Women’s March organizers in Washington state have announced that they are dissolving their chapter of the national Women’s March after an explosive report from Tablet Magazine which detailed rampant anti-Semitism in the national organization’s highest ranks.
The Washington Times reports that the Washington state Women’s March group — an active group within the organizations fifty-state system — could no longer abide blatant attacks on their Jewish members from some of the national group’s leaders, including Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Tamika Mallory.
The group’s spokeswoman took to Facebook to explain the “difficult” decision.
“Continuing to be a part of the Women’s March with the blatant bigotry they display would be breaking a promise,” she wrote. “We can’t betray our Jewish community by remaining a part of this organization.”
The spokeswoman, Angie Beem, later told the Spokane Spokesman-Review that she could no longer abide Sarsour, Perez, and Mallory’s ties to Louis Farrakhan. Beem added that while she knows the decision to disband an active organization would come as a surprise to some of the group’s membership, she hasn’t gotten a lot of pushback on her decision to disengage from the national March.
“One of the things that has really surprised me is that I’m not getting a lot of pushback and a lot of hate,” she said. “That, to me, is almost a miracle.”
Although plenty of outlets, including The Daily Wire, have regularly reported on Sarsour, Perez, and Mallory’s ties to the notorious Nation of Islam and it’s openly anti-Semitic, anti-woman, and anti-LGBT head, Louis Farrakhan, it took a massive, intense investigation from Tablet Magazine to bring the issue to the forefront.
That investigation revealed not only that Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Tamika Mallory are intimately connected with the Chicago-based Nation of Islam, but that the Women’s March and the Nation of Islam organization have been inextricably linked since the Women’s March’s founding.
Although the group was originally a grassroots effort, Sarsour and Perez quickly took over along with co-chair Bob Bland and aligned the Women’s March with another questionable group called The Gathering for Justice. Almost immediately after solidifying their positions at the helm of the Women’s March movement, Perez and Mallory tried to steer the group towards attacking Jews.
“Perez and Mallory allegedly first asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people—and even, according to a close secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade,” Tablet media reported, adding that Sarsour, Perez, and Mallory also looked to the Nation of Islam to provide security at personal appearances.
When the group’s original organizers tried to wrest control back, they were met with insurmountable resistance and a complicated financial relationship the new group had formed with the Gathering for Justice.
Although more than a week has passed since the Tablet expose, Women’s March leaders haven’t apologized outright for their connections to Farrakhan, nor denounced the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader. Instead, they’ve mostly called themselves victims of a witch hunt, insisting that the Women’s March stands in solidarity against racism and discrimination in all its forms.
Since the first whispers of Women’s March anti-Semitism began in the spring of 2018, a number of sub-organizations have declared themselves independent of the national Women’s March (Tablet reports that “Houston, Washington, D.C., Alabama, Rhode Island, Florida, Portland, Illinois, Barcelona, Canada, and Women’s March GLOBAL,” have all separated from the national March), but Washington state appears to be the first group to jettison their ties to Sarsour, Perez, and Mallory over the Tablet revelations.