Why Is Racist Rep. Randy Fine Allowed to Talk About Antisemitism?

There’s an odd phenomenon in American life: One where the most blatantly bigoted people in the country get to go on-air to protest prejudices, real or alleged, against their own community. Such blatant hypocrisy is only possible when one form of bigotry is treated with utmost sensitivity while other forms of hate are treated with callous indifference, if not endorsement.

This glaring double standard is most visible, at least to our eyes, when it comes to Zionist Jews who gleefully advertise their hatred for Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims (and sometimes others, too), yet are the loudest voices in the room complaining about antisemitism.

More than once, we have compared this to the Grand Wizard of the KKK, who accused the NAACP of anti-white racism, akin to right-wing Zionist accusations leveled against advocates of Palestinian equality.

But even when such Zionists are right about antisemitism — targeting, say, Nick Fuentes — they aren’t one to talk, any more than the Grand Wizard calling out the Nation of Islam for antisemitism.

The hypocrisy seems too obvious: How can someone be so sensitive to any perceived slight against their community yet so openly hateful toward others? But both sides actually cohere. Nationalists of all stripes are communal narcissists obsessed with perceived enemies. So they can only see what supposedly happens to them and never what they do to others.

What is inexplicable, however, is when outside mediators — such as the press — indulge this double standard. Take Florida Rep. Randa Fine (R). Fine is an apologetic bigot who makes vile death threats against his Palestinian colleague in the House of Representatives, attacks Muslims regularly, and calls for the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians. It is hard to imagine a member of Congress more openly and obsessively hateful than Fine.

And yet, Fine has been invited on CNN to decry alleged antisemitism in the Republican Party and conservative movement. No one thought to ask him, “What about your own history of saying bigoted things?”

Again, that can only happen because anti-Muslim hate is normalized while even the most risible accusations of antisemitism are treated with the utmost urgency.

But this practice is common amongst the most hawkish Zionists. As we once related with regards to the ultra-Zionist online magazine Tablet: 

The publication publishes screeds by Zionists accusing pro-Palestine online influencers of a “social media pogrom” and people concerned about detained Palestinian children of a blood libel against Jews, then turns around to publish hateful articles that pinpoint the Muslim faith of an ACLU official to demonize him and call for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza.

This practice is decades-long, and some Zionists will even go so far as to claim that objection to their bigotry is itself antisemitism (why not? since everything else is also antisemitism).

Back in 1988, during the First Intifada, which was a peaceful uprising against Israeli occupation but one that Israel brutally and violently repressed, uber-Zionist Ruth Wisse, then a Yiddish professor at Harvard, attacked the Palestinians in the right-wing Jewish magazine Commentary: 

“The obvious key to the success of Arab strategy is the presence, in the disputed territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Jordan River, of Palestinian Arabs, people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery.”

At the time of writing, Israel was killing more than one Palestinian a day, three-quarters of them children — but Wisse found fault with the Palestinians because they dared to exist on their land, dared to have children, dared to bleed like other human beings, and dared to protest their subjugation.

This essentialism — breed and bleed — and victim-blaming is remarkably racist, but Wisse (who CBS News president Bari Weiss has cited as a mentor) claimed that the accusation that she’s racist launders “Arab propaganda” that Israel is racist—in this case, just redirected against the individual Jew.

Needless to say, Wisse has spent her whole life claiming people are antisemitic for the mildest criticism of Israel.

Lastly, consider the case of The New Republic when it was owned by Zionist extremist Marty Peretz. Peretz was a notorious bigot who attacked Arabs with every breath he took, including publishing racist writing that posited that Arabs have a genetic defect making them congenitally prone to violence.

For decades, TNR under Peretz was a reliable source of hate against Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians, but the one time TNR found itself in a bigotry controversy was when a non-Jewish writer wrote a flippant comment about Jews and Hollywood. The resultant outrage was pored over in newspaper columns.

The comment, for the record, was a glib pronunciation — after the writer had seen a film he deemed racist — Hollywood’s Jews should be more culturally sensitive given their own history of unfair stereotypes.

Whatever one may think of that statement, it was more a matter of ironic, clumsy stereotyping on his part and not so evidently malicious. And certainly it was far from the worst thing published by TNR against any people.

But here was an alleged act of prejudice worthy of attention. Meanwhile, no one bothered to notice the bald attacks against those other Semitic people. Marty Peretz continued to be treated as a serious voice on the problem of antisemitism.