Anti-Semitic BDS supporter joins Sanders campaign

“What I saw there was cold, calculating racism and ethnic privilege masquerading as a Jewish State,” Agnew wrote in Ebony Magazine in 2015.

By Aaron Sull, World Israel News

Phillip Agnew, an anti-Semitic activist who supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS), announced on Saturday that he is joining Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.

“I’ve joined the campaign as a senior adviser; accepting the challenges & contradictions. To my friends & comrades: thank you for the love & accountability. This is a people’s position on a people’s campaign. We will leave no one behind. That is our promise,” Agnew tweeted.

Agnew, who also goes by the name Umi Selah, has been a longstanding critic of Israel, arguing that Zionism “is a racist, exploitative, and exclusionary ideology” in a 2015 article for Ebony magazine.

“In January, I joined a delegation of organizers from the United States in a pilgrimage to Palestine,” Agnew wrote. “What I saw there was cold, calculating racism and ethnic privilege masquerading as a Jewish State.”

I dined in the home of a woman who lost her unborn child to brutal Israeli occupation; a life snuffed out before it’s first breath,” he claimed.

Agnew is also widely considered to be sexist. In multiple tweets in 2009, he called former First Lady Michelle Obama “odd” and “ugly.”

In one tweet, Agnew wrote, “Random thought while standing on Gas Station: Michel Obama is an odd-looking woman… I’d call her ugly but I don’t want the backlash.” In another, Agnew wrote, “Michelle Obama is just not pretty… I’ve tried to look at her from every angle possible.”

On Wednesday, Agnew apologized for the sexist tweets by calling them “immature” and written by a “boy who thought he was forever invisible and invincible.”

According to Newsweek, Sanders hired Agnew in order to help win the African-American vote following his resounding defeat by former Vice President Joe Biden on Super Tuesday among the African-American community.

“I am excited to welcome Phillip to our team,” Sanders said. “He is a gifted organizer and one of his generation’s most critical voices on issues of race and inequity. He has and will continue to push me and this movement to deliver on what is owed to black people who have yet to experience reciprocity in this country.”