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.”
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