In the process of apologizing for antisemitic remarks that he made in March 2025 as a member of the Washington State Humans Rights Commission—something he did for the first time, and four more times, in a 45-minute phone call with JNS—Luc fils Jasmin said that he isn’t sure if Hamas is a terror organization.
The United States has designated it as one for nearly 30 years, since Oct. 8, 1997.
“I want to apologize to the Jewish community for what I said,” Jasmin told JNS. “It’s a line of idea that is not considerable given the position that I’m in.”
“I own my mistake,” he said.
At the March 27, 2025 meeting, video footage of which the state agency posted publicly last week, Jasmin said that Jews are always “crying” about antisemitism.
“This word ‘antisemitism’ has been around since the Jews got trampled by Hitler, and it seems like the Jewish people keep on crying and crying and crying and crying—always crying over the antisemitism,” he said at the meeting.
Jasmin, whom then-Gov. Jay Inslee appointed to the role in 2023 and whose term runs through 2028, added at the meeting that “these people the Jewish are killing by the millions over there—the Palestinians and the Arabs.”
A pastor in Spokane who immigrated to the country from Haiti when he was 16, Jasmin spoke to JNS on Sunday for about 45 minutes with his son Luc Jasmin III, who serves as eastern Washington outreach representative for the office of Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson.
The younger Jasmin is running to represent the state’s third legislative district in the Washington state House.
During the 45-minute conversation with JNS, the elder Jasmin apologized five times for his comments and said that after the meeting, he had two phone calls with members of the governor’s office, which investigated the incident, and apologized to them.
Jasmin told JNS that the meeting was a “closed executive session,” in which members of the commission were discussing a resolution on Jew-hatred.
“I wanted to put out that everybody should be treated the same,” he said. “The words came out very wrong. I realized that soon after that meeting. As a matter of fact, I was the first one who voted for the resolution.”
The commission passed the resolution, which ostensibly decries antisemitism, on April 17, 2025. It also states that equating Jew-hatred and anti-Zionism has been used to attack free speech rights under the Constitution, including the right to protest.
“Threatening or attacking those that peacefully protest and advocate for Palestinian rights, including Jews, does nothing to make the Jewish community safer,” the resolution states, “and in fact distracts from and undermines the ability to confront actual antisemitism where it exists.”
Jasmin told JNS that “these discussions are not supposed to be public.”
“They’re supposed to be in a room where the information is contained there. What is important is the decision at the end,” he said. “I don’t know who leaked it. I would never, never leak information like that to the public to hurt Jewish people, because they’re nice people and what I said sounds really bad, and I’m really sorry about it.”
“I want them to know that I’m very, very sorry about the statement I did,” he told JNS. “And if I could take it back, I would.”
Jasmin said that videos of executive sessions are “not supposed to be public,” because “some people say a lot of hurtful things about groups.”
“But we don’t take people’s mistake and throw it out on the street for everybody to hear,” he said.
JNS told Jasmin that the commission posted the video footage on its official YouTube page on June 10 and that it wasn’t leaked.
Jasmin said again that someone leaked it.
“The tape that they got—somebody got a hand to the table and said, ‘We will put this out,’” he told JNS.
When he said that Jews are always “crying” about antisemitism, it came off as offensive, because “sometimes you use a word that means something differently in a different language but to you it’s not offensive,” Jasmin said.
He also spoke about his claim that Jews were killing “millions” of Palestinians and Arabs.
“At that time, I didn’t make the difference between the State of Israel and the Jewish people,” he told JNS. “What came out of my mind was the State of Israel and what’s going on, but then it came out in a conversation about the Jewish people.”
“Jewish people are people that I love,” he said. “I’m serious.”
“That was the mistake right there,” he told JNS. “My mind was on what’s going on outside instead of what’s going on in Washington. Since there was no noise about antisemitism at that time in Washington, my mind was on what’s going on outside the state itself.”
“That’s where I got mixed up, and I messed up big time,” he added.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were 239 antisemitic incidents in the state in 2024, the year prior to Jasmin’s comment that there was “no noise about antisemitism” in Washington, and 189 in 2023.
In 2024, anti-Israel activists made encampments on campuses across the state, including University of Washington and Western Washington University.
Jasmin told JNS that he did not recall saying that Jews had killed “millions.”
“I really shouldn’t be talking about outside events in the meeting, and that was a mistake,” he said. “Sometimes your mind goes into where abuse is going on.”
The member of the state human rights panel said later in the conversation that he doesn’t understand why anti-Israel activism often crosses over into Jew-hatred.
“I don’t see why they take what happened to what the government is doing somewhere else and to have it in the local setting and people that are living peacefully here,” he told JNS.
He said that his son told him that Israel had offered humanitarian assistance to Haiti on multiple occasions and that Jews had been supportive of Haitian immigrants.
After talking to his son, Jasmin watched the clip of himself at the meeting and thought, “What did I do? Oh my God,” he told JNS.
He grew up in Brooklyn and went to school with many Jews, he said.
“We were never racist to them, and they were never racist to us,” he told JNS. “We didn’t have any fights, because in Flatbush Avenue in Utica, my friends—they were Jews.”
“My first job was given to me by Jewish people,” he said. “My second one and my third one. As a matter of fact, the only people I’ve been working for—they are Jewish, all of them.”
Though a member of the state’s human rights commission, Jasmin told JNS that he hadn’t paid attention to reports of antisemitism in the state.
“Now I’m going to pay attention to that, and I’m going to make sure that people know about it, because that’s one way I could repay back what I did,” he said.
The Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, took place a few months after Jasmin was appointed to the commission.
He told JNS that he could not recall discussing the attack at any commission meetings. “It’s mostly about what happened within the state,” he said.
He also told JNS that he could not remember the commission ever discussing the anti-Israel protests and encampments.
JNS asked if he thinks that Hamas is a terrorist organization.
“I have no access to the information of who they are,” he told JNS. “All I hear is in the news and what has got to me from the media. I do not know anything about this, and I don’t know if I should make a decision.”
He said that he may have learned that Israel killed millions “from the media.”
“That goes to my subconscious mind,” he told JNS.
Since the commission posted the video of the meeting, he has heard from “the people I Iove, that I’ve been with all my life, calling me to say, ‘What are you saying, Luc? I didn’t expect this from you,’ and all that.”
He told JNS thar he has learned from the situation to avoid listening to the news and focus on “defending the rights of people in this state.”
Jasmin said that he intends to listen more and talk less.
“To hear and not to talk so much, to not reflect on outside information so much and to look at what’s in front of me and to make decisions according to what’s in front of me,” he said.
He told JNS that he had not been in contact with any Jewish organizations but that he has worked with the Spokane Alliance, a coalition of groups which includes Congregation Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue in Spokane.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle stated that it contacted Jasmin last week, after the video was posted, but did not hear back.
Jasmin told JNS that he has not checked his government email since his comments went public.
He also said that his son was not aware of what had happened until last week.
Jasmin III told JNS that he wanted to give his father “kudos” for apologizing and owning his words.
“A lot of people, they’ll double down,” he said. “I think part of being a leader and part of being human is admitting when you’re wrong and committing to put in the work and to rectify situations.”
The son said that he didn’t think it would be “fair” to answer if Hamas is a terror organization.
On social media, in response to a July 7, 2025, news article about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nominating U.S. President Donald Trump for the Nobel Prize, Jasmin III wrote, “And then went ahead and killed 60,000 more people.”
“I think a lot of times we get to talking about things and have an opinion on things we’re not directly included in,” the younger Jasmin, who works in the Washington governor’s office, told JNS. “We get caught up in listening to what we see in the news, and I think that really gets us in trouble.”
“What I do know is I don’t love war and terror,” he said. “It hurts to see all the groups that are being impacted. I don’t think it’s fair to me to label any group, because I’m not in it.”
Of the campus protests and encampments, Jasmin III said that “we need to make sure we’re protecting freedom of speech, but we also need to make sure that we’re protecting people and their rights and their safety.”
He said that in the United States, people who came from countries at war are “living in unison.”
“That’s what I want to see in our state,” he said. “Everybody collectively living together, feeling safe to be able to navigate and do their thing.”
Jasmin III is running as a Democrat and works for a Democratic governor.
He told JNS he hopes to win everyone’s votes, including conservatives, because “I do the work.”
“I hope people judge me off myself and my own merits and the fact that I bring people together,” he said. “That’s a big value of mine.”
“Conservatives have good ideas, too,” he said. “I might not necessarily value the same things that conservatives do, but I don’t share the same views and opinions every Democrat believes either.”
Democrats in Olympia have stalled on antisemitism training, according to sources familiar with the matter.
If Jasmin III wins his election in November and joins the legislature in Olympia, he said that he would be open to the training.
“Just like I would want people to really learn and get training on what it means to be a black person in Washington state or coming from an immigrant refugee population, I think we owe it to each other to be open to looking at any training,” he told JNS.
“That would include antisemitism because, yeah, we have a lot of our Jewish neighbors who contribute a lot to our community that want to feel safe, and part of that is understanding their experience,” the younger Jasmin said.
He said that he is open to groups or legislators contacting him to share “different trainings and modalities that I could potentially partner with, because we need to stick together.”
“It benefits all of us,” he told JNS. “I would need help from leaders in the Jewish community to help me see what we could potentially do in the state legislature.”
After nearly 45 minutes, father and son stressed that they are separate people.
“I want to be judged based off my own actions,” Jasmin III told JNS. “That’s what I’m a little fearful of.”
“Being associated with me,” the elder Jasmin added. “It would be wrong for him to get caught in my mistake,” he said.
