NYTimes Credits Adbusters Mag With Launching OWS, Ignores Anti-Jewish Articles

New York Times reporter J. David Goodman interviewed an Occupy Wall Street attendee with a shameful past for the Tuesday metro section -- “A Regular at the Protests With an Unspoken Past: Wall St. Made Him Rich.”

Robert Halper is a retired Wall Street trader and the top single donor to the Canadian “anticorporate” magazine Adbusters, credited with launching the leftist sit-in. But Goodman didn’t mention the magazine’s incendiary anti-Israel past, like the paper’s notorious 2004 attack on neo-conservatives, “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?”

Mr. Halper said he first heard about the plan for protests in June when he visited Kalle Lasn, the editor in chief of Adbusters, a Canadian anticorporate magazine, in Vancouver. Over a steak dinner, the two longtime friends discussed Mr. Lasn’s project, a plan to fill Wall Street with protesters as a way to galvanize anger on the political left into a revolutionary movement resembling the Arab Spring.

“I rolled my eyes,” he said. “I was more interested in talking about health care.”

But Mr. Halper, who lives on the Upper West Side, had long been a supporter of the magazine, donating by his estimate $50,000 to $75,000 over the last 20 years since he was first attracted by the magazine’s spoofs on corporate logos and advertisements. So he wrote a check for $20,000 and returned to his life in New York.

A month later, the magazine sent an e-mail blitz to 90,000 readers and advocates calling for the occupation of Wall Street and setting the date for the first protesters to camp in downtown Manhattan.

There’s a stark double standard here. Last year the Times sent a reporter to Idaho to produce a 4,500 word front-page hit piece on the Tea Party, inaccurately linking it to unsavory anti-government radicals like Randy Weaver, even though most trace the origins of the Tea Party revolt to Seattle blogger Keli Carender and CNBC analyst Rick Santelli.Yet the paper is not at all curious about the unsavory anti-Jewish background of the magazine that instigated the leftist OWS sit-in. The Weekly Standard summed up Adbusters’ offensiveness in its October 24 issue (subscription required):

...Anti-Semitic signs were obvious at Occupy Wall Street protests, especially when compared with the thin gruel reporters cited in accusing the Tea Party movement of racism.

Now we don’t think Occupy Wall Street is necessarily defined by anti-Semitism. There are enough protesters to encompass a large and diverse assortment of unpleasant ideologies. But the fact that the protests were in large part inspired by the left-wing Canadian magazine Adbusters ought to give people pause.

The magazine’s editor, Kalle Lasn, has repeatedly been criticized for publishing such quality articles as the 2004 cri de coeur “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?”– which consisted of a list of prominent Jewish intellectuals accompanied by some barely coherent commentary about how Jews were responsible for the war in Iraq, or something. Adbusters later ran afoul of the Holocaust Museum by repurposing the museum’s images of the Warsaw Ghetto as part of an inarticulate gripe about Gaza. David Duke himself has felt moved to defend the magazine publicly. Can you imagine if the Tea Party were largely the creation of such an unsavory character?