#algemeiner

You don’t have to be an antisemite to get promoted by The Washington Post. But it sure seems to help. That is the inescapable conclusion from the paper’s news, editorial and opinion sections, which with growing frequency whitewash antisemites and others whose opinions on Israel and/or Jews are well outside of the mainstream.

Take, for example, The Post’s coverage of Ilhan Omar, the freshman Congresswoman from Minnesota. In 2012, Omar accused Israel of “hypnotizing the world”—an age-old antisemitic canard, as The New York Times’s Bari Weiss detailed.

Omar has, on several occasions, questioned the loyalty of Jewish-Americans, who, she has asserted, exert an undue influence in government and thereby in American public life. The Congresswoman has also expressed her support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which singles out the Jewish state for opprobrium and openly seeks its destruction.

But these readily available facts are missing in The Post’s July 6, 2019 report on Omar. In 3,639 words, reporters Greg Jaffe and Souad Mekhennet glossed over Omar’s disturbing history and comments. As CAMERA has noted, Omar’s rhetoric meet both the State Department and the widely adopted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definitions of antisemitism.

As CAMERA highlighted in a Feb. 17, 2019 Algemeiner op-ed, The Post has previously run several op-eds defending Omar.

Unfortunately, she’s not the only antisemite to receive favorable treatment from the newspaper.

On June 3, 2019, the newspaper gave column space to Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), who used it to decry her being denied a visa to enter the U.S. The Post, however, failed to inform readers about Ashrawi’s disturbing history.

Wow, the author, Pini Dunner, is such an idiotic asshat.

I hardly know where to begin:

1. This guy relies almost exclusively on anecdotal data. Not just in this article, but in the few of his I browsed. Does he not realize how invalid that is?

Let’s look at some actual data on religion and violent crime:

Citing four different studies, Zuckerman states: "Murder rates are actually lower in more secular nations and higher in more religious nations where belief in God is widespread." He also states: "Of the top 50 safest cities in the world, nearly all are in relatively non-religious countries."

Within the United States, we see the same pattern. Citing census data, he writes: "And within America, the states with the highest murder rates tend to be the highly religious, such as Louisiana and Alabama, but the states with the lowest murder rates tend to be the among the least religious in the country, such as Vermont and Oregon."

And these findings are not limited to murder rates, as rates of all violent crime tend to be higher in "religious" states. Zuckerman also points out that atheists are very much under-represented in the American prison population (only 0.2%).

2. “ It seems that while atheism may be an increasing phenomenon across the world, rather than attracting the cream of intelligentsia as its foot soldiers, the most vocal atheists are increasingly found among the belligerent fringes “

Now I personally don’t actually care whether atheists do represent the “cream of intelligensia” bc that wouldn’t really matter. But it’s idiotic to pretend that non-believers don’t represent a huge percentage of the intellectual community. For instance, Pew found that scientists are around 10x less likely to believe in god or a higher power than the general public (x). Among philosophers - certainly an important part of the “intelligensia” - non-belief is at 62% (x)! Atheists are also more likely to obtain a college degree or a post-college degree than the national average (x). And “ Overall, Zuckerman, Silberman, and Hall conclude that, according to their meta-analysis, there is little doubt a significant negative correlation exists (i.e. people who are more religious score worse on varying measures of intelligence).” (x)

But I’m sure Pini and his minyan at schul, and the orthodox community in general, is just chock full of the “cream of intelligensia”.

3. This guy is really dumb. Exhibit A, from the article:

“As I have written elsewhere, militant Islam, as promoted by groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, is just another branch of Godless atheism.“

4. “ I was reminded of the correlation between the excesses of human violence and nihilistic atheism by a Midrash on the story of Esau...”

So he’s now moved from anecdotes to actual ancient stereotypes. Brilliant.

5. “ Over the years I have discovered that atheism is no less a belief system than religion, requiring similar if not greater leaps of faith for it to make any sense.”

Riiiiiiiight. And what belief, specifically, does atheism necessitate? Oh, that’s right: None.

The UN investigator on human rights in Iran has called for an independent inquiry into allegations of state-ordered executions of thousands of political prisoners in 1988 and the role played by President-elect Ebrahim Raisi as Tehran deputy prosecutor. . . .

Raisi, a hardline judge, is under US sanctions over a past that includes what the United States and activists say was his involvement as one of four judges who oversaw the 1988 killings. Amnesty International has put the number executed at some 5,000, saying in a 2018 report that “the real number could be higher.”

Raisi, when asked about allegations that he was involved in the killings, told reporters: “If a judge, a prosecutor has defended the security of the people, he should be praised … I am proud to have defended human rights in every position I have held so far.”

Rehman said: “We have made communications to the Islamic Republic of Iran because we have concerns that there is again a policy to actually destroy the graves or there may be some activity to destroy evidence of mass graves.”

Ahmed Quraishi – Palestinian Conflict Won’t Change Arab-Israel Normalization

Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan display their copies of signed agreements while US President Donald Trump looks on, at the signing ceremony of the Abraham Accords, at the White House in Washington, DC, Sept. 15, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Tom…

Adam Levick – Walter Russell Mead Lays Out a New Paradigm for Israeli-Palestinian Peace

An aerial view of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Adam Levick – Walter Russell Mead Lays Out a New Paradigm for Israeli-Palestinian Peace Thanks to Alegemeiner News Service

Reports in The Guardianand other British media outlets on the US-sponsored economic conference scheduled to take place next month in Bahrain as the first step of the Trump…