Tablet Magazine reveals that two leaders of the Women’s March swapped anti-Semitic conspiracy theories when they first met.
By World Israel News Staff
A Dec. 10, Tablet Magazine story by Leah McSweeney and Jacob Siegel reveals that two leaders of the Women’s March swapped anti-Semitic conspiracy theories when they first met in November 2016.
“In the first hours of the first meeting for what would become the Women’s March … something happened that was so shameful to many of those who witnessed it, they chose to bury it like a family secret,” McSweeney and Siegel write.
Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez, while getting to know one another, talked about the Jews’ “special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people,” and that “Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade,” the Tablet authors write, citing a “close secondhand source.”
“These are canards popularized by The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a book published by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam — ‘the bible of the new anti-Semitism,’ according to Henry Louis Gates Jr., who noted in 1992: ‘Among significant sectors of the black community, this brief has become a credo of a new philosophy of black self-affirmation,’” McSweeney and Siegel say.
Mallory denies she made such comments.
A similar scene took place at a January 2017 meeting held at Mallory’s apartment, the Tablet authors say. One of the attendees, Evvie Harmon, described to the magazine what happened when Mallory and Perez started criticizing Vanessa Wruble, another member of the group.
“I suddenly realized that Tamika and Carmen were facing Vanessa, who was sitting on a couch, and berating her—but it wasn’t about her being white. It was about her being Jewish. ‘Your people this, your people that.’ I was raised in the South and the language that was used is language that I’m very used to hearing in rural South Carolina. Just instead of against black people, against Jewish people. They even said to her ‘your people hold all the wealth.’ You could hear a pin drop. It was awful.”
The Tablet piece also reports that Nation of Islam members handled security and acted as drivers for the Women’s March co-founders, according to Mercy Morganfield, a former spokeswoman for the Women’s March.
In November, the founder of the Women’s March movement, Teresa Shook, called on the leaders to step down, tweeting on Nov. 19:
“In opposition to our Unity Principles, they have allowed anti-Semitism, anti-LBGTQIA sentiment and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the platform by their refusal to separate themselves from groups that espouse these racist, hateful beliefs. I call for the current Co-Chairs to step down and to let others lead who can restore faith in the Movement and its original intent.”
One of the first public figures to distance herself from the group was actress Alyssa Milano, who announced in late October that she wouldn’t speak at another Women’s March event until its organizers denounce notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.
She was followed shortly afterwards by fellow actress Debra Messing.