Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., ended up in the arms of Sheldon Adelson’s Jewish News Syndicate in mid-July, in what appears to have been the equivalent of a shakedown operation. First, the New York Post in mid-July initiated accusations of anti-Semitism against Kennedy, publishing privately-recorded comments made at a dinner: “There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”
Kennedy tweeted that he “never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews. I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.” Aside from Kennedy’s allergy to and/or distrust of public health measures, it is quite likely that he was simply responding to someone at the table who said that some groups are being targeted; and that his “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not” was a response to that. If not, Kennedy was putting a reckless suggestion on the table; but, since the recording was made available to the New York Post for purposes of excerpting and scandalizing, the former is very likely the case. Otherwise, Kennedy was steering the conversation to papers that he had read on ethnic differentials on infection rates, independent of any conspiratorial targeting.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) then launched the attack: “The claim that COVID-19 was a bioweapon created by the Chinese or Jews to attack Caucasians and black people is deeply offensive”—and the game was afoot. Within 48 hours, Kennedy had given an “exclusive” 40-minute interview to Jewish News Syndicate—an upstart operation, founded in 2011, primarily funded by the Adelson Foundation. He was clearly at pains to call a halt to the attack, and his comments are both telling and painful. JNS published on July 17 their version of the interview, in which Kennedy is quoted saying: “There is nobody in the presidential race who is going to be a stronger champion for Israel than me.... This affection, the affinity relationship with Israel, is part of the DNA of our family.” The problem is the younger generation who “understands neither Israel’s importance as the only Middle East democracy nor the significance of its military alliance with the United States…. What was once ‘an oasis for justice and rights in the Middle East’ is instead seen as an ‘imperial nation’ that oppresses the ‘indigenous population of Palestinians.’”
