Yesterday we posted on the results of a new international antisemitism poll by ADL, which demonstrated that Palestinians are the most antisemitic people among the 100 countries surveyed. We noted that Palestinians are even more antisemitic than citizens in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Iran.

Here are some of the highlights:

88% of Palestinians believe Jews have too much control over global affairs.

89% believe Jews have too much power over international financial markets

88% of Palestinians believe that Jews have too much control over the global media

78% of Palestinians believe that Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars.

87% of Palestinians believe that people hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.

It would seem that true anti-racists would have a pretty difficult time defending such views – as some of the tropes are indistinguishable from the notorious Czarist forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

To boot, a Guardian op-ed published today by pro-Palestinian activists Donna Nevel and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark begins with this headline and photo:



The photo is surreal. An op-ed about antisemitism doesn’t depict Jews, but Palestinians, who, we are told, are denied their basic human rights.

It gets worse, much worse.

Here’s the opening passage, employing a modified version of the Livingstone formula, in which it’s claimed that Jews try to silence and intimidate those who don’t share their views on Israel:

This week the Anti-Defamation League – an organization with a long history of trying to silence and intimidate those who don’t share their unwavering support for Israel and its policies – published a survey ringing the alarm about antisemitism.

So, to the authors of the op-ed, a poll demonstrating dangerous levels of antisemitism among Palestinians is itself an attempt to silence debate.

They continue:

Rather than advance our understanding of this serious issue, the survey seems predictably designed to stir up fear that Jew-hatred is a growing global phenomenon that puts the world’s Jews universally at risk, and that the biggest culprits are Muslims and Arabs, particularly Palestinians.

This is remarkable. The ADL is evidently of guilty of ‘stirring up fear’ by demonstrating that Arabs and Muslims are the biggest culprits of antisemitism. Do the authors take issue with the methodology of the poll, or do they simply not fancy the results?

The following passage is even more astonishing:

The most striking example of a leading question undergirds the ADL’s claim that the highest percentage of anti-Semitism is among Palestinians who live in the occupied territories. The ADL asked a group of people for whom the movement of goods, money and labor is controlled by Israel, “Do Jews have too much power in the business world?“. Were they really to be expected to answer anything but “yes”?

Evidently, according to Nevel and Kleinberg Neimark, Palestinians possess no moral agency and can’t be held accountable for standards of decency. It’s impossible not read that passage as a justification for Palestinian antisemitism.

The op-ed continues:

In its press release, the ADL states that “The most widely accepted anti-Semitic stereotype worldwide is: Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country/the countries they live in.” It’s an odd indicator of anti-Semitism given that Israeli leaders consistently claim to speak for the global Jewish community and consider loyalty to Israel a precondition for being a good Jew. So it’s actually not surprising that this constant assertion has penetrated the consciousness of the rest of the world.

Again, the authors of the op-ed are justifying a historic antisemitic trope – the dual loyalty canard. Do Guardian editors really find this morally defensible? Do they not know a thing about the injurious effects of questioning Jews’ loyalty to the state in which they’re citizens? The charge of dual loyalty could be seen in the Dreyfus Affair through the Nazi’s rise to power – and, yet, it’s as if the dark history of this idea doesn’t bother the authors of the piece, nor the Guardian editors who approved it.

Then there’s this amazing charge:

These questions, and many others in the ADL survey are designed to gin up paranoia.

Seventy-eight percent of Palestinians believe that Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars, but ADL is the party stirring up paranoia!

We’ve been monitoring the Guardian and Comment is Free for over 4 and half years now, and this is arguably one of the most repulsive op-eds we’ve come across. The media group’s inability to take Jew hatred seriously represents a shameful moral abdication and makes a mockery of their claim to be a leading liberal voice.

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