A coalition of Jewish advocacy groups is trying to cancel a Democratic state delegate, Sam Rasoul, a Palestinian-American, accusing Rasoul of antisemitism for past statements on the genocide in Gaza being perpetrated by the government of far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
I can’t find anything new from Rasoul on the Gaza genocide, so the joint statement released on Thursday – by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington; the Jewish Community Relations Council of the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater; the Jewish Community Federation of Richmond’s Jewish Community Relations Committee; and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Jewish Peninsula – feels like a response to Rasoul announcing his intentions regarding a run for Congress in the 2026 midterms.
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Quick dose of reality on that: Rasoul, who represents Roanoke in the Virginia House of Delegates, is already finding himself boxed out in that effort.
Beth Macy, a Roanoke-based journalist and bestselling author, is raising gobs of money, and has the plum early endorsement of the cycle, from U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.
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But anyway, back to the Cancel Sam campaign: the advocacy groups are pretending to want to get Rasoul to step down from his post as the chair of the House Education Committee.
“Delegate Rasoul uses his position and platform to regularly spew vitriol toward the Jewish people – calling Israel ‘depraved’ and ‘evil’ while re-defining Zionism to falsely disparage it as a ‘supremacist ideology,’” the statement reads. “Delegate Rasoul’s words are precisely the type of destructive rhetoric that fuels antisemitic attacks.”
A Google search of the terms “sam rasoul,” “israel” and “depraved” gives us one clean result – a comment on an Instagram post featuring a video of an Israeli military attack on a Gazan target in which Rasoul wrote that “(t)he depravity of Zionism knows no bounds. A supremacist ideology that shows us the worst in humanity. The forced starvation of 2 million people, 1 million children. An evil we can barely imagine, playing out daily.”
The word “evil” is there, and in a Facebook post from July in which Rasoul observed that “(a)fter 22 months of the most horrific crimes, there is no doubt that Israel is conducting the most evil cleansing in human history as we fund and watch it play out minute by minute,” and lamented that “(t)he rights stripped from Palestinians for decades are being stripped here now. The concentration camps in Gaza are being built here. Zionism has proven how evil our society can be, and sadly we are beginning to experience it here in our great Republic. Now is our time to rise up and stand on the right side of history.”
It would appear that it’s the use of the word “Zionism” that is at issue here, and that the critics are using the ADL definition of what it considers “anti-Zionism” to be inherently antisemitic.
I’d prefer that Rasoul would have focused his criticism on the far-right Netanyahu government, so as not to confuse the issue; the traditional sense of the word “Zionist” refers to the right of Jews to self-determination in a homeland in the Middle East, which we should all be in favor of – just as we should also all be in favor of the right of Palestinians to self-determination in a homeland in the Middle East.
For all the squawking over Rasoul, I’m not seeing anything debating that what the Netanyahu government is doing in Gaza amounts to a genocide.
Anyway, these groups are trying to silence Rasoul – they don’t really think he’ll just resign; they want the House Democratic Caucus to replace him as the House Education Committee chair next month.
Shame on the caucus if that happens, is my two cents.
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Chris Graham
