Calling Zionists ‘Cockroaches’ Isn’t Racist, Politician Claims

Image by Facebook
A Georgia city council candidate defended himself against allegations of anti-Semitism last week, saying that his tweets describing Zionists as “cockroaches” and calls for Jews to be removed from the White House do not make him racist.
“I’m absolutely not racist in the very least,” Joe Briggs told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Briggs, a 59-year-old engineer who is running for a city council post in a suburb of Atlanta, has been tweeting about Jews and Israel over the last year. The posts, which came to light in the lead up to Tuesday’s election, are critical of Israel’s government and its role in American politics, but also criticize Jews more broadly. Briggs once wrote: “zionists in Israel far worse than anything described in Mein Kampf. Get over it.”
“Get the Jews out of the White House and out of POTUS’ ear,” Briggs wrote in a tweet from September about Iran.
“At least the Nazis assimilated and contributed to US society,” Briggs also tweeted.
A few days later, he wrote, “The problem is that Jews don’t care about racism — because they are racist. They only care about racism directed towards them. Square that.”
Dov Wilker, the director of the American Jewish Committee’s Atlanta office, called Briggs’ comments “severely offensive and insulting.”
“Especially any comment about Jews as bugs or cockroaches is an indication, it’s classic anti-Zionist trope,” Wilker told the newspaper.
Email Sam Kestenbaum at kestenbaum@forward.com and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO