When it is convenient, the left delights in tarring its political opponents with the brush of anti-Semitism, a subset of the larger racist smear.
True, as progressives have aligned themselves more aggressively with the Islamic cause, they are having a harder time pulling this gambit off, but it has worked so spectacularly in the past they sometimes cannot help themselves.
This week they tried it out on Donald Trump. Wearying of simply comparing Trump to Hitler, the leftist media, CNN front and center, decided that Trump was indifferent to the terror aimed at American Jews.
This is an old trick. Before Pearl Harbor, American conservatives, like the vast majority of Americans, generally opposed American entry into World War II. After the carnage of World War I just 20 years prior, the opposition made perfect sense.
America's communists opposed American entry as well. At the time, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies. As brutal totalitarian states, they had a lot in common, including their respective halves of Poland.
In June 1941, however, Nazi Germany turned on the Soviet Union, and the sophisticated Soviet propaganda machine turned on America's conservatives.
From the Soviet perspective, anyone who continued to resist America's entry into the war had to be a fascist, and so was born the "brown smear." The smear has outlived the Soviet Union and continues to mutate.
The media tried out a new version this week. Here is how it worked. On Monday evening CNN published an article with the seemingly benign headline, "White House denounces threats to Jewish centers."
The headline was the only honest part of the article. The thrust of the article quickly turned fake: "The reaction is notable coming after weeks of criticism that the Trump administration has not been forceful enough to denounce acts of anti-Semitism that have occurred nationwide since his election."
CNN cited no "acts of anti-Semitism" other than bomb threats of unknown origin. The "since his election" phrase insinuated that Trump supporters have made these threats.
The "weeks of criticism" suggested that Trump either endorsed these acts or did not care enough to denounce them.
A Google search, however, shows almost no articles on such bomb threats from Inauguration Day until this week, let alone any criticism of President Trump for his silence.
A New York Times article from Jan. 9 of this year explored an outbreak of bomb threats in January. Without a shred of evidence, the Times reporters and the quoted Jewish leaders all directly or indirectly tied the calls to Trump supporters.
They suggested the threats were "reflective of sort of the political discourse that we've had in this country." The Times article, like the CNN article, was silent on Islam. The word was not mentioned in either.
The McClatchy article on Trump's alleged indifference launched its attack right in the headline, "Trump finally denounces anti-Semitic attacks. Is it enough?"
"Days after he declined to denounce anti-Semitism," wrote Anita Kumar, "President Donald Trump finally condemned the reported increase in anti-Semitism in the United States that has been linked to his political rise."
This wasn't news. This was agitprop, pure old-school, Soviet-style brown smear. The increase in anti-Semitism wasn't "reported"; it was imagined. Its link to Trump's rise was pure slander, based on no known reality.
Kumar's lengthy article failed even to mention that Trump's daughter Ivanka, her husband and children are Orthodox Jews or that Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally felt welcome at the White House after eight years of Obama.
Kumar then goes on to say, Trump's slogan "'America first' also recalls the movement that urged the country to appease Adolf Hitler decades ago." This, of course, is an appalling re-write of history.
In neither the McClatchy or CNN article is there any mention of actual terror attacks against Jewish facilities. In 1992 Hezbollah blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29. Two years later, the group blew up the Jewish Community Center in the same city, killing 85.
In 2008 Islamic jihadists attacked a Jewish Center in Mumbai, killing eight. In January 2015, an Islamic terrorist killed four at a Jewish deli in Paris. The Islamic terrorist behind the November 2015 attacks in Paris had plans to strike Jewish targets had he not been apprehended.
Worse, on the same day the Kansas City Star ran the McClatchy article, it ran an article on a Missouri ISIS wannabe caught in an FBI terror sting.
Among other ambitions, the man threatened to kill the "Zionist Jew Pig." The Star article left that out. Why interfere with so delightful a Brown Smear?
Media wishing to interview Jack Cashill, please contact [email protected].
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