Adam Levick @ UK Media Watch:
(...) Even in Israel, where most generally view the Republican presidential candidates more favorably than the Democrats, polls showed that Israelis strongly preferred Hillary to Trump. This brings us to the following tweet by Gregg Carlstrom, who covers the Middle East for Times of London and The Economist, responding to a tweet about Marc Zell, co-chair of Republicans Overseas Israel.
Gilead Ini, a senior researcher for CAMERA, responded. Here’s the series of exchanges between Carlstrom and Ini.
The exchange was quite revealing. Despite the fact that American and Israeli Jews strongly favored Trump’s opponent, Carlstrom somehow found it necessary to not only highlight the pro-Trump sentiment (‘bad deed’) of one Jew, but to suggest (as Bradley Burston in Haaretz did yesterday, and as others have done even more viciously in different contexts) that even one such Jewish bad deed reflects poorly on all Jews.
Ini’s point that “Jews shouldn’t have to wince anymore every time a Jew does something unseemly, for fear of how *they* will be perceived” is an important one within the history of antisemitism. As Leon Wieseltier has has argued, this tendency amongst some on the left today to divide American Jews into good Jews and bad Jews is a practice with an extremely sordid – and historically ‘right-wing’ – political history.
So, was the tweet by Carlstrom – who, we should add, is normally one of the more sober voices among the foreign journalists we cover – simply a generic act of virtue signalling? Or, was he playing into the ‘good jew-bad Jew’ paradigm? We of course don’t know for sure.
However, one thing should be clear: Marc Zell certainly did not represent Jews – American or Israeli – when he visited the Kotel by himself and thanked G-d for Donald Trump. He only represented Marc Zell.Read more
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