Ha’aretz Calls Andrew Breitbart an Antisemite

The left-wing Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz has accused Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart of being an antisemite.

In an article Friday by Chemi Shalev, the newspaper claims: “Breitbart and other Jews working for his website exemplified the kind of radical right wing Jews who hate their liberal co-religionists most of all: in many ways, they are auto-anti-Semites.”

Shalev avoids the term “self-hating Jew,” because he rejects that term when it is used against leftists — such as Ha’aretz itself, which even Obama-friendly Jeffrey Goldberg accused of anti-Semitism.

Yet Shalev has no problem using the same tactic against conservatives, even though he acknowledges that Andrew Breitbart was Jewish, and was partly inspired to start Breitbart.com after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Like everyone else who has made the false charge, Shalev relies on a single headline in an op-ed by David Horowitz — one written by the author himself — calling Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew” for hurting Israel by effectively helping Hillary Clinton.

Shalev also makes the false claim that a “senior editor” has been “drawing a salary from both” Breitbart News and the presidential campaign of Republican nominee Donald Trump. He also carefully notes, and echoes, Hillary Clinton’s lie that Breitbart News is “racist, anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic.”

He ignores Clinton’s many disturbing associations with antisemitism, as well as her troubling record on Israel, to smear Andrew Breitbart and the Jews who work, and have worked, for his company.

It appears that Shalev’s real target is Netanyahu, whom he hopes to embarrass by association with Breitbart. While attacking Andrew Breitbart’s views on Obama as “crackpot,” Shalev indulges a conspiracy theory “that Netanyahu was the mastermind behind breitbart.com.” Shalev even imagines Netanyahu dreaming of a Trump victory, “guided along by Breitbart’s [Stephen K. Bannon] and the website itself.”

Left unexplained: why the “auto-anti-Semites” of Breitbart would want to help him.

Here, once again, is the full response of Breitbart News CEO Larry Solov and Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow to the Clinton campaign’s baseless charge (which Shalev has not only repeated, but also aimed at Andrew Breitbart himself):

Today, the Hillary Clinton campaign has decided to name-call and character assassinate Breitbart News Network and its 31+ million monthly readers. They say that we are “anti-Semitic,” though our company was founded by Jews, is largely staffed by Jews, and has an entire section (Breitbart Jerusalem) dedicated to reporting on and defending the Jewish state of Israel. They call us “racist,” even though her husband’s law enforcement policies led to mass incarceration of blacks. And they call us “conspiracy theorists,” even though Clinton herself was the original “birther!” Yet, according to her team, it’s Breitbart News that is “divisive.” Fending off charges of hatred and bigotry is nothing new for those who oppose the political and media establishment, but Hillary Clinton is cheapening the meaning of these once-powerful words — and she believes the American people are too stupid to see what she is doing. No wonder only 11% find her honest and trustworthy. 

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.