OPINION:
The U.S. mainstream media owes President Trump an apology.
This week, a 19-year-old Israeli man was arrested for making threats to Jewish schools and facilities in recent months. He was arrested in Israel by Israeli police.
In the weeks leading up to the arrest, the mainstream media veraciously accused Mr. Trump and his supporters for the rise in nationalism that led to these anti-Semitic actions and targeted his administration for not forcefully addressing and denouncing them.
Even before the election, the narrative was set. Politico ran a story in October titled: “In a Time of Trump, Millennial Jews Awaken to Anti-Semitism.”
A month later, after Mr. Trump won the election, the New Yorker warned “Hate is on the rise after Trump’s election,” and Steven Goldstein the executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect was widely quoted in reports and booked on television shows weekly to attribute the rise directly on Mr. Trump.
“We are now seeing a pattern,” he said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune last month, which he repeated on news outlets like MSNBC and CNN. In terms of Mr. Trump trying to make things better by him addressing it in a speech?
That’s just throwing a “Band-Aid on the cancer of anti-Semitism that has infected his own administration,” Mr. Goldstein said.
Other publications, like the Daily Beast, mocked Mr. Trump when he suggested the slew of anti-Semitic violence might be done to “make others look bad” — in other words, it may not be his supporters at all, but others who detest the so-called “deplorables” and simply want to make them live up to their name.
“Trump appears to suggest bomb threats against Jews are false flags,” the Beast wrote last month. “He supposedly said they done were to ’make others look bad,’ consistent with the White House/Breitbart line that protesters and leakers are working for Democrats.”
The liberal website ThinkProgress did one better.
“Trump echoes David Duke, reportedly suggests Jews are behind threats to Jewish schools,” a headline blared, adding: “He just said, ’Sometimes it’s the reverse, to make people, or to make others look bad.’ “
And yet it turns out, Mr. Trump was right — or at least partially right.
A troubled 19-year-old, a half a world away, was responsible for the majority of the threats. The suspect holds a duel U.S.-Israeli passport with the teenagers’ lawyer blaming a brain tumor on his behavior.
So will the media apologize? Will they correct their faulty narratives? As much as they wanted the vandal to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan or to be arrested wearing a red “Make America Great Again” cap in Middle America, that simply wasn’t the case.
Moreover, if the 19-year-old arrested was responsible for most of the threats against Jewish Community Centers like has been reported, was there really a wave of anti-Semitism at all? Or was it just this one kid causing a big splash? Even The Associated Press admitted last month there was evidence of rising anti-Semitism (because of the threats), but hard data remained “elusive.”
Sounds to me like this was all a narrative created by the mainstream media based on innuendos and their own preconceived assumptions. Noticeably absent are the facts. And they blame Mr. Trump for having a loose relationship with the truth. They need to look in the mirror.
Apologizing would be a good first step.
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