Jennifer Rubin’s boss sees no problem with anti-Arab bigotry
Washington Post blogger endorses the ravings of an extremist neocon, gets compliments from her boss
Topics: Washington Post, Media, Media Criticism, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Israel-Palestine, Jennifer Rubin, Neoconservatism, Politics News
Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s official correspondent for passing along and endorsing the Romney campaign’s anonymous criticisms of Rick Perry, recently “retweeted” a link to this blog post by Rachel Abrams, in which Adams responds to the release of Gilad Shalit by calling on Israel to commit mass murder against Palestinians in revenge. Rubin kind of got in a bit of trouble for this, except not really.
The grandiloquent post in question requests either (it’s not entirely clear) that Israelis feed Shalit’s captors to sharks or that they feed his captors along with women and “their offspring” to sharks. (I imagine Abrams considers nearly every Palestinian in Gaza to be complicit in Shalit’s imprisonment, so this distinction may not amount to much.) Either way, the post makes liberal usage of unambiguous anti-Arab slurs (“devils’ spawn,” “savages,” “animals”) and, well, it’s a call for mass slaughter.
After various people, including Max Blumenthal, said it was perhaps inappropriate for a Washington Post blogger to endorse this sort of talk, Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton took the case. Pexton concluded that the retweet was in poor taste, but for him it was more of an issue of inappropriate Twitter usage than it was of Rubin being essentially an awful person who agrees with a virulent anti-Arab bigot.
To demonstrate that she essentially agrees with Abrams’ perspective, Rubin then tweeted a link to another Abrams post, calling it “chilling, sobering, eloquent.” This post puts the word “Palestinians” in scare quotes and places Mahmoud Abbas in a list of “blood-worshippers.”
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.



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