Foxman, Fox and the rabbis

The ADL’s Abe Foxman is upset with Jewish Funds for Justice for publishing an ad signed by 400 rabbis taking Fox News Channel to taks for diminishing the Holocaust.

(Here’s our story, and the ad is below the jump.)

Abe is upset because the ad, appearing in today’s Wall Street Journal and Forward, quotes his own critiques of Fox’s Glenn Beck. JFSJ is free to do so, he said — his remarks are part of the public record — but it’s tacky for him to be used for a campaign he does not endorse.

He has a point. "Don’t use me to fight your battles," he says.

He also says running such an ad on International Holocaust Remembrance Day trivializes the Holocaust by making its remembrance about a battle royal with what he calls an "entertainment network" and also because the ad appears to be defending George Soros.

I don’t know about this. On the one hand, when CBS, the French Foreign Ministry (below the jump), the entire United Nations, are focusing on the enormity of the crime, yes, this ad seems a little, well, micro.

On the other hand, Fox says it’s a news outlet, and should be held to account as such. Beck does not peddle news, and that’s the charitable way of putting it. Plus, the outlet for much of what the ad says is FNC’s Holocaust diminishment is its constant attacks on Soros, who is a Holocaust survivor.

A quick aside: My professional career started with the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies, and a lot of my work was acquainting myself with the vilest forms of of Holocaust denial (what fun!) and theories of Jewish control. And then a few months back, when I was assigned the Beck-Soros story, I turned on the TV at home at 5 PM to watch the anticipated Glenn Beck broadcast. There were the puppets, the intimations of conspiracies, of Jewish collusion in the Holocaust, of  global control — and then my kid walked in to ask me a question, and I reflexively reached for the remote, turned "record" on on the DVR and switched off the tube.

I realized afterward that I acted as I did because I did not want my children exposed to anti-Semitism.

This is not an abdication of objectivity: My training is in recognizing anti-Semitism, and when I saw it, I did what any Jewish parent would do. If I were a reporter covering the "Skins" controversy on MTV, I would track down "for and against" opinions on whether the show was child porn — and I would keep my kids a million miles away from it. As Deborah Lipstadt, who knows anti-Semitism when she sees it, named it when she saw Beck’s output: "I’ve been in the sewers of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial more often than I’ve wanted."

Abe’s also upset because JFSJ, by signing on a passel of rabbis — including leaders of the Reconstructionist, Reform and Conservative streams — is positing an enmity between FNC and the Jewish people.

"They could have taken out that ad, charging Democrats and Republicans with trivializing the Holocaust," he said. "This is a statement against Fox."

True. But both parties have machines that have (at times) crushed this nonsense — the Democrats, most recently, in forcing Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) to apologize for likening Republicans to Goebbels, the Republicans, in the conservative voices that stepped back from Sarah Palin when she likened herself to victims of blood libels. It’s not perfect — Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) got scot-clean away with calling a videographer doing his job, and a grandson of Holocaust survivors to boot, "Gestapo" — but there is a mechanism.

No such mechanism appears to exist at Fox. Instead, Fox boss Roger Ailes looks to apologies, bizarrely, to enable the station’s abuse of the rhetoric. This is his account, from a recent Esquire profile, of what happened after he called NPR executives "Nazis" for sacking Juan Williams:

They said I was forced to apologize after tremendous media pressure. First of all, there was no media pressure because after I said ["Nazi"] I was driving to Washington, and after about eight o’clock in the morning I’m thinking I shouldn’t have used that word, because I’d met with some rabbis and I knew they were sensitive about that. I said, "Oh, shit." And so I called my assistant and I dictated a letter and I said, "Send it over to Abe Foxman and tell him that I apologize, I shouldn’t have used the word." So by 9:30, Foxman had the letter. Then I called him, and said I just shot off my mouth inappropriately. And he said, "Are you apologizing?" And I said, "Well, I’m apologizing to you, because I know the sensitivity amongst the Jewish audience, but I’m not apologizing to NPR because they basically acted like inflexible bigots." And I said I’ve no apology for them because I think they went after Juan unfairly and inappropriately. So I took [the controversy] right off the table. An hour later, Beckel came in to see me — Bob Beckel, one of our Democrats. He said, "Ailes, the Democrats were ready to unload on you at noon, calling for your resignation on the Nazi remark. I won’t tell you who they were, but they were ready to go." Then Foxman comes out with his statement. One of them said to me, "Ailes is freaking Houdini — how the hell does he get out of it? How the hell does he have Abe Foxman defending him by ten o’clock in the morning?" So the whole plot against me crumbled.

So Ailes, basically, stands by his use of "Nazis" by apologizing for it — if that makes sense (and it’s as hard to type as it is to make sense of).

I asked Abe if he thought Ailes’ apology to him meant anything without an apology to NPR.

"That’s between them and him," he said. "Between me and him, is the issue that he used Nazi imagery inappropriately. I don’t think he’s going to use it again, that’s what’s important to me."

For the French Foreign Ministry statement today, and for the ad, read below the jump.

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French Foreign Ministry statement:

Statement issued by Michèle Alliot-Marie,

Ministre d’Etat, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs

International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust and the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity – Thursday, January 27, 2011

On this International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust and the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity, France remembers the victims, and its thoughts go to their descendants.

We are absolutely determined to rise to the challenge of ensuring Holocaust awareness and of passing this knowledge on to new generations in France and around the world. 

Eyewitnesses are gradually disappearing. We all therefore have a duty to keep the memory alive and to protest against all forms of trivialization.

When I visited the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem last week, I understood, once again, how important it is for us to maintain our vigilance, in memory of the victims of the Holocaust and in order to prevent crimes against humanity.   

Here’s the ad: