Are the Proud Boys antisemitic? TRUMP NEEDS TO ADDRESS THIS ISSUE.

 Your primer on the far-right group Trump told to ‘stand back and stand by’

BY BEN SALES , JTA 


Far-rightists from the Proud Boys wait to get into vehicles after marching across the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland, Ore., Aug. 17, 2019. (Alex Milan Tracy/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

(JTA) — Who are the Proud Boys, the far-right group that Donald Trump name-checked at the first presidential debate? And do they hate Jews?

The answer to the second question: Some of them — including their founder — certainly do.

Let’s back up: At the debate Tuesday night, moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump whether he would condemn white supremacists from the debate stage. He did not. What he did say, amid denunciations of the far-left Antifa, was this:

“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by, but I’ll tell you what, somebody’s gotta do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem, this is a left-wing problem.”

The group Trump referred to, the Proud Boys, is a far-right, “western chauvinist” fraternal organization founded by Gavin McInnes that supports Trump and has engaged in street violence. Anti-Semitism is not core to the group’s ideology, but according to the Anti-Defamation League, the group has allied with white supremacists, and McInnes has made a series of anti-Semitic statements. The ADL estimates that it has several hundred members.

A former member of the Proud Boys, Jason Kessler, was the primary organizer of the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, which Joe Biden again criticized for its anti-Semitism during the debate Tuesday. Chapters of the Proud Boys have marched with neo-Nazis on other occasions as well.

Just as members of the Boogaloo Bois, another far-right group, frequently wear Hawaiian shirts, the Proud Boys have adopted a specific quasi-uniform, in their case a black polo shirt with yellow trim produced by the British company Fred Perry. Late last week, the company announced that it would stop selling the shirts and issued a forceful statement reiterating its top executive’s previous condemnation of the Proud Boys.

Fred Perry, the Englishman who founded the company in 1952, “started a business with a Jewish businessman from Eastern Europe. It’s a shame we even have to answer questions like this. No, we don’t support the ideals or the group that you speak of. It is counter to our beliefs and the people we work with,” John Flynn, the company’s chair, said in 2017 and again in the new statement.

“And, in case anyone has any doubts, the Proud Boys are a virulent strain of American right-wing extremism,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted on Tuesday night, following the debate. “They have a long track record of violence, including in Portland this past weekend.”

He wrote that Trump “owes America an apology or an explanation. Now.”

McInnes went on an anti-Semitic rant in 2017, in which he defended Holocaust denial and repeated anti-Semitic stereotypes. The rant came in a video he originally titled “10 things I hate about the Jews.”

“I felt myself defending the super far-right Nazis just because I was sick of so much brainwashing and I felt like going, ‘Well, they never said it didn’t happen. What they’re saying is it was much less than 6 million and that they starved to death and weren’t gassed, that they didn’t have supplies,’” he said, before adding, “I’m not saying it wasn’t gassing.”

He also blamed Jews for Josef Stalin’s starvation of millions of Ukrainians. “I think it was 10 million Ukrainians who were killed,” he said. “That was by Jews. That was by Marxist, Stalinist, left-wing, commie, socialist Jews.”

He then said Jews have a “whiny paranoid fear of Nazis.”

October 1, 2020 | 8 Comments »

Leave a Reply

8 Comments / 8 Comments

  1. @ keelie:
    I would take anything Ann Coulter says about them with a grain of salt. She herself has made anti-Semitic comments. If they are anti-Semitic, that wouldn’t bother her. Nevertheless, this is a group without political and economic power, they are no threat even if they are anti-Semitic. The threat to Jews and to America in general comes from the left. BLM/antifa are being bankrolled by corporations and billionaires, tech giants and with direct ties to the democrat party. Don’t allow the media and democrats to deflect from what really plagues America. White supremacy is not remotely an issue that plagues America.

  3. I totally agree with Liz. have been following JTA and ADL for years, and bottom line: they are definitely slanted left; the first is fake news and the second is a fake “defender” of Jews. literally, with friends like these two creeps, Sales and Greenblatt, who needs enemies?

  6. @ LIZ WATSON:
    I agree with you Liz… I’ve seen a few programs about and interviews with Proud Boys members, and I was actually quite impressed.
    Let me put it this way, they appear to be one of the few functional bulwarks against groups such as Antifas and BLM who would undoubtedly kill Jews with great gusto.
    I personally have problems with most commentators these days, because they all maintain a stance of “If they are to the right of me, they are [insert your description here].”
    I must also remark that US (and other) Jews are doing themselves no favours by supporting leftist politics without question, and very loudly. I have (metaphorically) run into many of these fellow Jews, and if you want to dig up a reason for some current Jew-hating, you may want to try examining how many rabbis and their flocks are openly verging on insanity when it comes to Trump and his policies (about which most of them are truly ignorant).

  7. Whatever. Actions speak louder than words. Newsweek has some great articles, lately:

    “OPINION
    The Democrats’ Pro-Iran, Anti-Israel 2020 Platform | Opinion
    BRUCE ABRAMSON AND JEFF BALLABON
    ON 7/24/20 AT 6:00 AM EDTBruce Abramson and Jeff Ballabon”

    ” For the past week or so, Democrats purporting to be “pro-Israel” have been laying the groundwork for release of the party’s official 2020 platform. Their spin has been that they held the line against their party’s ascendant anti-Israel progressive base.

    They needed that spin. Many lifelong Democrats who recognize Israel as a valued U.S. ally, who appreciate the existence of the world’s only secure Jewish state and who oppose the unremitting terror campaigns of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas had grown concerned.

    They know that much as they may have admired the Obama-Biden administration on other grounds, its “daylight” doctrine had been an unmitigated disaster for Israel. In a stark, stunning and explicit departure from decades of bipartisan U.S. policy promising “no daylight” and “no surprises” between the allies, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry revealed Israeli intelligence, sabotaged operations and engaged in stealthy diplomatic attacks on the Jewish state—culminating in the notorious UNSC 2334 declaration that the mere act of Jews living in Judea is criminal. The party’s progressive base has made no secret of its desire to pocket 2334 and orient American policy in directions increasingly antagonistic towards Israel—and increasingly dangerous to Jewish life. The purported “pro-Israel” Democrats needed a pro-Israel platform for assurance.

    But the Democratic National Committee released a platform 180 degrees off from the spin. It’s so pro-Iran that the National Iranian-American Council, the de facto Iranian regime lobby in Washington, immediately “applauded” the DNC “for its forward-leaning platform commitments on issues of importance to the Iranian-American community.” It demonstrates that President Obama’s curious preference for the supremacists running the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than our traditional regional allies, has become mainstream Democratic ideology.

    Trump administration policies have brought the bloody Islamic Republic to its knees. The Democrats seek to restore its vitality by ending sanctions and re-entering President Obama’s odious Iran deal. Every faction across Israel’s notoriously fractious political spectrum agreed that this deal was an existential threat. Biden and the 2020 Democrats take the opposing view: Regime change is wrong; diplomacy and economic engagement can restrain the mullahs.

    Next up, the Gulf Arabs: A new generation of leaders have recently expanded women’s rights, confronted Islamism, acted to curb terrorism, deepened ties to the U.S. and moved towards ending the Arab/Israeli conflict. Biden and the 2020 Democrats prefer to “reset” those warm relations in order to keep America’s traditional Gulf allies at arms length.

    Beyond merely calling to strengthen the genocidal Iranian regime while weakening reformers seeking to integrate Israel into the broader region, the platform also advocates a “small, finite and focused” U.S. troop presence nonetheless capable of training the Iraqi military and Syrian militias, stabilizing both countries, securing the Kurds and preventing a resurgence of the ISIS caliphate. Left unsaid is that such a presence does little more than dare belligerents to attack Americans while constraining Israeli freedom of action.

    The platform then turns to Israel. It recommits to the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding tying U.S. military aid to severe constraints on Israel’s dealings with Congress. It then sets the stage with a series of shockingly immoral and inhumane statements. It baldly equates America’s loyal, liberal, democratic ally Israel with a corrupt, genocidal and profoundly anti-American terror organization that wreaks havoc on Jewish lives and perpetuates the squalid misery of Arabs under its yoke. It equates Jewish homeownership in disputed areas—to which Israel possesses by far the best historical and legal claims—not with Arab homeownership in those same disputed areas, but with Arab terror.

    Having thus undermined Israel’s right to exist, the platform calls for an unconditional commitment to restore Palestinian Authority (PA) funding that the U.S. has withheld until the PA ends its program of paying for murder, popularly known as “pay-for-slay.” The PA’s response to this American demand has been utter rejectionism; billionaire terror-chief Mahmoud Abbas insists on his right to use American money to fund terror.

    With this Israel plank in its platform, Joe Biden and the 2020 Democrats have effectively adopted the terrorists’ creed, excusing, justifying and encouraging the murder of Jews, denying history and law, and promoting the continued rise of global anti-Semitism. While the platform committee may have allowed the purportedly “pro-Israel” operatives to remove the word “occupation” from the text, its substance reaffirms the Democrats’ commitment to the unspeakably anti-Semitic and anti-American notion of “judenrein” territory—the ethnic cleansing of Jews from their historic homeland. Selected details and linguistic niceties cannot spin away the platform’s substantive anti-Jewish reality.

    It is both telling and terrifying that purportedly “pro-Israel” Democrats have cast this disastrous platform as a victory. The platform’s avoidance of the term “occupation” and its mild critique of BDS are smokescreens intended to let pro-Israel voters convince themselves that they’re not voting for anti-Jewish genocide.

    It would be tragic if the spinmeisters succeed.”

    “Bruce Abramson is a senior fellow and director at ACEK Fund and the author of American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War. Jeff Ballabon is the principal of B2 Strategic and a veteran government relations and media consultant.”

    https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-pro-iran-anti-israel-2020-platform-opinion-1520136?fbclid=IwAR1DsUbEguZOKigbSLf7JjI86U3eGpu-HPk-n_m1XS6MM-Wza6axzcUPJrQ

  8. I have no knowledge of the proud boys.

    But I do have a lot of experience with Ben Sales of jTA a firm supporter of J St., Peace Now, etc. with the southern center who have practiced a left-wing agenda for many years; and with the Anti-Defamation League. None of them can be trusted since they tend to label fascist and racist many conservative causes that are actually very pro-Israel. They stretch linkage, for example when they say marched with the Nazis…. unfortunately, many of us do when they put in a contingent into a parade such as on Armed Forces Day. Also, a member of an organization who also is active in a rather bad organization does not link the first organization to the misdeeds of the second. In this article there is an awful lot of third order linkage. I hope that Ted Belman reads this information so that he can include his personal disclaimer for anything originating with JTA and/orADL and/or the Southern Center.