White House pans Fox News, talk show host Mark Levin for calling Blitzer, Tapper ‘self-hating Jews’

The White House tears into Fox News and conservative talk show host Mark Levin for calling CNN journalists Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper “self-hating Jews.”

Levin, who is also Jewish, recently said on his radio show that Blitzer’s parents, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, “weren’t victims in one way or another” of the Holocaust.

Levin acknowledged that “certainly [Blitzer’s] family comes out of that background, but that “you wouldn’t know it” from his coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, adding that CNN is “filled with a lot of self-hating Jews.”

In another show last month, he also referred to Tapper as a self-hating Jew.

Asked for a response on the matter, a Fox News spokesperson pointed the Washington Post to subsequent comments made by Levin yesterday in which he claimed his words regarding Blitzer’s connection to the Holocaust had been twisted.

“I barely remember saying it… They think they’re going to intimidate me. They think they’re going to silence me,” he said then, adding that he would not back down.

Weighing in on the ordeal, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates tells The Times of Israel that “not only is Fox News aligning with those who fan the flames of hate – Fox is paying their salaries.”

“Lying to insult the pain that families suffered in the Holocaust has absolutely no place in America,” Bates says, calling out other Fox News hosts for recent comments targeting Arab and Muslim Americans.

“Fox News continues to promote the cynical, dangerous lie that fighting against Islamophobia is somehow at odds with fighting antisemitism, even as they permit hosts to hurt their viewers with foul antisemitic comments like yesterday’s,” he adds.