Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has been slammed with an across-the-board media assault, inside and outside the U.S., charging him with antisemitism, based on remarks he made at a July 11 press event, subsequently reported in the July 15 The New York Post by journalist Jon Levine. The attacks have gone viral. The supposed proof of his antisemitism was his assertion that Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately, citing papers “that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.” Studies he referenced found that Caucasians and Blacks have proven more susceptible to infections than Chinese and European Jews. He later cited a Cleveland Clinic study indicating that certain ethnic and racial groups, including Ashkenazi Jews, were less susceptible to the Covid 19 virus, than other groups, among them Blacks.
In his coverage, Jon Levine misrepresented what RFK said, leading to a firestorm of media lies beginning a day after the Post report came out—from the print media, TV networks, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Jewish Committee, among others. Levine claimed that RFK said that Covid was “a genetically engineered bioweapon that may have been `ethnically targeted’ to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people to spare Jewish and Chinese people.”
In an article published in the Sheer Post, journalist Patrick Lawrence charged that Kennedy is obviously getting the Jeremy Corbyn treatment, referring to the former leader of the British Labour Party who was removed as party leader in 2020, as Lawrence explains it, “on fabricated charges of anti-Semitism.” As soon as RFK announced his candidacy in April, “corporate newspapers and broadcasters went into attack mode,” Lawrence explains. But calling him a conspiracy theorist, or a “deranged fanatic, or a liar or a kook or a crank,” didn’t seem to catch on. “RFK is still standing and so are his polling numbers,” says Lawrence, “which in my view, are the true cause of the panic on the Democratic side of the political ledger.” He might have added the RFK’s attack on the Ukraine war and threats of World War III, and how that has resonated among the population, is another major factor.
