The once-venerable New Yorker is portraying UC Berkeley lecturer and anti-Israel activist Hatem Bazian as an “outspoken champion of Palestinian causes” who has been victimized by “counter-B.D.S. organizations” and in particular, a now-defunct “private Israeli intelligence firm called Psy-Group.”
Reporter Adam Entous dredges up an incident from May 2017---by connecting it, however thinly, to the Mueller investigation into President Trump---in which fliers were left on the windshield of Bazian’s car accusing him of connections to terrorism.
Despite acknowledging that “it is unclear who left the fliers,” Entous takes the opportunity to attack organizations that have exposed the unsavory connections of Bazian and his academic cohorts via publicly available material. He singles out Canary Mission and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD)'s Jonathan Schanzer, who testified before Congress in 2016 that the group Bazian founded, American Muslims for Palestine, has provided funding for Hamas (a recent Israeli government report did the same).
Entous concludes by taking Bazian’s word that both these substantive allegations and concerns over his well-documented history of spreading “classic anti-Semitism” are nothing more than “intimidation tactics.” A more fawning portrait and a less deserving subject would be hard to find.
