“Know these punks?” asked musician, singer, songwriter, hunter, and right-wing political activist Ted Nugent’s Facebook page on Monday, and continued: “They hate freedom, they hate good over evil, they would deny us the basic human right to self-defense & to KEEP & BEAR ARMS while many of them have tax paid hired ARMED security! Know them well. Tell every1 (sic) you know how evil they are. Let us raise maximum hell to shut them down!”
The accompanying unabashed poster, headlined, “So who is really behind gun control?” shows 12 prominent Jewish Americans, with a small Israeli flag affixed to each picture, along with a nasty, occasionally outright anti-Semitic introductory comment:
“Jew York City mayor Mikey Bloomberg — Nanny State trouble maker and 9/11 Israeli agent.”
“Sen. Chucky boy Schumer.”
“Sen. Frank Lautenberg — Gave Russian Jew immigrants your tax money.”
Here’s one that’s a bit bizarre, but easily fact-checkable:
“Rahm Emanuel Chicago mayor — Served in Israel’s army during Gulf war.” The son of an Israeli immigrant to the US, Emanuel took part in a two-week civilian volunteer holiday, known as the Sar-El, where, as a civilian volunteer, he assisted the Israeli army during the 1991 Gulf War, helping to repair truck brakes in one of Israel’s northern bases (Wiki).
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Monday condemned the Facebook post, and ADL CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt issued the following statement:
“Ted Nugent has a long history of being an equal opportunity offender. But his latest share on Facebook, making the outrageous suggestion that Jews are behind gun control, is nothing short of conspiratorial anti-Semitism. Regardless of one’s views on gun control, this kind of scapegoating of an entire religious group is completely unacceptable and completely divorced from reality.
“It should go without saying that anti-Semitism has no place in the gun control debate. Nugent should be ashamed for promoting anti-Semitic content, and we hope that good people on both sides of the gun control debate will reject his tactics and his message. We hope that Nugent will have the good sense to remove this share immediately so that it does not spread virally across the internet.”
In January 2014, ADL spoke out after Nugent made public remarks comparing film producer Harvey Weinstein to Hitler’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, charging that Weinstein was out to “destroy the NRA.”
As usual in these Facebook attack posts, the comments are far more decrepit than the original message, and this Nugent post is getting worse by the hour. But we decided not to provide the link to his page because Nugent’s tastes are not G-rated, not in the least.