(JTA) — A columnist for Breitbart News attacked Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, calling her a “Polish, Jewish, American elitist” and accusing her of having “global media contacts” in a discursive article that tried to link her to partisan Polish politics.
The gratuitous nod to Applebaum’s Jewishness came in a 1,400-word article published Tuesday titled “WaPo’s Anne Applebaum Embarks On Kremlin-Style Disinformation Offensive vs. the Anti-Globalist Right.” According to the story, Applebaum is “on the warpath against the rising populist forces doing electoral damage to her establishment friends and allies across the world.”
“[H]ell hath no fury like a Polish, Jewish, American elitist scorned,” wrote Matthew Tyrmand, who is himself Jewish.
Tyrmand defended his comment on Twitter.
“Apparently to #AggrievedIndustrialComplex, mentioning one’s identity is racist if it’s politically expedient at that moment,” he wrote.
The piece comes a month after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump tapped Stephen Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart News, to be the campaign’s new CEO. The article notes Applebaum’s frequent columns critical of Trump, calling one the product of “an increasingly unhinged mind.”
Breitbart News has been accused, including by the Hillary Clinton campaign, of peddling anti-Semitism, and Bannon’s ex-wife said he made anti-Semitic remarks.
A headline in a May article in Breitbart called Bill Kristol, the prominent Jewish conservative commentator and editor of The Weekly Standard, a “Renegade Jew.” The article took Kristol to task for opposing Trump’s candidacy once he became the presumptive Republican nominee.
The author of the “renegade Jew” article, David Horowitz, has said that he wrote the headline and it was meant to convey that Kristol, by not endorsing Trump, was betraying his fellow Jews by paving the way for a CLinton presidency.
The news website’s founder, the late Andrew Breitbart, was raised Jewish.
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