Jewish groups lambast CNN for hiding antisemitism

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Several Jewish groups are criticizing CNN for its recent special covering the rise of antisemitism, which focused mainly on “right wing,” white supremacist threats while “whitewashing” left-wing antisemitism and anti-Jewish attacks by other minority groups, The Daily Caller News Foundation said in a report.

“Experts across the board caution antisemitism is growing on the left, but it is not equivalent to hate on the right”, CNN Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash stated in her special, “Rising Hate: Antisemitism in America”.

She then advertised part of her special in a tweet stating the issue is “complicated and nuanced”, which both the Jewish Leadership Project and the Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV) called a “whitewash” of left-wing attacks toward Jews in public press releases.

Bash interviewed Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who previously served as a staffer for former President Barack Obama, and progressive rabbi Jill Jacobs, who said she is more terrified of antisemitism on the right. “On the left it is more in the discourse”, she concluded.

“That’s because attacks on Jews are increasingly coming from the left and they don’t want to admit it. They rightfully cite white supremacists, but when it comes to black supremacists, left-wing anti-Zionists, radicals and Islamists … it’s complicated and nuanced,” the Jewish Leadership project added, criticizing Bash’s comments in an email to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“On the extreme right, (anti-Semites) are the tornado that will tear apart your house and kill everyone inside in an instant,” Greenblatt told CNN. “The far left is like climate change. Slowly, but surely the temperature is rising”.

“The only ‘rabbi’ they quote is regarded by most of the Jewish community as providing cover for antisemitism,” CJV President Rabbi Yaakov Menken told DCNF. He noted that CNN did not talk to any traditional or more conservative rabbis.

“I have worked in academia for two decades. I have yet to encounter a white supremacist group at CUNY,” City University of New York Professor Jeffery Lax, who runs the group S.A.F.E. CUNY, told the DCNF. “On the other hand, I can roll off of the top of my head several violent attacks by left wing radicals against Jews just from the past year or two”.

He claimed a CUNY student took a bat to an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn when another student, Nerdeen Kiswani, held a rally where pro-Palestinian protesters chanted “Globalize the Intifada”, a violent uprising that Palestinians waged against Jews living in Israel over two time periods.

Former New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind called the special “a slanted point of view of antisemitism” that is “obsessed” with white supremacy in an interview with DCNF. He said the ADL is in a “good shidduch”, or good relationship, with CNN, claiming they refuse to examine who is committing anti-Jewish hate crimes in his state “which happen to be other minorities”.

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