We Need to Talk About This Republican Candidate’s AntisemitismMark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, has for some reason not bothered to take down his old Facebook posts about the Jews.“There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” Robinson, the state’s lieutenant governor, wrote in one 2017 post. (The reason was left unsaid, but the scare quotes spoke loudly.) He regularly argued on Facebook that focusing on the evils of Nazism obscured the greater danger: the one represented by the Democratic Party. “George Soros is alive. Adolf Hitler is dead,” he wrote in one post, and in another, “Who do you think has been pushing this Nazi boogeyman narrative all these years?”In 2018, Robinson, who is Black, offered some thoughts about what he seemed to see as a Jewish plot behind the hit movie “Black Panther.” The title character, he wrote, was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic Marxist,” calling the movie “trash” that was “created to pull the shekels” from the pockets of Black people, whom he referred to using a Yiddish slur. ["shvartze" - EoZ.] He has refused to apologize for these statements, though he called them “poorly worded” and has denied that he’s antisemitic.None of this appears to have hurt Robinson with the Republican electorate in North Carolina, where on Tuesday he won nearly 65 percent of the vote in the gubernatorial primary.
I looked at Robinson's posts she mentions and others. He's nuts. And he has a lot in common with the antisemites of the Left.
Like the "progressive" antisemites, Robinson associates Jews with what he hates the most.While the Left eagerly links Jews ("Zionists') with racism and colonialism, Robinson breezily associates Jews with the Hollywood and communism he hates.
In this 2017 post: "The 1977 version of 'Roots' is one of the most vile things EVER filmed. It is nothing but Hollywood trash that depicts the ignorance and brutality of the goyim, and the helplessness and weakness of the shvartze."
He has been accused of Holocaust denial. I haven't seen outright denial. He uses the Holocaust as a rhetorical device to attack thing he believes are worse. He says that communism is at least as bad as Nazism, and to make his point he has minimized the Holocaust and Hitler's crimes. Robinson even approvingly featured an alleged quote of Hitler's about having pride in one's own race.
These examples, and others, should disqualify him from being supported as a candidate.
Goldberg brings other examples of Republican tolerance of antisemitism:
[E]ven if you believe that the Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib’s use of the anti-Zionist slogan “from the river to the sea” is obviously antisemitic — I don’t — it’s worth asking why it received so much more coverage than Robinson’s apparent Holocaust denial, or for that matter, the promotion of antisemitic websites and social media posts by Republican congressmen like Arizona’s Paul Gosar and Georgia’s Mike Collins.
The examples given do indicate antisemitism. Gosar's campaign newsletter linked to an likely Kremlin-funded antisemitic website that wrote an article about him titled "Congressman: Jewish warmongers Nuland & Blinken ‘Are Dangers Fools Who Can Get Us All Killed,’” taking out the word "Jewish" indicating that this was no innocent mistake. Collins slyly noted the Jewishness of a Washington Post reporter who wrote a stupid article minimizing urban crime.
Another accusation Goldberg made, about how CPAC supposedly tolerated neo-Nazis, was not as convincing. The neo-Nazis came to CPAC, some paid and some not, and mingled with the delegates and tried to spread their poison. That is like a serial killer taking a photo with a First Lady and pretending that she approves of his crimes.
And Goldberg's spin, that Republican tolerance of antisemitism is worse than that of Democrats, is similarly unconvincing. They are different in form but the same in fact: on each side, the desire to promote their own political ambitions makes them blind to the antisemitism by their allies. You will have to look long and hard to find a prominent member of either side saying, unequivocally, that antisemitism by their own side is unacceptable and will be rejected.
But she's right about the fact that there has not been nearly as much publicity over Gosar's and Collins' flirtations with hate as with Tlaib's and Ilhan Omar's. Antisemitism is noxious on both sides of the aisle and too many people are afraid to call it out. or willing to minimize it, when it happens on their side.
