Chris McGreal attacks pro-Israel group: aka, it’s a day that ends with “y”.

In his latest attack on AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the Guardian’s Chris McGreal has focused his attention on a Pittsburgh area congressional race taking place today, pitting Summer Lee against Chris Doyle.  AIPAC – via their Super PAC – supports Doyle due to Lee’s anti-Israel stance.

We noted this fact in a previous post in response to a piece by McGreal during the Democratic primary, citing for instance, a tweet thread by Lee during in the May 2021 war that rejected the idea that Israel had a right to defend itself from Gaza terrorists, and which absurdly projected the US racial dynamics onto the Israel-Hamas conflict.

McGreal’s latest article advocating on behalf of the anti-Israel candidate, misleadingly titled (“Pittsburgh Jews decry pro-Israel group’s support for Republican extremists”, Nov. 3), attempts to leverage a petition by attacking AIPAC:

More than 240 Jewish American voters in Pittsburgh have signed a letter denouncing the US’s largest pro-Israel group for backing extremist Republican election candidates while spending millions of dollars to oppose a Democrat who would be Pennsylvania’s first Black female member of Congress.

The letter condemned the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) for its attempts to defeat Summer Lee, a candidate for the district that includes Pittsburgh, after failing to block her during the Democratic primaries earlier this year because of her criticisms of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.

To put this petition in context, let’s note that, based on the most recent figures, there are roughly 50,000 Jews living in the Greater Pittsburgh area.  So, the 240 signatures – characterised by McGreal as encompassing “Pittsburgh Jews” – represents a mere 1/200th of 1% of the Jews who live in the Pittsburgh area.  It’s basically a rounding error.

However, not only does McGreal grossly misrepresent the significance of the petition in the context of the Pittsburgh Jewish community, but, later in the piece, goes even further:

The letter suggested that Aipac does not represent the views of the majority of American Jews…

To intuit, based on the opposition to AIPAC by 240 Jews, that “AIPAC does not represent the views of the majority of American Jews” is risible given that there are over seven million Jews in the U.S.

Two-hundred and forty signatures on a petition notwithstanding, polls have consistently shown that the overwhelming majority of American Jews support Israel – rendering AIPAC’s opposition to the the candidacy of the anti-Israel candidate running for congress completely unremarkable.

Similar to how the Guardian routinely gave platforms to fringe anti-Zionist Jews who, amidst the Labour antisemitism crisis, denieddespite all the evidence – that Jeremy Corbyn was hostile to Jews, McGreal found a minuscule number of Pittsburgh area Jews supportive of the anti-Israel candidate in order legitmise his own visceral hostility towards Israel and pro-Israel organisations.

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