TEL AVIV – The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has called on Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to fire newly-appointed senior advisor, Phillip Agnew, for what ZOA calls “maniacal, Jew-hating, Israel-bashing” statements.
Agnew has in the past described Zionism as “racist and exploitative.”
“The Zionist Organization of America strongly urges presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders to fire Sanders’ new Jew-hating, Israel-bashing senior advisor, Phillip Agnew,” ZOA’s president, Morton A. Klein, and its chairman, Mark Levenson, said in a joint statement Monday.
The two called on leaders of other Jewish groups — including Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt; American Jewish Congress head David Harris; the Conference of Presidents’ Arthur Stark and William Daroff; and American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) CEO Howard Kohr — to rally together in condemning Agnew, whom ZOA also described as a “dangerous, maniacal Jew-hating bigot and militant extremist.”
“You dare not be silent!” they wrote.
In a 2015 article for Ebony magazine, Agnew called Zionism “a racist, exploitative, and exclusionary ideology.”
Agnew is the co-founder of Dream Defenders, a group created in response to the 2012 killing of African American teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida.
In 2016, Agnew shared a cartoon on Instagram of the World Trade Center on fire as two boomerang-shaped planes, with “U.S. Interventionist Policy” imprinted them, were embedded in the buildings. His accompanying text read: “#neverforget what goes round comes round.”
