“The right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” is guaranteed right at the top of the First Amendment, but the folks in charge of The Washington Post see such action as profoundly sinister if the “wrong” people do it, or perhaps the paper’s problem is with association and communication for the wrong causes.
We can’t make anything else of the paper’s oh-so-appalled report that “a group of billionaires and business titans working to shape U.S. public opinion of the war in Gaza privately pressed New York City’s mayor last month to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.”
As if Mayor Adams didn’t hear from a ginormous range of advocates on every side of every question, including the likes of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, New York’s vibrant Muslim and Jewish communities, a ton of Democratic clubs and on and on . . .
Most important, Adams didn’t send in the NYPD until Columbia asked for help, at which point it became his duty.
The WaPo’s defenders might claim the story was really about the group, a high-powered bunch that started communicating in a WhatsApp group chat, started by real-estate mogul Barry Sternlicht last Oct. 12 with an eye on changing “the narrative” on Israel and bringing attention to “the atrocities committed by Hamas.”
Which, thank goodness. The American left instantly greeted the Oct. 7 atrocities with cheers and huge anti-Israeli rallies (some advertised with terror-paragliders).
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They could see what was coming down the barrel as Israel’s war with Hamas began: an explosion of antisemitism and a passionate push (now succeeding!) for President Biden to stop Israel from eliminating the terror outfit.
Not only was the Sternlicht group’s forming admirable, it was necessary.
But the WaPo chose to paint it as a sinister, shadowy force, though plenty of its members (Bill Ackman, anyone?) have been as public as it gets these past few months.
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City Hall (as in a Deputy Mayor for Communications Fabien Levy’s blazing tweet) smells a whiff of antisemitism in the WaPo report, and perhaps there is: Intimating that a mainly Jewish bunch of wealthy power-players were quietly pulling a politician’s strings is a classic trope of Jew-hate.
But mostly it looks to us like general bias of most of the US media these days: Anyone organizing for causes “everyone” in the newsroom opposes is an evil conspirator.
Hence all the stories about right-wing “dark money” in politics, even though more of such anonymous spending goes to lefty causes.
Whatever went on in the other Post’s newsroom, it was lame journalism.
Source link: https://nypost.com/2024/05/17/opinion/wapos-disgusting-use-of-an-antisemitic-trope-endangers-jews/