Jake Tapper Questions Media Response to Chanukah Stabbing: Would Coverage Be ‘Different’ if White Supremacists Had Done It?

In just the past week there have been an alarming number of attacks on Jewish people in New York, most recently the stabbing at a rabbi’s house during a Chanukah celebration on Saturday night.

On CNN today, Jake Tapper asked, “This is kind of a sensitive question, but do you think the reaction by the politicians and the media would be any different if these recent anti-Semitic attacks were committed by white supremacists instead of who they were committed by?”

The New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss argued it would, “because it took a man walking in with a machete the size of a broomstick for there to be public outrage during the holiday of Chanukah.”

Weiss brought up the recent attack in Jersey City and said, “In certain cases, when the person is wearing a MAGA hat or when they can be connected to the alt-right, that’s sort of a clean case, right? It is someone who we all — people of conscience see as a villain but what happens when the attacker is someone when we — I mean say we, I mean we people of conscience — see as someone who is part of a victimized group? It seems then that a lot of people don’t know how to make sense of that.”

Tapper briefly noted she’s not talking about “everyone with a MAGA hat,” saying, “I just want to clarify because the Internet’s insane.”

Vox’s Jane Coaston said, “One of the challenges we have is that we keep wanting to use anti-Semitism or racism as a cudgel against our political opposites forgetting that anti-Semitism exists across the political spectrum. There are a lot of famous instances of the far right and the far left coming together on the subject of hating Jewish people.”

You can watch above, via CNN.