MRC’s Hypocritical Double Standard On Anti-Semitism

After the Hamas attack on Israel in October, the Media Research Center rushed to attack anyone who dared voice anything even slightly critical of Israel as an endorsement of Hamas and liberally throwing around the “anti-Semitic” tag. For instance:

• Worst of the Media’s Decades-Long, Antisemitic Hamas PR Campaign
• WashPost Hates Cancel Culture When It’s Applied to Leftist Anti-Semites
• NY Times Pivots: Anti-Semitic Op-eds, Finding ‘Context’ for Hamas War Crimes
• Israeli Official Tells Off CNN, Anti-Semites on College Campuses/Congress
• Nets Decide to Care About ‘Alarming’ Anti-Semitism in Colleges Now the WH’s Involved
• NY Times Lends Voice to Anti-Semitic Poster Vandals: ‘Own Form of Protest’

This is all utterly hypocritical, given that the MRC has never rushed to criticize actual anti-Semitism on its own side. It spent years praising Kanye West for spouting anti-abortion rhetoric and palling around with Donald Trump, but when he started spouting virulently anti-Semitic remarks — ironically, two days after the MRC’s Tierin-Rose Mandelburg gushed, “BRB, adding Kanye West’s music to my daily mix,” in a post that aged extremely poorly to say the least — the MRC was still praising him, with Mandelburg cheering his “power moves only” and “mic freakin’ drop” after his “White Lives Matter” stunt with Candace Owens. It took 10 full days for the MRC to address West’s “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” and even then it was buried in an article cheering West for buying right-wing social media site Parler (a deal that fell through when West’s anti-Semitism became too toxic). The MRC then tried to argue that the cancellation of West’s social media accounts somehow proved he was correct about his hatred of Jews (though the MRC deleted that post a few days later). It wasn’t until it was argued that Ye’s anti-Semitism is part of mainstream conservatism that the MRC was finally moved to forcefully criticize him. Still, when an MRC writer criticized Apple Music for deleting a West playlist, he couldn’t be moved to accurately describe West’s hateful remarks as anti-Semitic.

The MRC was similarly squishy about anti-Semitic remarks made by NBA player Kyrie Irving , then labored hard to distance Donald Trump from his role in having dinner with West and anti-Semitic white supremacist Nick Fuentes, despite Trump’s history of invoking offensive Jewish stereotypes. All this, of course, didn’t stop the MRC from rushing to frame Rep. Ilhan Omar’s criticism of Israel as “anti-Semitic” though it mostly looked the other way when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene spouted weird things about Jewish space lasers.

Despite that, the MRC lashed out when non-right-wing media refused to play along with its narrative. Alex Christy whined in an Oct. 14 post that the Associated Press fact-checked a viral tweet portraying old content as new:

AP fact-checker Philip Marcelo beclowned himself on Friday as he rated a claim that Hamas sympathizers chanted anti-Semitic remarks “false,” not because they didn’t—he admits that they did—but because the clip “is more than two years old.”

Under the headline, “Old video of pro-Palestine supporters shouting antisemitic remarks is being misleadingly shared,” Marcelo begins by laying out the “CLAIM: A video shows Hamas sympathizers driving through London shouting antisemitic remarks during Friday’s day of protests against Israel.”

He then responds, “AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The widely shared clip is more than two years old. London police at the time apprehended four men in connection with the incident.”

[…]

Marcello’s X-used-to-be-known-as-X blunder aside, nowhere in those quotations does anyone mention anything about a date. It is not as if the people who demonstrated in support of Hamas on Friday have suddenly changed their tune. Quite the opposite, in fact. This is who Hamas and their sympathizers are.

Of course, the implication was that the video was new, whether Christy wants to admit it or not, and it was dishonest to suggest otherwise.

An Oct. 16 post by Luis Cornelio cheered the removal of an “anti-Semitic” video from YouTube:

YouTube, infamously known for its quick censorship of speech critical of the left, inexplicably dragged its feet to take down a sickening video from Hamas terrorist leaders calling for Islamists to rise up against Israel. It did so only after MRC Free Speech America pressed the company over its policies.

MRC Free Speech America reached out to YouTube on Oct. 12 to question whether the company allowed content that “actively calls for the mass murder of Israeli citizens?” MRC researchers launched an investigation after Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh helped to ignite what became infamously known as the “Day of Jihad.” Haniyeh’s anti-Semitic call to action against Israel was uttered during an interview with Qatari state-owned Al Jazeera, which the outlet — notorious for its historically pro-Hamas bent — then promoted on YouTube. 

By contrast, Cornelio and the rest of the MRC have been silent about the plethora of anti-Semitic content at right-wing video site Rumble and how it helps the creators of that content make money off it.

An Oct. 28 column by Jeffrey Lord, headlined “The Rise of Anti-Semitism In America, Again: What The Media Elite Forgets,” which is largely a tangent about the Nazi-linked German-American Bund in the 1930s, which unsurprisingly had an anti-Semitic component. Lord declared that “history records the American people of the day were seriously appalled by all of this. They were informed by the media of the day.” What Lord forgets is that anti-Semitism in America didn’t begin or end with the German-American Bund — no less than Henry Ford was virulently anti-Semitic to the point that he published newspapers to spread that hate — meaning that the Bund had a ready audience for that part of its agenda.

As all this was going on, there was more hypocrisy: The MRC desperately tried to ignore that Elon Musk endorsed an anti-Semitic tweet and even tried to insist that it wasn’t a reflection of how Musk actually feels. No liberal would get such a wide benefit of the doubt from the MRC, and it has denounced non-conservatives as “anti-Semitic” for less.