Many in the Democratic Party appear to be falling hook, line, and sinker for the ramshackle propaganda of a genocidal cult.
Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week we have a rundown of Democrats’ equivocations and lies about Israel, the not-so-curious case of Chris Cuomo, and more media misses.
“Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism”
Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement last week after a flare-up of hostilities caused by rocket attacks from the latter on the former. Ostensibly, Hamas is inspired by the cause of Palestinian statehood broadly and the court-ordered eviction of a small number of Arabs from a neighborhood in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood — a local, still-ongoing legal fight — in this specific instance.
In truth, Hamas is using this narrow dispute as an excuse to target Israeli civilians, an ever-present objective of the terror group. Hamas’s original charter reads, “Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims.”
And yet, many in the Democratic Party appear to be falling hook, line, and sinker for the ramshackle propaganda of a genocidal cult. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example — she who, when asked to expand upon what she meant by the “occupation of Palestine,” backpedaled into admitting that she was “not the expert on geopolitics on this situation” — tweeted that “apartheid states aren’t democracies.” Lucky for her, no one asked for an elucidation this time. Unlucky for her, Rich Lowry took a knife to the non-expert’s implication.
But the falsehoods aren’t limited to young show horses. Senator Bernie Sanders condemned the evictions, saying that “the United States must speak out strongly against the violence by government-allied Israeli extremists.” Senator Elizabeth Warren — once a denizen of Harvard Law School — called the evictions “abhorrent and unacceptable” without addressing the legal issues driving the controversy, falsely lending credence to the idea that the situation in Sheikh Jarrah is driven primarily by divisions over ethnicity, or even politics.
As Erielle Davidson explained for us last week, “there is intellectual laziness, and then there is shameless misinformation.” Check out her piece for a substantive dive into the issue that you won’t find from progressive politicians who see the world’s only Jewish state as a political football, not one of the United States’ allies.
Many in the media too are of course guilty of shamelessly misinforming their readers, viewers, and listeners. Not only have some members of the press perpetuated the lies about Sheikh Jarrah, they’ve suggested that Iron Dome — the missile-defense system preventing Hamas’s rockets from landing in Israeli population centers — has exacerbated the conflict, implied that Israel did not have evidence of Hamas’s presence in the office building rented out by The Associated Press in Gaza (even though it has been known for years that the AP cooperates with the terror group for reasons of convenience), and failed to distinguish between the inadvertent civilian casualties caused by Israel’s response and Hamas’s initial campaign of intentional terror.
Democrats’ confusion about the state of the conflict — and which groups bear moral responsibility for it — is apparently shared by thugs residing in a number of American and European cities.
Across the West, Jews are being sought out and beaten for the crime of being Jewish: In Los Angeles at a sushi bar, in Manhattan’s Diamond District where explosive devices are being lobbed at them, and in London where anti-semitic incidents have increased by 500 percent over the past few weeks.
It Was You, Fredo
CNN’s Chris Cuomo acted as a political adviser to his brother, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, when the governor faced a number of allegations of sexual harassment earlier this year. It’s important to note here that Andrew Cuomo has not been able to substantively refute said allegations and has instead survived by just letting the news cycle pass him by — an option available exclusively to Democrats. In any case, it’s a gross ethical violation by the nominal journalist but one that will nevertheless go unpunished by CNN. After all, he was only repaying the “luv gov” for the preferential treatment he enjoyed last spring! The benefits of having been born with a powerful name are obvious, but the trouble with it is that the many advantages you have may land you in a position where you’re hopelessly in over your head. In this family, there is no Michael.
It Was You, Part II
You didn’t think we were done with Fredo yet, did you? Cuomo also monologued on the air on the abortion issue last week, even going so far as to argue that pro-lifers were misogynistic racists who ignore “science.” Said monologue did not include any scientific arguments. David Harsanyi dismantled his Blue Anon-adjacent rant.
Progress!
Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that her office would be accepting interview requests only from black and brown journalists as a matter of policy last week. Race-based opportunities and punishments being doled out by the mayor of the country’s third-largest city could only be seen as progress by the most warped of minds. The National Association of Black Journalists, and every other thinking person in this country, knows it to be exceedingly and self-evidently wrong.
Headline Fail of the Week
This week’s headline fail goes to Teen Vogue for its piece “The Modern American University Is a Right-Wing Institution.” However, the headline on the piece was later changed to read “Campus Cancel Culture Freakouts Obscure the Power of University Boards” — perhaps a slightly less ridiculous premise, after a number of conservative blogs and social-media users lambasted the piece by Asheesh Kapur Siddique, an assistant professor in the Department of History at UMass Amherst.
Media Misses
PolitiFact and Dr. Anthony Fauci both recently reversed course on their firm denials of the possibility that the novel coronavirus could have leaked from a lab. Last week, PolitiFact removed a fact-check that it published in September titled “Tucker Carlson guest airs debunked conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was created in a lab.”
The fact-check organization archived the post last week and added an editor’s note that reads: “When this fact-check was first published in September 2020, PolitiFact’s sources included researchers who asserted the SARS-CoV-2 virus could not have been manipulated. That assertion is now more widely disputed. For that reason, we are removing this fact check from our database.”
Meanwhile, in May 2020 Fauci told National Geographic that “Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.” He told the magazine that based on the scientific evidence, he did not entertain the lab-leak theory.
Yet at a PolitiFact event earlier this month Fauci did an about-face, saying now that he is “not convinced” COVID-19 developed naturally and calling for further investigation into the virus’s origins. Footage of the event was unearthed by conservative media outlets over the weekend.