Esther Panitch, a Democratic Georgia state representative and the lone Jewish member of the state’s legislature, is calling on the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Georgia to “change their minds” about featuring antisemitic speakers at its upcoming gala in September.
Listed speakers include political commentators Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur and Zahra Billoo, executive director of CAIR in the San Francisco Bay Area. The 10th anniversary gala is slated for Sept. 12 at an undisclosed site.
“CAIR-GA’s Sept. 12 keynote, who wrote, ‘The goyim are waking the f**k up,’ was told exactly what it meant by her own side, and she refused to apologize,” Panitch wrote on social media, of a post of Kasparian’s in February.
Fourteen hours after posting it, Kasparian wrote on social media, “I do not regret this comment. I don’t apologize.”
She defended her post by calling Israel “evil” and “genocidal” and saying that “they’re about to drag us into another war, and all we hear from Israelis and their brain-dead supporters is ‘antisemite’ if you disagree with Israel’s agenda.”
Panitch told JNS that CAIR-GA is done “pretending they don’t hate Jews.”
“This is actual straight-out, Nazi-level ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ kind of antisemitism,” she told JNS. “They’re doing it, and they can’t say they didn’t know.”
“They’ve dropped the mask at this point,” the lawmaker said. “They don’t want Israel to exist. They don’t want Jews to exist.”
Panitch, a Jewish attorney, stated that she doesn’t think CAIR-GA can be banned, but she believes that groups and public figures have a “responsibility for making sure you don’t say things that incite the mob.”
