A top Jewish group slammed Democrat Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in a statement late on Saturday night after they campaigned with Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA), who has referred to Jews as “termites” and accused them of stealing the homes of Palestinians.
“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,” The Daily Wire reported. “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.”
The Republican Jewish Coalition released a statement calling out the Democrat Party for its continued drift toward anti-Semitism and abandonment of Israel:
Hank Johnson, Jon Ossoff’s mentor and former boss, enjoys referring to Israelis as “termites.” He used the phrase when speaking to the group called Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation – a group that supports the antisemitic BOS movement. That Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff rely on Johnson to boost their campaigns is a direct endorsement of Johnson’s bigoted statements about the citizens of the only Jewish country in the world. Calling Jews “termites” is dehumanizing and on par with the propaganda that the Nazi regime used to desensitize the German people to the eventual Holocaust.
Johnson’s use of “termite” is so troubling that the RJC made it a central point of a national ad campaign in 2016 to highlight the growing anti-Israel sentiment in the Democrat Party. This also isn’t an isolated incident. Much like Nazis and other regimes who have sought to rid the world of Jews, Johnson has accused Jews of stealing. He accused individual Israelis of simply walking into Palestinian homes and stealing those homes with impunity. That is an absolute lie, and as a Member of Congress, Johnson knows it’s a lie.
Jon Ossoff certainly knows what Johnson has said about Jews from Israel, and Raphael Warnock either knows, or is being purposefully ignorant. The Jewish community deserves to know who Ossoff and Warnock will stand with. Today it became even more clear that they will stand with the large anti-Israel contingent of the Democrat Party, ensuring that they will not stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel.
“This really crosses a line,” Matt Brooks, director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said in a statement to The Daily Wire. “Ossoff and Warnock have to know Johnson’s anti-Israel history. Ossoff worked for the guy. The only thing they can do now is apologize and condemn Hank Johnson.”
The State Department recently declared that it would officially recognize anti-Israel BDS campaigns as being anti-Semitic and that it would immediately move to identify organizations that participate in it and receive government funds and strip them of that funding.