Topic: WorldNetDaily
It's not often you see a ConWeb editor denouncing his own columnists, but Joseph Farah does just that in an Oct. 22 WorldNetDaily column criticizing WND columnist Vox Day's Oct. 15 column in which he made a few odd statements about Jews (which we've previously highlighted).
Farah soft-pedaled his criticism at first, saying that Day "went … well, shall we say, a little over the top," but then got more harsh, saying that Day's statement that "Vanity Fair has recently announced that a remarkable 51 percent of the Vanity Fair 100 Power List are Jewish in a country in which Jews make up approximately 2 percent of the population. Jews also make up 7 percent of the current House of Representatives, 13 percent of the Senate, and, according to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of 'The Israel Lobby,' roughly 100 percent of George W. Bush's foreign policy advisers" "strikes me, quite honestly, as hateful and Buchananesque nonsense." Pat Buchanan, by the way, is another WND columnist.
But then, Farah lists several State Department and Pentagon officials and asks, "Where are the Jews? It looks to me like Bush needs an affirmative action program to get some Jews involved in foreign policy." Farah ignores that a number of prominent neoconservatives who favored a war in Iraq (i.e., Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and William Kristol) are Jews, and that neocons, such as WND columnist Ilana Mercer, have tried to twist criticism of neocons into criticism of all Jews. Julia Gorin wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2004: "By 'neocons,' the left means the Jewish subset of neocons."
Farah also points out that Day's column "gets even meaner and uglier when it turns, in my mind, nearly threatening – blaming the victims of anti-Semitism and hatred for bringing it all upon themselves" by asserting that "Jews have worn out their welcome in literally dozens of countries over the centuries." Farah wrote: "Show me one place they were ever welcome? Again, the Christian Bible Vox Day reads, along with me, explains quite clearly the Jewish Diaspora would have a trying experience in which the Jews received no welcome. That's the way God planned it – not them."
All this is well and good, but why did it take a week for Farah to respond?
Meanwhile, Farah defends Ann Coulter, claiming she was a victim of an "ambush interview with Donny Deutsch." But Coulter willingly appeared on Deutsch's show and was the first to bring up the idea that everyone should be Christian -- hardly the definition of an "ambush." While Farah concedes that Coutler "could have handled" her claims "with more tact and sensitivity," he's mum on Coulter's later statement that "the Jews believe that my savior, a Jew, was a raving lunatic."
