Bari Weiss: 'We're not hearing the kind of moral clarity that we hear when the attacker is a white supremacist'

This is a pretty stirring summary of a position Weiss had made before in print. Over the weekend she expounded on the idea that media just doesn’t seem interested in covering anti-Semitism unless white supremacists are involved. She not only made the case but named some names during this interview on Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources: Louis Farrakhan, Mayor de Blasio and Al Sharpton.

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Asked if the press had been slow to respond to the anti-Semitic attacks in New York, Weiss replied, “Absolutely, yes.” She pointed out that the media had not trouble identifying the cause of the deadly anti-Semitic attack in Pittsburgh last year. “Everyone recognized that for what it was, which is that he was motivated by hatred of Jews, plain and simple.” She continued, “For some reason, people cannot seem to get their heads around the fact that when someone machetes their neighbors, when someone is breaking people’s noses, when someone is punching people in the street, when someone is rippng off someone’s kippah, it’s motivated by the same thing.”

Instead of simply saying that, the media ran stories in the wake of the Jersey City attack and the machete attack in Monsey about racial tensions caused by Jews moving to black neighborhoods. “We’re not hearing the kind of moral clarity that we hear when the attacker is a white supremacist,” Weiss said. She added, “And the question is why. And that is a question the press needs to answer for itself.”

A bit later, both Stelter and Weiss cited the piece by Vox’s Jane Coaston which I wrote about last week. Coaston made a simple argument that many of the recent attacks seem to have some ideological connections to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories promoted by the Nation of Islam. Weiss agreed with this and then asked why Farrakhan’s influence didn’t seem to generate much interest from the media.

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“It took two years for the mainstream press to cover the fact that the leaders of the women’s march, one of whom is now a surrogate for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, that she has [a] close relationship with Louis Farrakhan,” Weiss said. “The mayor of this city has compared Al Sharpton to Martin Luther King. That is a scandal. Al Sharpton incited the violence against Jews in the borough that I am now walking toward in 1991.”

She’s referring to the now-former members of the women’s march, three of whom were apparent fans of Farrakhan. At least one of those leaders, Tamika Mallory, was thanked by name during Farrakhan’s largest annual speech and referred to him as the “GOAT,” i.e. the greatest of all time.

As for Al Sharpton, she’s referring to the 1991 Crown Heights riots in which Jews were attacked on the street and one man, Yankel Rosenbaum, was murdered after a car accident that killed a child. Here’s the full clip via the Washington Free Beacon:

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David Strom 6:00 AM | April 26, 2024
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