By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT
01/20/2012 00:41
BERLIN – The media firestorm unleashed by allegedly anti- Semitic bloggers at a prominent think tank affiliated with the US Democratic Party resulted Thursday in a White House Jewish affairs official terming the situation at the Center for American Progress to be “troubling.”
According to a Washington Post online article on Thursday, Jarrod Bernstein, the new White House liaison with the Jewish community, told Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, that what was unfolding at CAP was “troubling,” and, “that [the attitude toward Israel at the think tank] is not this administration.”
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There are many points to make about how this campaign has manifested, but I want to focus on one amazing aspect of it. Because these “leading Jewish groups” have whittled away their credibility by continuously exploiting charges of “anti-Semitism” for political gain and debate-suppressing ends, it is no longer sufficient for them simply to spout the accusation and be taken seriously. They are now required to specify what exactly is out of bounds and what makes someone “anti-Semitic” as opposed to a mere critic of Israeli actions. And in their answers here one finds extremely revealing — and damning — facts.