Zohran Mamdani’s obsession with Israel was on full display when, during the mayoral campaign, video emerged of him advising activists “to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”

The idea that minorities everywhere are under the boot of a global Jewish cabal has been a favorite libel of certain progressives who seek to establish a “race war” narrative of incitement against U.S. Jews. The media play a key role in keeping this narrative fiction alive.

The latest collaboration between anti-Semitic activists and political journalists on this issue, however, offers a useful glimpse into how this smear campaign is constructed.

CAIR, an Islamic pressure group that celebrated Hamas’s October 7 attacks and has been on the bleeding edge of incitement for years, has been pushing the Los Angeles Police Commission to investigate any and every angle of the LAPD’s past trips to Israel. Of course, major metropolitan police departments do training activities with a range of countries, so to focus solely on Israel is an admission of egregious bias.

But just how egregious? The LA Times’s writeup of the results of one such investigation is illuminating.

The LA Police Commission’s Office of the Inspector General has released a report on the department’s past 10 years of participation in training programs abroad.

Before getting into the details of the report, it’s worth noting how the LA Times framed the story. The headline is “The LAPD sent officers to train in Israel. Officials can’t explain what they learned.” So right away we’re told this story is about Israel and whatever the LAPD is hiding about it.

Here is how the story begins:

“Over the last decade, the Los Angeles Police Department sent employees to Israel to train or be trained by the country’s counterterrorism experts on at least nine occasions.

“But officers who attended these training sessions and dozens of other overseas seminars and conferences routinely failed to document what they learned or keep track of who they met with….

“The LAPD’s relationship with Israeli security forces has come under scrutiny amid the country’s ongoing military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, which has caused tens of thousands of deaths and drawn allegations of genocide.”

Much of the story is about Israel, though the reporter makes sure to sprinkle hints here and there that Israel shouldn’t really be the focus and he is crafting an artificial narrative with the help of outside groups like CAIR.

The report itself turns out to be quite interesting, though more for what it says about the state of LA Times reporting and the bad faith of groups like CAIR.

It is true, for example, that Israel is one of the countries to which LA police have traveled. One of 32 countries, to be specific.

So why the focus on Israel? Perhaps Israel is the only Mideast country on the list? No, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are there, too.

Then maybe Israel is the most common destination for LA cops? Again, no. And it’s not even close to some of the competition: The UK gets twice as many trips, Canada three times as many as Israel.

Well then surely Israel is the only country accused of “genocide” on the list? After all, it’s the only country accused of genocide in the article. But no—China, a country carrying out an actual genocide, is there too.

Since we all know where this is going, let’s just get there already. Israel accounts for 7 percent of “total activities” of LAPD personnel going abroad, about the same share as France and far less than some others.

The numbers of LAPD officials participating in such events abroad follows the roughly the same pattern. Trips to France account for about a quarter of all employees who went abroad in the decade under investigation, with Canada close behind and the UK not too far in the rearview. Israel is a small part of the exchange program.

One could easily find some non-Israel details for concern, if that’s truly all one was looking for. Thailand, for example, is rated by Freedom House as “not free,” having transitioned from military rule to a “military-dominated, semi-elect government” known to use “repressive tactics including arbitrary arrests, intimidation, lèse-majesté charges, and harassment” to quell protests. One might look at the IG report and see that the LAPD apparently went to Thailand to “train” the royal police and ask what the story is there. But one would only be tempted to do so if one were actually concerned about any of this rather than trying simply to spread unfounded conspiracy theories about Jews.

If the LAPD is displaying a tendency toward mishandling public order, is it more likely that they learned such behavior from, say, Israeli K-9 training programs and bomb-squad instruction, or from their time spent at the “Austrian Police Academy Public Order and Riot Control Conference”?

Would you look to where they are learning particular skills, in other words, or would you simply draw attention to vague insinuations that the Jews must have taught them to hurt people? With regard to CAIR and the LA Times, we already know the answer. But perhaps others should ask themselves the same question.