Source: WRAL
Earlier this month, a group of Jewish, Muslim and Christian activists gathered outside the North Carolina General Assembly to protest a bill that would codify a controversial definition of antisemitism into law.
According to WRAL, House Bill 942, pushed by Republican House Speaker Tim Moore, advanced through a House Judiciary Committee before being fast-tracked to the House floor for a vote, where it passed.
Called The Shalom Act, groups such as Carolina Jews for Justice, criticized the Republican-led bill, stating that it would harm free speech without protecting the Jewish community.
“This is not a serious bill to address antisemitism,” stated Abby Lublin, executive director of Carolina Jews for Justice, during a press conference. “By conflating and connecting the protection of all Jewish people with limitations on criticism of the State of Israel, the bill sponsors get to exploit Jews for political gain.”
The Republican bill comes after Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson made national headlines for his discriminatory rhetoric towards the Jewish community.
Critics and activists have condemned state Republicans for failing to call out Robinson’s hate speech and long history of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.
In a 2021 article from the Jewish Insider, reporter Matthew Kassel uncovered a series of social media posts made by Robinson that documents his history of spouting antisemitic conspiracy theories.
“Robinson shared a quotation attributed to Adolf Hitler, compared the toppling of a Confederate statue to Kristallnacht and frequently minimized the legacy of the Holocaust while decrying the threat of communism, among other inflammatory remarks,” wrote Kassel.
In 2017, Robinson made a post casting doubt on the Holocaust, stating, “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered.”
“Robinson has thrown plenty of rocks at people who dare live a life different than the one he wants to dictate to the rest of us,” Issac Baile, an opinion writer, wrote in The News & Observer. “The North Carolina Republican Party chose him as their standard bearer in spite or maybe because of that record. The rest of North Carolina must not follow their lead. We must not let people forget who this man has long been, no matter how often we have to remind them”.
