Misrepresenting Europe’s Muslim Anger With A False Claim of Antisemitism

On Editorial Writing

It is true that opinion columnists offer a personal point of view. However, this is only the start of what should be an industry standard for those professional opinion writers you repeatedly see in the newspapers. As the media critic Aubrey Nagle puts it “the purpose of an editorial or opinion section is not to give an enormous platform to anyone to say whatever they please. The purpose is to offer readers a new perspective, but one that is still based in truth and supported by fact.” As it is, it is too easy for a professional columnist to insist that his or her opinions are accurate interpretations of fact—when this is demonstrably not so. Most newspapers and media outlets simply do not police this standard.

Take, for example, Mr. Bret Stephens, an opinion columnist for The New York Times (NYT) since 2017. He was actually the Pulitzer Prize winner for “Commentary” in 2013. To emphasize that his point of view has “the ring of truth” to it, Stephens tells us that “every word I publish in The Times is rigorously fact-checked.” Can we take him at his word?

Soccer Fans and Pogroms

On 8 November 2024, Stephens wrote a column entitled “The Age of Pogroms Returns.” He writes, “The attack [in Amsterdam] on Israeli [soccer] fans comes after years of rising antisemitism in Europe, much of it within the Muslim community.” His cited source for this assertion is an article in the Wall Street Journal about speech and expression among Muslim immigrants in Germany.

As we will see, Stephens’ characterization of the events in Amsterdam are wrong. But first lets consider his accusation that that the feelings he says are on the rise in Europe’s Muslim community are an expression of traditional antisemitism. The historical definition of antisemitism is a hatred of Jews as such. Why? Because they supposedly represent a race of economic exploiters, social polluters, underminers of civilization, etc. All such accusations, attributed to a race (Jewish or otherwise) are without foundation but, nonetheless, the version targeting Jews has been carried over from generation to generation and indeed persists among some, mostly rightwing, groups in today’s Europe.

However, is this what is going on in the Muslim community? Certainly not in any traditional sense of antisemitism. Modern Muslim immigration into Europe began after World War II. The origins of most of these migrants was and still is North Africa, where traditional antisemitism was not common. The Muslim hostility that did develop toward some Jews was mainly (1) a reaction to Zionist behavior in Palestine, where even before 1948 and the founding of the state of Israel, gave evidence of racist discrimination against Palestinians. And, (2) the false, but confusing, Zionist claim that their racist behavior and goals represented all Jews worldwide. It is a tribute to Europe’s Muslims that many of them understand that this Zionist claim is false. Not so Stephens. One can be confident that he himself is a Zionist (he once was editor and chief of the Jerusalem Post) and so fails to recognize Israel’s racism is at the heart of just about all Muslim (and indeed Jewish) opposition to its’ policies and behavior. Instead, he is quick to translate that opposition into a modern day threat of a new Holocaust. Thus Stephens ends his “The Age of Pogroms Returns” in this way: “my advice to Europe’s besieged Jewish communities: remember what Kishinev [a deadly 1903 Russian pogrom] foreshadowed — and please get out while you still can.”

The Screw Up

While Stephens’ column is meant to be scary, it misreads the nature of the anger within Europe’s Muslim community, and also discounts the past and present provocative behavior of the Zionists. And as a consequence he seriously screws up the story of what happened with those Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam. The “fact checked” story shows that Stephens, his editor at the NYT, and other media outlets reversed cause and effect. Perhaps their doing so was part of an ongoing pro-Israel (and, in effect, pro-genocide) reportage. Thus, it was the Israeli fans who staged a riot in Amsterdam and attacked Dutch citizens, Muslim and non-Muslim. You can get the full story from the Dutch-Palestinian author Mouin Rabbini, the very complete Counterpunch essay by Dan Falcone, and the Electronic Intifada report on the NYT’s reversal of facts. One should also look at the comments of Haaretz’s editorialist Gideon Levy on Israeli culpability in this event (he gives the facts of the case in the second part of his essay. The first part is meant to be ironic). Finally, please note that the real story not only reveals that Western media is quite willing to play fast and loose with the facts when it comes to supporting Israel, but that, in this instance, the Dutch government, full of Islamophobic and pro-Zionist ministers, was also willing to suppress the truth—and pro-Palestinian protests as well. Stephens uses the false statements of Dutch officials as his own sources.

The Conspiracy Theory

There is something bordering on the fanatical about Stephens’ writing on the alleged plight of Europe’s Jews and those Israelis traveling there. He followed up his misleading message on the return of the “age of pogroms” in Europe with another editorial, this one appearing in the NYT on 12 November 2024 entitled “A Worldwide Jew Hunt.” In this piece, he spins a conspiracy theory of organized Dutch Muslim antisemitism based on another Wall Street Journal investigation that, he says, “removes all doubt about the motives of the Amsterdam [Muslim] thugs.” This “investigation” cites a number of hacked messages in Amsterdam using the words “Jew hunt.” Considering the mendacious reporting of the Dutch government and Western media, there is no way to know if these messages are real. Nonetheless, Stephens puts them together with isolated antisemitic incidents in Chicago, New York, and Paris and comes up with a worldwide conspiracy to “hunt Jews.”

Still pointing a finger at the Amsterdam Muslim community, he claims “their antisemitism” does not use “the faddish language of anti-Zionism” or even make reference to Gaza. Of course he is relying on the Wall Street Journal piece here. Did he look any further? Instead, he claims that the local Muslims were just going after Jews as would traditional antisemites. But wait a minute. There are a lot of Jews in Amsterdam. Yet there was no Muslim trouble until a crowd of Israeli Zionist Jews started screaming insults against Arabs, tearing down Palestinian flags and beating folks up. Stephens dismissed this part of the story as of minimal importance.

Ultimately, Stephens brings this whole conspiracy drama back to the U.S. Stating that America has a culture that “traditionally admired Jews,” he charges that this is now actively threatened by “Hamas fellow travelers in the Ivy League.” This is the sort of nonsense that comes easily to those who wear ideological blinkers. It is, in fact, the reverse of the truth. It is the student and faculty protesters on campuses worldwide, many of them Jewish, who are defending the best interests of Jewish people. They do so by actively opposing Zionists who have, almost literally, turned themselves into Nazis and now carry out a genocide against Palestinians—claiming to be doing so in the name of Jews. Such is the twisted world suggested to us by Stephens’ “personal point of view.”

Conclusion

Well, considered more broadly, maybe that Stephens’ claim that “the age of pogroms has returned” has some truth to it. Unfortunately, for him, this possibility, as applied to the present conflict, leads us to Zionist behavior and not those of Muslims. If Stephens had checked it out with any thoroughness, he would have found out that almost all of today’s pogroms are committed by Israelis illegally “settled” on Palestine’s West Bank. According to B’Tselem, Israel’s own human rights organization, “In the past two years, at least six West Bank communities have been displaced” by the violent harassment of Israeli settlers often protected by the Israeli army. If you are looking for contemporary equivalents of the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev these attacks on Palestinian villages and towns are it.  Bret Stephens’ failure to draw the connection is really unconscionable.

In practice, through his editorials on antisemitism, programs and “Jew hunts,” Stephens has turned himself into a “fellow traveler’ of genocidal murders. For instance, ignoring in these columns the purposeful starvation of the Gaza population.  Why has he done this? Although Mr. Stephens has characterized himself as “a believer in free speech and the need to safeguard the institutions of democracy at home and abroad” he has, in truth, locked himself inside an ideological bubble which, haunted by the past, now distorts his vision of the present. The Zionists look at the present conflict with the Palestinians (or the Arabs, or the Muslims, etc.) from an ideologically ordained, one-sided “point of view”—whether expressed editorially, diplomatically, or through the insulting slogans of soccer fans. This is a particular problem for a man of Stephens’ profession, though he seems unaware of this. It is a problem because (1) To rigidly insist on only on the Zionist viewpoint is to decontextualize the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict and (2) As Stephens’ tale of what unfolded in Amsterdam suggests, you cannot really fact-check a scenario that you have decontextualized.

Let’s return to Audrey Nagle’s definition of what editorial writing should be: “the purpose of an editorial or opinion section is not to give an enormous platform to anyone to say whatever they please. The purpose is to offer readers a new perspective, but one that is still based in truth and supported by fact.” Stephens does try to give us a new perspective: the rise of antisemitism among Europe’s Muslims. But, his offering is neither factual nor true. The growing Muslim anger is a function of Zionist brutality and not a hatred of Jews as such. Stephens confuses the issue because he has swallowed the Israeli claim that political Zionism is a form of Judaism. He has also contrived his argument so that it cannot be effectively fact checked.

Is Bret Stephens dishonest, is he insincere, is he two-faced, or just shifty? No, I don’t think he is conscious of any of these things. But he is trapped by an ideologically uncompromising “point of view.”  So, while he might believe all that he writes, you, the reader, don’t have to believe a single word of it. I certainly don’t.

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