Bernie Sanders hired Simone Zimmerman as his Jewish Outreach Director. Front Page's The Point exposed Simone Zimmerman's hatred of the Jewish State and her participation in If Not Now, anti-Israel group harassing Jewish charities in a BDS-like campaign.
Simone Zimmerman has joined the JVP hate group in condemning attempts to fight campus anti-Semitism. In response to Hamas attacks on Israel, Simone Zimmerman said, “We think it’s important to understand the context of occupation". And declared that she opposed the campaign against Hamas that began after the brutal murder of three Jewish teens by Hamas terrorists.
Simone Zimmerman retweets violently anti-Israel bigots, including Max Blumenthal, who has called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel and helped inspire the Kansas City Jewish Community Center shooter, along with Hamas apologists like Glenn Greenwald and Yousef Munayyer.
Noah Pollak at the Free Beacon went on to note her ties to the JVP BDS pro-terrorist hate group and her obscene rant against Netanyahu.
The next year, Zimmerman wrote an op-ed calling on Hillel International, a national Jewish student organization, to sponsor campus events promoting the BDS movement, which seeks Israel’s destruction.
The JTA's Uriel Heilman rushed to write up a puff piece whitewashing and praising Simone Zimmerman. Despite his gushing over the Bernie Sanders hire, the left freaked out because he linked to the original piece at Front Page Magazine and because the emphasis on Zimmerman's opposition to Israel in the viral article was viewed as unhelpful to Bernie's New York campaign, which is already doing badly with Jews.
Meanwhile, across the room, an activist exchanged vitriol with the campaign’s newly hired national Jewish outreach coordinator, Simone Zimmerman, after demanding accountability for the campaign’s failures on the Jewish front.
Even former ADL boss Abe Foxman called on the Sanders campaign to get rid of Simone Zimmerman.
So the BernieBros went after Uriel on Twitter for linking to Front Page Magazine, even though the JTA piece denounced us as a "right-wing site" and defended Simone Zimmerman against our charges.
Initial attacks against Front Page Magazine came from Daniel Sieradski, the anti-Israel activist who runs Jews for Bernie, who distributed a meme during the last war with Hamas which claimed that "That's why Palestinians are fighting back." Sieradski's anti-Israel views had been exposed earlier by The Point and he was still smarting.
It's good to know @jtanews'@urielheilman takes editorial cues from an Islamophobic hate group listed with the SPLC and ADL.
— daniel s. (@selfagency) April 13, 2016
The psychotic right-wing columnist smearing me & @simonerzim is encouraging & mocking her vicious harassment pic.twitter.com/XaYjsPfJo6
— daniel s. (@selfagency) April 14, 2016
Then it was quickly picked up by the full spectrum of the anti-Israel camp.
What a joke. @urielheilman reproduces slander by a vile hate group and passes it off as legit criticisms. https://t.co/nMFHTovLKX
— Ali Gharib (@Ali_Gharib) April 13, 2016
@sharm629@urielheilman Don't tell JTA, who wants to lend the voices who say that (and almost only that) credence.
— Ali Gharib (@Ali_Gharib) April 13, 2016
Ali Gharib had been forced to apologize for his behavior at the Center for American Progress over allegations of anti-Semitism.
Gharib has defended the idea that Israel causes anti-Semitism; claimed that there is no evidence that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons program (two years after Barack Obama acknowledged that they were); approvingly quoted discredited anti-Semitic propagandist Max Blumenthal accusing Israel (and Texas) of genocide; defended Iran’s brutal intelligence agencies as “normally very professional”; defended the jihad flotilla against Israel on which people were chanting a genocidal jihad slogan vowing the murder of Jews; and denied the massive extent of anti-Semitic incitement in Palestinian Authority textbooks.
His virulent anti-Semitism has not gone unnoticed. In 2012, Gharib had to apologize after “asserting that American Jews and a non-Jewish Republican senator serve the interests of the Israeli government over the security of the United States.”
Should @urielheilman quote a site with tagline of "Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out"? pic.twitter.com/VRSFNPzknd
— Ben Murane (@kungfujew18) April 13, 2016
Should @urielheilman quote a blogger on the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate watch list? https://t.co/VBgm6BRJtd
— Ben Murane (@kungfujew18) April 13, 2016
Why on earth would @urielheilman quote a website run by people on hate group watch lists? FrontPageMag is not respectable jouranalism.
— Ben Murane (@kungfujew18) April 13, 2016
Because journalism. Ben Murane is with the New Israel Fund which funnels money to assorted vile anti-Israel groups dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish State. But don't worry, they're doing it in a respectable fashion.
Meanwhile the Point will continue exposing the ugly elements within the Sanders campaign. And Jordana Brown, who unlike Simone Zimmerman, is an actual member of the Jewish community, has her response to Bernie's pet bigot.
Normally, I wouldn't care to write this. I would ignore you like I do the other members of the small, but rabid and vicious, young, self-hating, American Jewish community who pop up here and there to scream and yell and wear keffiyehs and write patronizing and ignorant articles and tweet nonsense that no one notices, but you are different.
You have been thrust onto the national stage as a "director of Jewish outreach" for the Bernie Sanders campaign, and for anyone who knows what you stand for, that should read like a The Onion headline. Normally, I try and keep infighting in the Jewish community to a minimum, L-rd knows we see a lot of it. But you are a rotten apple, with the ability to ruin the whole bushel, and you must be called out. You will be known to large swaths of the American population as a "Jewish representative," and that fact makes my stomach turn.
What you are saying is not new, not innovative, nor progressive or cool. You are not a great Jew because you call other Jews "yids" or have bagel and schmears on Sundays. You are not open-minded because you went to Berkeley, a bastion of anti-Semitic hatred in the bleak and anti- Semitic UC system. You are somewhat more notable because of the extents to which you have gone to try and destroy Israel, I will give you that. You joined (and led!) blatantly anti-Israel groups, you wrote anti-Israel articles, heck! You even opposed university legislation trying to curb campus anti-Semitism! So when I say you are similar to other self-hating, liberal Americans of Jewish lineage, I don't mean to demean your efforts- you are certainly at the forefront of this vile movement. You must be, or I don't believe Mr. Sanders would have chosen you for your current position.
Jordana's whole essay is well worth reading.