Georgia Democrat Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock reportedly campaigned over the weekend with a politician who compared Jews to “termites” just a few years ago.
The trio reportedly campaigned together on Saturday during a drive-in rally hosted by county-level Democrat parties in their attempts to drive voter registration.
Ossoff and Warnock’s decision to campaign with Hank Johnson, who has made anti-Semitic remarks in the past, comes as Warnock has faced scrutiny on the campaign trail for controversial comments that he made a few years ago about Israel.
In 2016, the Free Beacon reported that Johnson “compared Jewish Israeli settlers to termites” while speaking at an event “sponsored by an anti-Israel organization that supports boycotts of the Jewish state.”
The Free Beacon reported:
“There has been a steady [stream], almost like termites can get into a residence and eat before you know that you’ve been eaten up and you fall in on yourself, there has been settlement activity that has marched forward with impunity and at an ever increasing rate to the point where it has become alarming,” Johnson said during an event sponsored by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, an anti-Israel organization that galvanizes supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS.
“It has come to the point that occupation, with highways that cut through Palestinian land, with walls that go up, with the inability or the restriction, with the illegality of Palestinians being able to travel on those roads and those roads cutting off Palestinian neighborhoods from each other,” Johnson continued. “And then with the building of walls and the building of check points that restrict movement of Palestinians. We’ve gotten to the point where the thought of a Palestinian homeland gets further and further removed from reality.”
The State Department recently declared that it would officially recognize anti-Israel BDS campaigns as being anti-Semitic and that the U.S. government was in the process of identifying organizations that support the anti-Semitic movement and withdrawing any support that they receive from the U.S. government.
The Free Beacon further noted that Johnson suggested that “Jewish people” steal the homes of Palestinians.
“You see one home after another being appropriated by Jewish people who come in to claim that land just because somebody did not spend the night there,” Johnson said. “The home their [Palestinian] ancestors lived in for generations becomes an Israeli home and a flag goes up,” he said, adding, “the Palestinians are barred from flying flags in their own neighborhoods.”
Johnson also campaigned with Warnock and Ossoff at an October event in Lithonia. Johnson posted a photo of himself with the two candidates at the event, writing: “@ossoff & @ReverendWarnock in the Senate will fight to protect #healthcare for all American families by safeguarding pre-existing condition protections, no matter how hard some Republicans will work to strip them away.”
.@ossoff & @ReverendWarnock in the Senate will fight to protect #healthcare for all American families by safeguarding pre-existing condition protections, no matter how hard some Republicans will work to strip them away. pic.twitter.com/24sLkAv0LN
— Hank Johnson (@ReElectHank) December 5, 2020