The Washington Post continues its well-worn habit of publishing and promoting terror apologists, anti-Israel activists and antisemites.
You don’t have to be an antisemite to get promoted by The Washington Post. But it sure seems to help. That is the inescapable conclusion from the paper’s news, editorial and opinion sections, which with growing frequency whitewash antisemites and others whose opinions on Israel and/or Jews are well outside of the mainstream.
Take, for example, The Post’s coverage of Ilhan Omar, the freshman Congresswoman from Minnesota. In 2012, Omar accused Israel of “hypnotizing the world”—an age-old antisemitic canard, as The New York Times’s Bari Weiss detailed.
Omar has, on several occasions, questioned the loyalty of Jewish-Americans, who, she has asserted, exert an undue influence in government and thereby in American public life. The Congresswoman has also expressed her support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which singles out the Jewish state for opprobrium and openly seeks its destruction.
But these readily available facts are missing in The Post’s July 6, 2019 report on Omar. In 3,639 words, reporters Greg Jaffe and Souad Mekhennet glossed over Omar’s disturbing history and comments. As CAMERA has noted, Omar’s rhetoric meet both the State Department and the widely adopted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definitions of antisemitism.
As CAMERA highlighted in a Feb. 17, 2019 Algemeiner op-ed, The Post has previously run several op-eds defending Omar.
Unfortunately, she’s not the only antisemite to receive favorable treatment from the newspaper.
On June 3, 2019, the newspaper gave column space to Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), who used it to decry her being denied a visa to enter the U.S. The Post, however, failed to inform readers about Ashrawi’s disturbing history.
In a November 2000 interview with the Associated Press (AP), Ashrawi endorsed the murder of Israeli civilians saying, “Settlers have become legitimate and select targets of Palestinian resistance.” As Adam Levick of UK Media Watch, a CAMERA affiliate, has documented, Ashrawi has defended terrorist groups like Hezbollah and has previously declined to renounce anti-Jewish violence.
