Tikkun magazine, for which I interned in the early ’90s, has published an article by the pseudonymous Israel Shamir, a notorious antisemite and arguably a neo-Nazi. The subject is terrorism, Israel and Palestine. This is sad, because Tikkun originated as a sane voice on the left, dedicated to getting beyond crude and demagogic thinking on the Middle East. Now they try to explain away their mistake with a clueless disclaimer, telling us that Shamir’s ideas are ones “with which we must grapple.” The disclaimer compounds the error, in fact: It suggests that blatant antisemitism has intellectual legitimacy, apparently because it is “unlikely to [be found] in the mainstream media.”
One quick Google search would have revealed to Tikkun‘s editors that Shamir considers Tikkun itself part of the global Jewish conspiracy. “[T]he Jewish Lobby is not a ‘small group of pro-Zionist Jews’ but an extremely powerful group of billionaires, media lords, and their supporters in the left and the right, from the New York Times to the Nation, from Wolfowitz of Pentagon to Rabbi Lerner of Tikkun.”
[Update: I’ve been informed that Michael Lerner of Tikkun has decided to remove the post by Israel Shamir.]
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