“I Don’t Mean It in a Racist Way”

Palestinians have become the excuse for cruelty, and they deserve a movement that wants peace more than it wants a word.

On Saturday, a woman on X told Ana Kasparian that calling Hakeem Jeffries an “AIPAC monkey” was racist, and that a disclaimer did not undo it. Kasparian, who co-hosts and produces The Young Turks, wrote back: “Wouldn’t want to offend Israel’s cattle. Is political prostitute more to your liking?” She ended with a request that “these fucking race vultures” shut up. The posts are still up.

I have watched this movement for three years and I did not expect this to come out so clearly.

Earlier in the week, Rula Jebreal, a Haifa-born Palestinian journalist who teaches at the University of Miami, sat down with Wajahat Ali on his podcast, The Left Hook, to talk about Jeffries and Israel. She told Ali that “Hakeem” means healer in Arabic and that Jeffries is a divider. Then she said: “He is a bought and paid by AIPAC monkey. With all due respect, and I don’t mean it in a racist way. He is just basically an errand boy.”

Ali, after nodding in agreement to her statement, said on air that the word carries terrible racial connotations when aimed at a Black man. Jebreal said she meant the three wise monkeys. Ali published the episode, with the exchange in it.

The condemnation came fast. The Congressional Black Caucus wrote that there is no non-racist way to call Leader Jeffries a monkey or an errand boy. Ayanna Pressley called it disgusting. Shontel Brown wrote, “No subtext, no dog whistle, just easily going straight to ‘monkey.’” Ritchie Torres, Joe Neguse and Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Senate candidate whose campaign Ali has supported, said versions of the same thing.

On Friday Jebreal apologized. Her post began: “I am disgusted and horrified that Hakeem Jeffries is taking money from AIPAC amidst Israel’s genocide in Palestine.” The apology arrived in the second sentence and called the slur “a term.” The word “unconditionally” came last, at the end of a paragraph that had opened with her excuse.

Kasparian’s co-founder at the Young Turks,, Cenk Uygur, spent the same day posting that “the donors are in charge on every issue” and that every politician who crossed the Israel lobby had been “bribed,” and never mentioned the word. Ali spent the weekend answering every critic with a question. When asked whether he would be this forgiving of a Republican who said it. “Sure, but they sadly don’t.” Joe Walsh asked why antisemitism was missing from a list of bigotries Ali had said must be condemned. “Sure. I’ll even add misogyny. See? Not hard. Can you condemn Israel’s genocide and occupation of Palestinians yet? We will wait.”

When the Black man who first posted the clip objected, Ali noted that his account had started in Canada and changed its name more than forty times. The man wrote back that he was a real person with a target on his back because he is Black in America. Ali’s reply began: “Of course, ‘Greg.’” The quotation marks are his.

That is the pattern, and it holds beyond one podcast. Every objection to the slur was answered with Israel. The objector was told to condemn a genocide first, or was checked for authenticity, or was called cattle. At no point in the weekend did anyone in that circle answer the objection on its own terms, because in this movement there are no other terms. There is one enemy, and every other subject is either a symptom of it or a distraction from it.

Incredibly, the Rula Jebreal scandal was just one of the Free Palestine movement’s controversies this week.

Emma Vigeland, who co-hosts The Majority Report, said on a broadcast that “the people that bore the brunt of the Holocaust were the Palestinians,” and when the clip spread, she explained that she meant the West had “outsourced its guilt to the Palestinians.” Six million Jews were murdered. Her sentence gave the brunt to someone else and her correction kept it there.

Miriam Margolyes, the anti-Israel actress, who told the Jewish Council of Australia in 2024 that “Hitler has won” because he “changed us Jews” into a “vicious, genocidal, nationalist nation,” turned to the Black presenter Andi Peters on ITV’s This Morning, asked him, “What are you?”, and described him as “a mix” and “high yella” until producers stepped in.

In Sydney, hundreds of protesters lined the marathon route with Palestinian flags to chant “No IDF on our streets” at fifty Israeli runners raising money for Shalva, a Jerusalem center that has served Israelis and Palestinians with disabilities for thirty years, after the protest’s organizers demanded the runners be investigated as war criminals.

In Derry, four Israeli triathletes were withdrawn from a European Cup race after the host club said it could not support their participation “while Palestinians continue to suffer” and police warned of protests. The local anti-war coalition said it was delighted.

And then there was the Adidas campaign.

Adidas has introduced a new service in 23 European countries that lets anyone who needs to buy one shoe, instead of a pair, at half price. Among the eleven people in its promotional campaign this month was Shalev Biton, an Israeli who lost his left leg to anti-tank fire near the Gaza border in 2021. His video was in Hebrew and did not mention the army. Oscar-winning actor Javier Bardem decided the inclusivity campaign was a good opportunity to tell his Instagram followers to boycott the company. Posts under #BoycottAdidas drew millions of views, many of them claiming Biton had fought in Gaza in the war Hamas started on October 7th, 2023. He had not.

I saved the Adidas campaign for last because it is the cleanest example I have ever seen of what this movement has become. The World Health Organization counts Palestinian amputees in Gaza in the thousands, many of them children. The service Bardem wants boycotted exists for any amputee in any of those 23 countries. A boycott that succeeds takes a half-price shoe away from a Palestinian child in Berlin so that an Israeli who lost his leg five years ago will not appear in an ad. Nobody who called for it seems to have asked who else needed the shoe, because the question this movement asks is never what a Palestinian will receive. It asks what an Israeli will be denied.

The hate I received

I replied to Jebreal’s apology. I wrote that she should be disabling her account for a statement she said on camera without thinking twice, and that the anti-Israel mob would whitewash it for her because it does not care about racism when it comes packaged with hatred of Jews.

The replies proved the second half of that in about an hour. None of them defended Jeffries or argued that the word was fine. They went to work on me instead. “Nazi scum.” “Squalid deceitful Israel child genocide shill.” “You should be in The Hague for genocidal propaganda.” “Fuck off jew.”

Then this reply, from an account with a watermelon in its name: “A white genocide supporter trying to scold a black woman who lived as an orphan under the harsh conditions of his utopian ethno-state.”

I am a Mizrahi Jew. My family came from Iraq and Tunisia. In that reply I became white, because the argument needed a white man, and the argument assigns everyone a race by where they stand on Israel. A Black congressman had been called a monkey, and the movement’s answer was to find a Jew and give him a color.

I will grant the obvious. These are small accounts with one like or none, and my post said “anti-Israel mob.” I invited the fight. But the invitation was to defend a Black man, and nobody took it. Every reply that came in was about Jews.

The movement Palestinians deserve

I am not arguing that Palestinians should have no advocates abroad. I am not even arguing that occasional slip ups should get otherwise well-meaning activists cancelled. I am observing a disturbing pattern: That Palestine has become the answer to the question “was that racist.” In other words, it’s become a way to avoid answering that question at all.

Palestinians have a cause, and they have had it longer than most of the people now speaking in their name have been paying attention to them. What this week won for them was a Black congressman insulted, a Black presenter interrogated, the Holocaust reassigned, a disability charity shamed on a marathon course, four athletes kept out of a race, and a boycott aimed at a company for being inclusive.

Not one of those acts moved a checkpoint or fed a family in Gaza.

A movement that wanted peace would have spent the week differently. It would have been busy. I hope the Palestinians will get that movement from someone, eventually. They will not get it from the people who use them as an excuse.