Among other materials, a prolific antisemite posted online a 12-hour film that claims Jews created communism in order to dominate the world.
By BEN SALES/JTA
Trump supporters display QAnon posters at a 2018 rally in Florida. Recently, Latinos in the state have been inundated with anti-Semitic messages, many relating to the false QAnon conspiracy theory.
A popular, vociferously antisemitic promoter of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory was identified as an evangelical Christian man from Florida.
The man, who goes by GhostEzra on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, has more than 300,000 followers and posts “explicit Nazi propaganda, including outright Holocaust denial and a slew of conspiracy theories that often range from obliquely to explicitly antisemitic,” according to Logically, an organization that tracks disinformation online and uncovered his identity.
Among other materials, the man has posted a 12-hour film that claims Jews created communism in order to dominate the world. GhostEzra’s Telegram channel, according to Logically, has effectively become a neo-Nazi chat room.
According to Logically’s investigation, GhostEzra is a pseudonym for Robert Smart, an evangelical Christian man who lives in Florida. Smart, as GhostEzra, had posted photos and other identifying markers that, perhaps ironically, situated him in an area of southeast Florida with a large Jewish population — near the cities of Boca Raton and Boynton Beach.
Logically also sussed out Smart’s identity through customer reviews he had left on Google and Yelp using the same name and avatar seen in one of GhostEzra’s Telegram posts. In one instance, he left a one-star review of an Orthodox synagogue in Boca Raton, writing, “Not nice.”
Logically’s investigation appears to put the question of GhostEzra’s identity to rest. At one point, suspicions had swirled that the account was run by Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a Jewish Donald Trump administration official who once worked with Michael Flynn and later was appointed to a senior Defense Department post. Flynn was briefly Trump’s national security adviser before resigning because he lied to the FBI, and has since become a celebrity among followers of QAnon.
But Cohen-Watnick’s lawyer, Mark Zaid, wrote on Twitter in March that GhostEzra’s posts were the “usual conspiracy laden Q’Anon garbage” and that Cohen-Watnick was not associated with the account.
In fact, Logically reported that GhostEzra’s antisemitic conspiracy theories have become too extreme even for some other leading promoters of QAnon, a theory that falsely claims Trump is fighting a secret cabal of Democratic elites who kidnap and abuse children, and harvest their blood. Scholars have said that QAnon’s claims of worldwide conspiracy and child murder for blood have their roots in age-old antisemitic canards.
I checked out the “Logically” site and discovered that it is an extremly sinister “fact-checking” site which seeks to “identify and combat misinformation” on the internet, using a mixture of “AI’ and “best of human intelligence.” Among its clients are unspecified “national governments,” to whom they sometimes make “criminal referrals” about “misinformation.” They also “partner” with Facebook”” and other businesses for this task.
Among the “misinformation” that they seek to combat are allegations that there was election fraud in the 2020 elections (“extremely rare”) and that Covid19 vaccines might be bad for your health.
Apparently the investigative arm of Big Brother, using the latest development in technology to repress dissent.
Remember that the JTA is the voice of the American Jewish establishment, and especially the Reform and Conservative movements, which are extremely anti-Trump and anti-Netanyahu. The extremely biased character of this report is exemplified by such dubious statements of fact as “Flynn was briefly Trump’s national security adviser before resigning because he lied to the FBI, and has since become a celebrity among followers of QAnon.” Recent investigations suggest that Flynn never deliberately lied to the FBI. And I am not seen any evidence connected with “Q Anon.”
“Q-Anon” seems to be an electronic billboard on a website, not an organization. Those who post on the billboard certainly include many antisemites. But not everyone who posts on the billboard is antisemitic.
I have never heard of this “Logically” organization before. I have no reason to think it is professional and reliable news service. Certainly it is not a large and well-known one.If anyone knows more about “Logically,” please inform us.
While it is certainly possible that this Evangelical minister whom the JTA writer identifies as the author of antisemitic articles posted on a Q Anon billboard is in fact their author , a large number of Evangelical ministers are fervantly pro-Israel and not antisemitic. (For example, pastor MIke Evans from Texas). Antisemitism is no longer common among Evangelical ministers. Less common, in fact, than in ‘liberal” Protestant churches such as the Methodists and Presbyterians.Tarring the Evangelical churches with an antisemitic brush is misleading and unfair.