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By Jonathan S. Tobin
(MAY 30, 2023 / JNS) You’ve got to hand it to the current occupants of the West Wing. President Joe Biden’s administration has shown itself to be weak and confused about a lot of important issues. But when it comes to manipulating American Jews, they know exactly what they’re doing.
After teasing it for weeks, the White House’s unveiling of the “U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism,” last week was a public-relations triumph in more ways than one. It was released just hours before the Jewish holiday of Shavuot and the Memorial Day weekend. Much like the traditional DC Friday-afternoon news dump in which officials release something just as everyone stops paying attention to headlines, this helped the White House manage reactions. With the Jewish world about to be shut down for two days—and then everyone else for two days after that—administration shills succeeded in dominating the conversation about the document.
More than that, the unveiling was a textbook example of how exceeding low expectations can generate positive spin. It also led to a discussion that avoided the most important question that should have been raised. Instead, the Jews were debating how happy they should be about Biden’s gesture.
For weeks, Jewish groups had feared that the document would not be rooted in the working definition of antisemitism established by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Among other points, this definition states that denying Jews the right to self-determination and claiming that Israel is a racist endeavor are antisemitic.
This is why the intersectional left—which promotes the lie that, in accordance with the precepts of critical race theory, the Palestinian war on Israel’s existence is morally equivalent to the struggle for civil rights in the United States—opposes the IHRA definition. And given that faction’s increasing influence within the Democratic Party, the rumors emanating from the White House that the antisemitism strategy would treat the IHRA definition as no more valid than others put forward by anti-Zionists that give a free pass to hatred of Israel, those fears seemed valid.
So, it was not surprising that when the document was unveiled and it turned out the IHRA definition was embraced by it, the sighs of relief and hosannas for the wisdom of Biden were far louder than they would have otherwise been.
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