The effort by the Times to depict Mr. Bannon as the second coming of Adolph Hitler and David Duke initially struck me as odd. I say that primarily because when my book JFK, Conservative came out, Mr. Bannon had me on his radio show. He was gracious, friendly and supportive. He’d clearly read the book, which has plenty of material about Kennedy and Israel and the Soviet Jews, and which doesn’t exactly leave it a mystery where I am coming from on those issues. I assume he realized I was Jewish from my biography indicating past work for the Forward and the Jerusalem Post.
In the past few days, additional testimony and information has emerged. Ben Shapiro, a critic of Breitbart‘s who left the site with some acrimony, nevertheless wrote: “I have no evidence that Bannon’s a racist or that he’s an anti-Semite; the Huffington Post’s blaring headline ‘WHITE NATIONALIST IN THE WHITE HOUSE’ is overstated, at the very least.” No mention of that in the New York Times.
As David Bernstein has pointed out, the Breitbart site also includes totally philosemitic and innocuous content, such as this story headlined: “1000 Attend Giant Shabbat Dinner in Tel Aviv for Global Shabbat Project.” No mention of that in the New York Times.
It’s interesting, too, that the New York Times that is so suddenly on newfound hair-trigger alert for antisemitism would publish, in the same issue as all the paranoid coverage of Mr. Bannon, an article headlined: “76 Experts Urge Donald Trump to Keep Iran Deal.” Among these “experts” are Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whose view of the “Israel lobby” was endorsed by David Duke, and whose book and Harvard Kennedy School paper were widely condemned by Jewish groups for trafficking in long-discredited and harmful stereotypes of Jewish influence. Yet the Times news article doesn’t even mention their involvement, let alone their sordid history. It’s a double standard — almost enough to make one think that what the Times is worried about isn’t antisemitism, but Republicans in the White House.
To be fair, that’s always what they’re worried about. But getting this kind of pushback — in The Algemeiner, no less — is a pretty brutal blow.