Pollak: Laura Ingraham, but Not Geraldo Rivera? Left’s Double Standard

For the past week, left-wing gun control activists, egged on by Parkland, Florida, school shooting survivor David Hogg, have urged companies to stop advertising on Laura Ingraham’s show, The Ingraham Angle, on Fox News.

Ingraham’s “crime” was to accuse Hogg of whining about not being accepted into four University of California schools.

But another Fox News host did something far worse.

Geraldo Rivera, one of the network’s more liberal personalities, said Mar. 30 that his one regret as a journalist was not supporting the Palestinians during the second Intifada, which lasted roughly from 2000 to 2005:

I regret in 2002 backing down from backing the Palestinians in their conflict with Israel. The Second Intifada. Because I saw with my own eyes how. And I know how this is going to resonate very poorly with the people watching right now. But still, I have to tell you how I feel. I saw at firsthand how those people were. And now you said 14, 15 people killed in Gaza. Palestinians killed by the IDF forces. I saw what an awful life they live under constant occupation and oppression.

And people keep saying, “Oh, they are terrorists. Or they are this or they are that.” They are an occupied people and I regret chickening out after 2002 and not staying on that story and adding my voice as a Jew, adding my voice to those counseling a two-state solution. It is so easy to put them out of sight, out of mind. And let them rot. And be killed. And keep this thing festering. And I think a lot of our current problems stem from – that’s almost our original sin. Palestine and Israel. I want a two-state solution. I want President Trump to re-energize the peace process.

The second intifada was launched in September 2000 by the Palestinian Authority after then-Chairman Yasser Arafat walked away from a peace deal at Camp David in July of that year.

The uprising was much deadlier than the first intifada of the late 1980s, and included a massive terrorist campaign of suicide bombings and other attacks against Israeli civilians. Some 1,100 Israelis were killed.

Geraldo did not mention any of that. Rather, he sent the message that Palestinian terror can always be excused by an occupation that, arguably, continues largely because of their own intransigence. (Israelis withdrew all soldiers and civilians from the occupied Gaza Strip in 2005, and suffered thousands of rockets and mortars in response.)

Last week, the Zionist Organization of America demanded that Fox News fire Geraldo. “Fox should not continue to employ a commentator who has stated his support for the wholesale mass murder and injury of thousands of Jews, and who turns truth upside down – blaming the victims and exonerating the terrorists,” said ZOA president Morton A. Klein in a press release.

What was striking about the ZOA’s response is that it was virtually the only reaction. The concerned activists and corporate citizens who could not stand to be associated with a Fox News host who merely poked fun at a teenage gun control enthusiast failed to muster the same outrage against a host who had apparently condoned terrorism.

That is not to say Geraldo should be fired (though he should be criticized and challenged). It does, however, show the double standards of the left, and reveals that what lies behind the campaign against Ingraham is pure politics.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.