I started my writing career roughly thirty years ago with an opinion piece for the leftist Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant.
The article dealt with the shocking revelations about new concentration camps in former Yugoslavia and an anti-Semitic attack on the Auschwitz monument in a park in Amsterdam.
“Never again” said the text on the monument and for a long time I naively believed that the anti-Semitism which led to the near extinction of the Jewish community in Europe during World War II would not be possible in our time.
I also didn’t believe that Europe would see concentration camps again but the Serbian camps in former Yugoslavia proved me wrong as well.
I admitted that I had been dead wrong and called upon the European countries to acknowledge that “never again” could not be taken for granted and demanded immediate action from governments to turn the tide.
I was reminded of this article when I checked the news updates after Passover on the Israeli Rotter site and noticed a headline about an anti-Semitic cartoon in the New York Times among several breaking news reports about a shooting attack on a Chabad synagogue in southern California.
The cartoon depicted a blind US President Donald Trump wearing a yarmulke being led by a dachshund dog with the face of Israeli Prime Minister BInyamin Netanyahu wearing a collar with the star of David.
Much has already been written about the NYT cartoon and the pathetic halfhearted apology by the editors of the paper which followed its publication.
“I didn’t believe the cartoon was real when I first saw it and many of my colleagues didn’t believe it either,” wrote Op-Ed editor Seth Franzman of The Jerusalem Post in an article about the cartoon.
Franzman dismissed the apology by the NYT editors and said the publication of the horrid cartoon was no mistake as the Times wants us to believe now. According to the JPost editor at least a number of editors must have reviewed the cartoon before the decision was taken to publish it.
Some in the American Jewish community now call upon the director of the largest newspaper in the world to fire the editor who published the cartoon, but that won’t fix the real problem as Franzman proved and it won’t solve the root of the problem.
It seems too late.
The ship of hate has left the port a long time ago and the anti-Semitic horse has once again fled the open barn door and the largest paper in the free world is now in the center of the new anti-Semitic storm.
This doesn’t come as a surprise because after all, as former JPost editor-in-chief and current NYT columnist Bret Stephens pointed out the New York Times has a long history of anti-Semitism which dates back to WW II when the paper buried news about the Holocaust.
Stephens could have added that today the paper is suffering from modern anti-Semitism –which includes applying a double standard vis a vis Israel and denouncing Zionism- and not only because of the cartoon it decided to publish.
The New York Times clearly has a long-standing unhealthy obsession with Israel and is constantly burying the truth about the virulently hatred unleashed by Palestinian Arabs against the Jewish state.
At the same time, the paper is highlighting every perceived Israeli misdeed in the ongoing conflict with the various Palestinian terror groups.
“This should be a defining moment,” Franzman wrote adding that the NYT “shows America’s face to the world.”
That’s besides the truth, however, the paper represents only the leftist worldview of a part of American society and it is the left which is largely to blame for the current explosion of anti-Semitic incidents in many countries.
Like in Israel, media in Western countries are largely controlled by so-called liberal elites and they are openly collaborating with Islamists who not only try to destroy Israel but also the free world.
The decades-long media campaign against Israel is influencing the masses in many countries and has created a climate which inspires radicals on the right and left side of the political spectrum who do not any longer differ between Jews and Israel.
By manipulating the news about Israel a large segment of the media has convinced the masses into believing that Israel is to blame for the ongoing conflict with the Palestinian Arabs and Muslim countries and is acting as an outlaw state.
They now claim that PM Netanyahu is controlling the White House and the man who they hate even more than the Israeli leader: President Donald Trump as the NYT cartoon made clear.
As a result, the number of anti-Semitic incidents is on the rise in many mainly Western countries.
The Anti-Defamation League in the US just published its annual report on anti-Semitic incidents in the US and found that the number of physical attacks against Jews in 2018 more than doubled compared to 2017.
The same phenomenon is visible in France, The United Kingdom, Germany, The Netherlands and even Finland.
The same European countries continue to protect the only country in the world which threatens to carry out a new Holocaust, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Today “Never Again” sounds like a hollow and laughable promise and media like the New York Times have played a significant role in creating a climate where Jews – be it in Israel or in the Diaspora – again worry about the possibility of a new Holocaust.
Source material can be found at this site.
