ve had something to do with it (the antisemitism we see percolating up in America), noting as they did, the dates 2021-2024, the entirety of his term. In paragraph six, they even throw shade at Obama, again, obliquely:

[Antisemitism] tends to re-emerge when societies become polarized and people go looking for somebody to blame. This pattern helps explain why antisemitism began rising, first in Europe and then in the United States, in the 2010s, around the same time that politics coarsened.

Huh. What was going on in the 2010s, kids? That caused political discourse to “coarsen”? It’s not like Obama had a great relationship with Israel. Even NBC concedes that. And it was 2010 (in March) when Obama left Prime Minister Netanyahu to cool his heels in the White House while he, Obama, went up to the Residence for dinner. One might reasonably argue that a coarse action such as this stupefyingly, appallingly rude stunt is worse than a coarse word.

In any event, the first six paragraphs were solid. Edifying, even. Well done.

Then comes the seventh:

The political right, including President Trump, deserves substantial blame. Yes, he has led a government crackdown against antisemitism on college campuses, and that crackdown has caused colleges to become more serious about addressing the problem. But Mr. Trump has also used the subject as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education. The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.

Huh?

The editors then go on to cite a laundry list of lefty favorites, all of which are easily debunked or explained away, including the “very fine people” hoax for Charlotte, which just. will. not. die.

We get three paragraphs of this progressive fever, then, miraculously, it breaks, in paragraph ten. They continue to try to make antisemitism “bipartisan,” but just ignore that part. The rest of this sentence is solid.:

It also has a home on the progressive left, and the bipartisan nature of the problem has helped make it distinct. Progressives reject many other forms of hate even as some tolerate antisemitism.

The editors then go on to focus on the rising tide of antisemitism on campuses, with some admirable clarity, though you have to dig for it. This from paragraph thirteen:

Consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist and express admiration for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — Iran-backed terrorist groups that brag about murdering Jews. Consider how often people use ‘Zionist’ as a slur — an echo of Soviet propaganda from the Cold War — and call for the exclusion of Zionists from public spaces. The definition of a Zionist is somebody who supports the existence of Israel.

They next spend the next six paragraphs trying to knit it all together as some kind of bipartisan whole. While the editors make a few good additional observations regarding the unique, historical nature of antisemitism and how it simply mustn’t be treated as ordinary hate, they largely fail. The New York Times just can’t help itself. The paper of Walter Duranty endures.

Image created using a photograph by Ajay Suresh (CC BY 2.0).