Democratic Jewish Outreach Pennsylvania (DJOP) today called on the Pennsylvania Republican Jewish Coalition to condemn gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano’s association with the antisemitic website Gab.
Jill Zipin, Chair of DJOP, said that Mastriano’s association with the website shows his antisemitic leanings and that if he does not disassociate himself from Gab, the Republican Jewish Coalition should remove the word “Jewish” from its name.
Media reports show that on April 28 Mastriano gave Gab $5,000 for “campaign consulting” fees. The website is home to a steady flow of white nationalist, antisemitic, racist and neo-Nazi rantings.
“it is deeply disturbing that an organization that purports to reflect the interests of the Jewish community finds it acceptable to support a candidate who underwrites a website so full of bigoted rantings,” Zipin said.
The website’s founder, Andrew Torba, endorsed Mastriano days after the State Senator’s $5,000 payment to Gab. The man who murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 was a major user of Gab. After this year’s mass shooting in a Buffalo supermarket, Torba posted, “The best way to stop White genocide and White replacement, both of which are demonstrably and undeniably happening, is to get married to a White woman and have a lot of White babies.”
Zipin said that all Pennsylvanians should be angered that Mastriano is affiliated with such right-wing extremists.
“Angered, but not surprised,” she said. “Doug Mastriano consistently demonstrates that he is unfit to serve as Governor or State Senator. His unhinged support for Donald Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election being stolen, his extreme position against abortion, even when the life of a mother is at stake, his ignorant comments about climate change and now his purge of posts from his Senate webpage and his social media pages show that he is a danger to our democracy.”
Zipin commented on a report in Tuesday’s Philadelphia Inquirer that Mastriano is removing posts on his personal websites and his State Senate Facebook page.
“It’s no wonder he wants to remove these rantings,” Zipin said. “They are disgraceful and don’t deserve the light of day. In fact, Mastriano’s excuse that Facebook removed the posting “by default” after 30 days is implausible, if not dishonest, because older posts still appear on Mastriano’s sites.”
She said the Republican Jewish Coalition for Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey and its Regional Director, Scott Feigelstein, should act immediately to insist that their candidate for Governor disaffiliate himself from the extreme right-wing antisemitic website Gab.