New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd came under fire Sunday night for what some on both the left and the right said were words that came dangerously close to anti-Semitism.
Dowd’s Sunday column, about the Republican ticket's foreign policy proposals, accused Mitt Romney of being a tool of neo-conservative puppet masters.
The problem, critics said, was that many leading American neo-conservatives are Jewish and that Dowd’s turns of phrase were reminiscent of anti-Semitic slurs of the 20th Century,
Politico reported.
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Late Sunday night, the editorial page editor of the Times, Andy Rosenthal, responded via email that "No fair-minded reading of Maureen Dowd's column supports the allegations" that Politico reported. "She makes no reference, direct or implied, to anyone's religion."
Dowd, a liberal who has made of career of mocking conservatives, wrote that neither Mitt Romney nor Paul Ryan are experts in the field of foreign policy. She then asserted their strategy was orchestrated by a "neocon puppet master" who was leading the neocon effort to "slither back" into power.
Those words struck experts as a seeming appeal to anti-Semitic stereotypes. They seemed especially offensive ahead of the first night of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah.
"Dowd's use of anti-Semitic imagery is awful," Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on Twitter.
"Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews,"
Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic columnist and leading journalist on Israeli issues, wrote.
"[A]mazing that apparently nobody sat her down and said, this is not OK," Blake Hounshell, the managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, tweeted.
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On the right, The Weekly Standard's Daniel Halper called it "outrageous," while Commentary's Jonathan Tobin described it as "particularly creepy."
"Dowd’s column marks yet another step down into the pit of hate-mongering that has become all too common at the Times," Tobin wrote, according to Politico. "This is a tipping point that should alarm even the most stalwart liberal Jewish supporters of the president."
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