Even a cursory reading of this blog will quickly reveal that I have a disdain for politics, an intolerance of hypocrisy, and I’m alarmed about the pervasive Jew hatred of the mainstream media. The media furor about Elon Musk’s implied antisemitism is a confluence of all three issues.
Musk is under fire for responding to a post on his X social media site that said Jewish communities “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” The post also referenced “hordes of minorities” flooding Western countries, a popular antisemitic conspiracy theory.
“You have said the actual truth,” Musk responded.
Musk has long been known for promoting conspiracy theories and saying stupid s—, although blatantly endorsing that Jews promote white hatred seemingly is a new low for him. That said, it’s debatable how much thought, if any, Musk puts into his tweets and whether he even understands the implications of many of his messages. Musk is a brilliant technologist, but he’s demonstrated that he’s not an especially deep thinker on many matters, particularly those beyond his expertise.
Remember how in March 2020, when there were under 2,000 reported Covid cases a day, Musk predicted that by the end of April there would be zero new cases? There were 20,000 reported Covid cases by the end of April 2020. Then there was Musk’s insistence he was a “free speech absolutist,” a claim that was undermined by this Bloomberg report that Tesla asked China’s communist government to censor Chinese critics of the EV maker on social media.
I trust the judgment of China’s leader Xi Jinping, who reportedly regards Musk as “a technology utopian with no political allegiance to any country.” That’s why Tesla enjoys a privileged status in China, and why Musk has nothing but the highest praise for China’s government while he maligned President Biden as a “damp sock puppet.”
Here’s a compilation of some of Musk’s other mistaken comments.
The legacy media is all over Musk’s response that Jews advocate white hatred, feigning a concern for the promotion of antisemitism. That concern has been absent in the media’s coverage of Congresspersons Rashida Tlaib and Illan Omar, who have been trafficking in Jew hatred conspiracy theories for years with abandon. The media promotes Tlaib and Omar as “progressives,” when in fact their undeniable Jew hatred is to promote antisemitic tropes dating back centuries. Musk has “conservative” leanings, hence the seeming media concern for his alleged Jew hatred.
When it comes to judging antisemitism, I’ll defer to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an organization bearing the name of the famed Nazi hunter. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the organization’s director of global social action, was judicious in his criticism of Musk and stopped short of calling him antisemitic.
“I don’t understand why Elon Musk, even though it’s his toy, would jump in with this kind of statement, whatever his motivation may be, that further involves him with bigots,” Cooper told NBC News. “I almost feel like saying to him, ‘Grow up.’”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is unequivocal about Rashida Tlaib, who the organization previously labeled among the most virulent antisemites in the world.
Musk understandably has an issue with Jonathan Greenblatt, a former senior Obama aide who heads the Anti-Defamation League and is selective about who he calls out for antisemitism. Greenblatt has promoted the narrative that Jew hatred has soared on X since Musk acquired the site, which he attributes to a lack of “content moderation.” Greenblatt has lobbied advertisers to boycott X.
Jew hatred was pervasive on Twitter long before Musk acquired the social media sewer. One only needs to visit the ADL’s website for proof.
An ADL analysis of Twitter in the days following the 2021 outbreak of conflict between Israel and Gaza found more than 17,000 tweets using variations of the phrase, “Hitler was right” between May 7 and May 14, 2021. Many of those tweets expressed blatant antisemitism and the belief that the fighting between Israel and Hamas revealed the evil nature of Jews everywhere.
In October 2016, the New Yorker published this article headlined, “Twitter’s Anti-Semitism Problem” citing ADL statistics showing that between August, 2015, to July, 2016, there were 2.6 million tweets that included anti-Semitic language. Only a fifth of the anti-Semitic accounts cited by the ADL were suspended.
What Greenblatt cites as antisemitic is open to debate. He once tarred Senator Ted Cruz as being antisemitic after Cruz, in response to a puff piece Bloomberg published about owner Mike Bloomberg when he was running for president, quipped, “It’s almost as he owns the media.”
Cruz is a die-hard supporter of Israel.
Also, accusing Cruz as being antisemitic was former Michigan Rep. Andy Levin, who referred to Tlaib as his “comrade” and denied claims she was antisemitic.
As noted by Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, Greenblatt was among the Jewish leaders who disputed the undeniable Jew hatred of the Black Lives Movement.
“Organizations such as BLM have done nothing to hide or sugarcoat their animosity toward Israel,” Riley said in his October 31 column. “In 2016, four years before Floyd was killed by police, BLM released an official platform that referred to Israel as an “apartheid state” and declared that America is “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”
“What’s shocking isn’t the rhetoric of BLM leaders in the aftermath of Oct. 7 but that so many people who ought to have known better got played,” Riley said. “In 2020, an open letter that endorsed the BLM movement appeared as a full-page ad in the New York Times. It was signed by more than 600 Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, which exists to fight anti-Semitism. If accusing Israel of genocide isn’t defamation of Jewish people, I don’t know what is. Yet Jonathan Greenblatt, the executive director of the Anti-Defamation League, is a prominent defender of BLM.”
IBM said it suspended advertising on X after the left wing website Media Matters for America published a report that highlighted Apple, IBM, Amazon and Oracle as among those whose ads were featured on pro-Hitler, Holocaust denial, white nationalist, pro-violence, and neo-Nazi accounts.
In a statement, IBM said it “has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination, and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation.”
Given its stated intolerance of hate speech, one must wonder why IBM was reportedly spending $1 million to advertise on X in the first place. It’s telling about the advertising due diligence of Jonathan Adashek, IBM’s senior vice president for marketing and communications, that he wasn’t aware of the controversial placement of his ads until Media Matters spotted them.
Notably, the Verge reported in August that IBM signed a $69.8 million contract with the British government to develop a national biometrics platform that will offer a facial recognition function to immigration and law enforcement officials, despite declaring at the height of the BLM movement that it was abandoning the technology because of concerns about racial profiling, mass surveillance, and other human rights violations.
Fidelity, which helped finance Musk’s purchase of Twitter, has maintained an eerie silence. This is the firm that in 2019 promptly terminated its relationship with Fisher Investments after founder Ken Fisher made a ribald reference at a conference.
Fidelity contributed more than $300 million to Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter, but has since written down the value of its investment by nearly 65%. As a longtime Fidelity customer who has previously sung the company’s praises, it’s alarming that a company that actively manages trillions of dollars for investors opted to get into bed with Musk given his well-known controversial behavior.
Then there’s the Biden Administration, which issued a statement in response to Musk’s comment saying, “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.” Yet President Biden was comfortable naming Karine Jean-Pierre his spokesperson, despite her previously accusing AIPAC of being “severely racist” and for “trafficking in anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric while lifting up Islamophobic voices and attitudes.”
There is nothing racist about AIPAC, without which Israel may not have been able to survive. One of AIPAC’s signature programs is reaching out to Black students on college campuses and educating them about Israel. That effort was responsible for South Carolina becoming the first state to pass legislation prohibiting a boycott of Israel. The aide to then Gov. Nikki Haley who spearheaded the legislation was part of AIPAC’s outreach program.
Twitter and its X reincarnation have long been, and likely always will be, a promotional cesspool of hate and misinformation. Any company that buys advertising on the site is complicit in supporting it and the values Musk advocates, regardless of whether he truly supports or understands them.