NEW YORK – A Jewish rapper turned Democratic candidate running for office in Brooklyn sparked outrage on social media Tuesday when he alluded that the rise of antisemitic assaults on religious Jews is not a real threat.
"[I]'m sorry but the real threat to [A]merican [J]ews is not someone getting their hat knocked off by a teenager," Noah Weston, known as the rapper Soul Khan, wrote on Twitter to his 23.7K followers. "[I]t's the [C]hristian [R]ight emboldened by their successes against abortion and LGBT rights and the actual [N]azis among and alongside them."
New York Jewish leaders were quick to slam the Democratic Socialist's tweet.
i'm sorry but the real threat to american jews is not someone getting their hat knocked off by a teenager. it's the christian right emboldened by their successes against abortion and LGBT rights and the actual nazis among and alongside them.
— starscourge rod dreher (@soulkhan) May 10, 2022
Mordechai Lightstone, Chabad social media director, fired back with a link to an article headlined "64-year-old Brooklyn rabbi hit in head with brick." Lightstone added: "I didn't know we could only have one thing to be afraid of at a time. (Also, hat knocked off? Try brick in the face)."
Joel Petlin, superintendent of the Kiryas Joel school district, replied: "Someone who makes light of Antisemitic violence against visibly Orthodox Jews, in order to highlight issues that they find more important, says everything people need to know about someone's fitness for elected office."
Weston's claim comes as antisemitic hate crimes are surging in New York, an Anti Defamation League (ADL) poll released last month shows.
The ADL reports there were 51 incidents of antisemitic assaults in New York last year, representing a 325% increase over the year before.
Weston, who is outspoken about anti-cop rhetoric, announced in February that he’s running for Democratic district leader of Assembly District 46 in Brooklyn in response to the "indifference and broken promises" of US President Joe Biden and the "callousness and cruelty" of New York City Mayor Eric Adams – so that he can "transform" what he perceives as failures of the Democratic Party "from the ground up," US media reported.
In a tweet last month, Weston said that "the greatest threats in this city are Eric Adams and the NYPD."
He has also expressed opposition to Israel online.
"What's good for Israel isn't the same as what's good for Jews everywhere," Weston wrote on Twitter in 2015.
More recently, he penned a 2020 tweet saying that "'Israel has the right to exist' is the AIPAC version of 'all lives matter' used to deflect the clear, urgent demand for Palestinian equality."
Weston did not respond to The Jerusalem Post's immediate request for comment.