"Just as Netanyahu can as little be trusted as Musk to speak credibly against antisemitism or much anything else, your readers deserve to know that Netanyahu is a sitting prime minister whose finance minister is a self-described “fascist” and whose minister of national security has been compared by pro-Israel stalwarts to the leadership of the Ku Klux Klan. To report on racism without credible anti-racist sources is irresponsible."
September 15, 2023
To:
Steve Bartlett, Managing Editor, SaltWire
Kanjyik Ghosh, Reporter, Reuters
Emily Rose, Reporter, Reuters
Steven Scheer, Reporter, Reuters
Dear Steve Bartlett, Kanjyik Ghosh, Emily Rose, and Steven Scheer,
I am writing on behalf of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME, cjpme.org) to express concern about your September 14 article, “Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to meet Elon Musk around antisemitism storm.”
Your readers are nowhere in this article given the most salient piece of information: that neither participant in this meeting is a credible source on antisemitism.
Elon Musk, yes, is at minimum flirting with white nationalism, attacking the movement that ended Apartheid in his home country of South Africa as anti-white while blowing his dog whistle with Soros claims woven of antisemitic innuendo.
Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, is so single-minded in his anti-Palestinian commitments that he has engaged in flagrant Holocaust revisionism, earning praise from US neo-Nazis and condemnation in Federicho Finchelstein’s Brief History of Fascist Lies (pp. 97–98).
Yet as this pair of historical revisionists meets, your readers are left without credible factual guidance. The “UnXeptable” citations are simply inadequate.
Significantly, nowhere do you explain what is “hateful” about the “hateful anti-Zionist” opinion that you report being irresponsibly conflated with “antisemitic invectives.” Your sources’ cynical association of things “anti-Zionist” with things “antisemitic” is not factually serious. History cannot be revised in this way without real danger.
Here in Montreal, Europe’s first Zionist Congress of 1897 had barely concluded when our city hosted a gathering of the much more representative Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR). “Resolved,” the rabbis voted: “That we totally disapprove of any attempt for the establishment of a Jewish state.” Anti-Zionism was and is just not antisemitism.
In pre-Holocaust Europe, should facts matter, the picture was also quite mixed. The world’s largest pre-Holocaust Jewish community, in Warsaw, voted in their largest numbers for an anti-Zionist political party (the Bund) in the last Jewish communal or kehile elections before re-ghettoization. Dare we call Warsaw’s late-’30s Jewish electorate antisemites?
In the present, meanwhile, it is a politics of anti-Palestinian hate that is exploding before the world’s eyes.
Just as Netanyahu can as little be trusted as Musk to speak credibly against antisemitism or much anything else, your readers deserve to know that Netanyahu is a sitting prime minister whose finance minister is a self-described “fascist” and whose minister of national security has been compared by pro-Israel stalwarts to the leadership of the Ku Klux Klan.
To report on racism without credible anti-racist sources is irresponsible. First and foremost, Palestinian sources need always to be front and centre whenever Israel is covered. Wider anti-racist perspective is available from Southern Poverty Law Center personnel.
Feel free to contact me at 438-380-5410 if you would like to discuss other resources.
Sincerely,
Dan Freeman-Maloy
PhD, University of Exeter
Director of Strategic Operations
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East/
Canadiens pour la Justice et la Paix au Moyen-Orient