Jews may seem paranoid, but that doesn’t mean their foes aren’t after them. Though Jews are often accused of undue sensitivity about contemporary anti-Semitism, it doesn’t mean that anti-Semitism doesn’t exist in many places, including the media.

That’s the allegation in a long article in the Aug. 26 issue of the Tablet, an online American Jewish publication. Its author, Matti Friedman, is an award-winning writer and a former reporter with Associated Press.

Based on his inside knowledge, he suggests that the recent Gaza war “has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse — namely, a hostile obsession with Jews.”

Though in theory being anti-Israel isn’t proof of anti-Semitism, in real life reporters and readers alike seem to find it increasingly difficult to demonstrate the difference.

The hostile obsession with Jews, Friedman writes, is “to be found first among the educated and respectable people who populate the international news industry; decent people, many of them, and some of them my former colleagues.” The result has been “a severe malfunction” in the profession of journalism when it comes to reporting from and about Israel.

Friedman’s reflection on the world in which Jews now find themselves is noteworthy: “Having rehabilitated themselves against considerable odds in a minute corner of the earth, the descendants of powerless people who were pushed out of Europe and the Islamic Middle East, have become what their grandparents were — the pool into which the world spits. The Jews of Israel are the screen onto which it has become socially acceptable to project the things you hate about yourself and your own country. The tool through which this psychological projection is executed is the international press.”

Steven Gutkin, Friedman’s bureau chief in Jerusalem, and Jewish like Friedman, has described the latter’s article as “little more than well-written hogwash.” Though he felt compelled to acknowledge unconscious bias as “an inescapable part of the human condition,” he somewhat defensively denied that media coverage of Israel necessarily reflects the new face of global anti-Semitism.

Others disagree. Two days after the Tablet published Friedman’s essay, it printed an article by Richard Block, a leading rabbi in Cleveland, Ohio, and president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. He describes himself as a liberal and a lifelong U.S. Democrat who has nevertheless decided that he can no longer subscribe to the New York Times.

“What drove me away,” he writes, “was the paper’s incessant denigration of Israel.” He cites many instances of what he considers to be deliberate and malicious distortions of facts about the Gaza war. His description is ominously similar to Friedman’s.

It’s no secret that many members of the Jewish community in the GTA look at the Toronto Star in a similar light, even though its editors would no doubt deny anti-Semitic bias.

Some Jews may prefer the bulletins of Honest Reporting, an organization that claims 30,000 members and many reporters who monitor the media in order to celebrate excellence and expose inaccuracies and bias. Its website reminds us that “the media is the primary lens through which the Canadian people learn about the world.”

In our democracy, opinions must always be expressed freely, whether or not we like them. But manipulating facts that would conform to the prejudices of reporters, editors and perhaps readers, is totally reprehensible.

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Friedman’s piece is said to have gone viral because Israel’s sensitive supporters believe that his allegations are true, pointing to calculated misrepresentations of the Jewish state, and by inference, the Jewish people. Perhaps Jews aren’t paranoid after all, just realistic.

Dow Marmur is rabbi emeritus at Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple. His column appears every other week.

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