The Washington Post Ignores Antisemitic Attack in Los Angeles
The Washington Post has warned about a “rising tide of antisemitism.” But as CAMERA has highlighted, The Post’s coverage of antisemitism has frequently been selective and is often politicized. More recently, the newspaper even ignored a high-profile antisemitic attack.
On the night of Nov. 23, 2018 a Mogadishu-born man named Mohamed Mohamed Abdi used a rented car to try to run over two Jewish men outside of a Los Angeles synagogue. Authorities arrested Abdi who reportedly “made anti-Semitic remarks” at the Jewish men and made several U-turns in his attempts to target them.
Los Angeles Police and the FBI are investigated the incident as a hate crime. Several major U.S. news outlets, including ABC, Fox News, and others reported on the crime. Some, such as The Los Angeles Times, obfuscated on Abdi’s antisemitic motivations.
As the journalist Armin Rosen noted in Tablet Magazine:
“Readers had to hack through this thicket of self-contradiction that begins a Nov. 26 Los Angeles Times report on the incident: ‘Authorities are trying to determine the motivations and background of a 32-year-old Seattle man who allegedly tried to run down two men outside of a synagogue in Hancock Park last week in an attack that police have described as a hate crime.’”
The motivations, however, seem clear enough: Abdi had “yelled several expletives at the victims referencing their Jewish heritage,” according to the LAPD’s deputy chief.
As Rosen pointed out, The Los Angeles Times’s report was “perhaps, an improvement on The New York Times and Washington Post’s coverage of the attack”; both papers failed to provide readers with original reporting on the incident.
The Washington Post, for all of its professed concern about rising antisemitism, merely reprinted an Associated Press brief.
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