Michelle Goldberg: Rep. Jayapal’s racist gaffe wasn’t a big deal

The NY Times employs at least one opinion columnist whose only job is to write about race and racism. They have another columnist who writes about the topic somewhat frequently. Never in all of the columns about race and racism published by the NY Times have I ever seen one suggesting the problem was overblown. But yesterday the Times published Michelle Goldberg’s column saying exactly that. It was titled “The Hysterical Overreaction to Jayapal’s ‘Racist State’ Gaffe.”

Last weekend, Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat who is chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, made a significant political error. She called Israel a “racist state,” instead of simply a state that has racist leaders who treat many of the people under their authority as second-class citizens or worse on account of their ethnic and religious background.

Her rhetorical misstep generated international headlines and rebukes from Democrats and Republicans alike, demonstrating that, no matter how far Israel veers from liberal democratic norms, when it comes to American politics, it’s still protected by a thick lattice of taboos…

One group of centrist Democratic lawmakers circulated a draft of a letter blasting her words as “unacceptable” and saying that efforts to “delegitimize and demonize” Israel are “dangerous and antisemitic.” House Democratic leaders declared that “Israel is not a racist state” in a statement of their own that didn’t mention Jayapal but was obviously a response to her comments. On Sunday, Jayapal offered an apology and a clarification, saying, “I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist,” even though there are “extreme racists” enacting “outright racist policies” in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Jayapal’s clarification was wise: It’s good to be as precise as possible when discussing an issue as fraught and complex as the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians…

…the rush to condemn her offhand remarks is not about encouraging linguistic rigor. It’s about raising the political price of speaking about Israel forthrightly.

And so you see calling an entire state racist just wasn’t a big deal.

Goldberg has really twisted herself into a pretzel in these few paragraphs. She has praised Rep. Jayapal’s “wise” decision to clarify her comments even while condemning her critics for saying they needed to be clarified.

So which is it? Was Jayapal’s comment wrong or just refreshingly forthright? If wrong then doesn’t that mean her critics had a point? If she was merely being forthright then doesn’t that mean she need not have corrected herself at all? Goldberg wants to have it both ways and many readers seem to agree there was nothing to apologize for. Here’s the top comment which has been upvoted nearly 1,000 times.

Also, why was it a gaffe? I thought it was a moment of truth. Remember those?

The second comment is similar:

I rarely agree with Ms Jayapal

I do on Israel, if not with words with the substance of her message

There is one comment which I think is a lot more insightful about the leftist hypocrisy on display in this column.

Fine. I’m willing to concede that Jayapal spoke inartfully about racism or racist leaders. She does have a history, but let’s assume the best of intentions.

Should we be as charitable with Eli Crane (R-AZ) who said “colored people” as opposed to “people of color” on the floor of Congress?

Let’s be honest: does one comment reveal inner racism, while the other is but a slip of the tongue?

You will not see a column in the the NY Times defending Rep. Crane but it would be an interesting experiment to see how readers would react if the paper published one.

Again, the left wants to have it both ways, on this issue especially. Every slip of the tongue by someone on the right is proof of deep-seated racism. Every similar mistake by people like Rep. Jayapal is merely a mistake of no importance.

For a very different take on Rep. Jayapal’s gaffe, the Washington Examiner published an editorial today titled “Hatred of Israel is ascendant in the Democratic Party.”

At the same conference last weekend, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) claimed Palestinians have been occupied for 75 years — since 1948, when Israel was founded. This suggests Omar’s real problem is not with Israel’s control of the West Bank, blockade of the Gaza Strip, or annexation of the Golan Heights because none of these areas were controlled by Israel until 1967. Her problem is with the existence of a Jewish state in any land between the Jordan River and the sea. This extinguishment of Israel is a radical position, adopted by the mullahs of Iran and the terrorist groups they sponsor.

Not to be outdone, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) often tweets that Israel is an “apartheid state,” even though all Israelis may vote, whether they are Jews or not, and may live anywhere in Israel, and there are Arabs in the Israeli parliament. In 2020, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) withdrew from a memorial event for the liberal Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered in the 1990s for pursuing peace with the Palestinians, after being criticized by anti-Israel activists.

The problem is more widespread than being merely to do with outspoken Democratic members of Congress. In 2021, while Israel was at war with Hamas, which was firing thousands of rockets at its cities, 10 Democrats refused to vote to replenish munitions for the Iron Dome, Israel’s anti-missile defense. They did so not for fiscal reasons but because they didn’t want Israel to be able to defend itself against terrorists.

It’s a small minority of Democrats who are in this camp, and the reaction to Jayapal’s gaffe shows that’s the case. Still, people with these views are not hard to find on the far left.