At the National Review, Kevin Williamson lashed out over criticism of the National Review’s article attacking Orthodox Jews.

I don’t think most people who read the news are too stupid to understand the news. I think they are too dishonest.

I am frankly embarrassed that we’ve found it necessary to append a note to Zachary Evans’s report on anti-Semitism to emphasize that quoting a person to illuminate his sentiments does not constitute an endorsement of those sentiments. That’s obvious. Every mentally functional adult is able to understand as much. 

The issue is not that the National Review chose to quote someone describing Jews as “locusts”. The issue is that NR ran a generic piece that could have come from the mainstream media, implicitly linking anti-Semitic violence, to assorted criticisms of Orthodox Jews.

That’s NR’s own subheader, “Attacks in Jersey City, N.J. and Monsey, N.Y., bring national attention to political fights between the region’s ultra-Orthodox and their non-Jewish neighbors.”

It’s dishonest to pretend that wasn’t the agenda. And to continue defending it. The quote is just icing on the cake.

The two terrorist attacks by black nationalists were not about “political fights between the region’s ultra-Orthodox and their non-Jewish neighbors”, but a racist hate group that believes Jews (and white people in general) are the devil.

Gentrification is the media’s lens and frame meant to distort and cover-up that fact.

The National Review article by Zachary Evans reads exactly like the kind of garbage that multiple media outlets ran filled with all the things that people who don’t like Orthodox Jews believe they’re guilty of, including having too many kids and raising real estate prices.

It’s no different than running an article after 9/11 about all the things that people who don’t like America think about America.

Every mentally functional adult is able to understand as much

But because there are people who want to smear National Review for political purposes, they pretend that an article about anti-Semitism written by a veteran of the Israeli military is itself an exercise in anti-Semitism. 

Whether Evans is a veteran of the IDF has nothing to do with the article’s distaste for Orthodox Jews, a traditional conservative religious group.

The real question is why did garbage like “Anti-Semitic Attacks Shine Spotlight on Long-Simmering Tri-State Tensions” even need to exist at a conservative publication? 

From the headline on down, it reads like articles that the New York Times ran weeks ago. There’s nothing conservative about this story. It’s the work of a guy auditioning for a media job at the expense of people who have been targeted for murder.