There’s been a marked increase in the amount of anti-Semitic tweets aimed at Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser over the past week, the Anti-Defamation League has found.
The wave of anti-Semitic tweets from white nationalist accounts came as Steve Bannon was removed from the National Security Council’s Principals’ Committee and as Trump ordered missile strikes on a Syrian air base in retaliation for a chemical attack believed to be carried out by Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
“What started as a few isolated anti-Semitic tweets suggesting that Jared Kushner should be ‘fired’ because of his ‘Jewish supremacist views’ has quickly metastasized into a full-blown onslaught of anti-Semitic hate speech,” Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the CEO of the ADL, said in a statement.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, the tweets have argued that the Trump administration is trying to start a war to advance Israel’s interests and that Trump ditched his nationalist posture at the suggestion of Kushner and other Jewish members of the administration.
Tweets with the hashtag #fireKushner began circulating on Thursday with a tweet about Bannon’s removal from the NSC and the U.S. strikes in Syria, according to the ADL. Anti-Semitic tweets using the #fireKushner and #KushnerAtWar hashtags began circulating with increasing frequency on Friday, and by the end of that day, the ADL found that three hashtags about Kushner, some of which were associated with anti-Semitic tweets, were trending with about 130,000 mentions.
#KushnerAtWar is doing what he does for a living, …driving brown people out of valuable real estate to make way for wealthy Jewish tenants pic.twitter.com/BZqUfPOzH2
— TradWorker (@TradWorker) April 8, 2017
no more jewish wars #fireKushner #Syriahoax https://t.co/xrDgxHI7do
— AltGrey (@AltGrey1) April 7, 2017
Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke joined the chorus of anti-Semitic tweets aimed at Kushner:
We are being brought down from within. ZIO Supremacists are the true enemy of the American people… not Assad, not Putin. #FireKushner pic.twitter.com/t0AqbHi7rV
— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) April 9, 2017
“Believe me folks, I know all of the best people.” – Donald J. Trump
ZOG pic.twitter.com/gdV1lyF6Zw
— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) April 9, 2017
The tweets followed Bannon’s removal from the NSC and reports on his waning power in the Trump administration. Before working for Trump, Bannon was the executive chairman at Breitbart News, which has served as a platform for the white nationalist “alt-right.”
Bannon and Kushner also have been at odds recently, reportedly prompting Bannon to consider resigning. New York Magazine reported that Kushner argued in favor of missile strikes against Syria following the chemical attack, while Bannon pushed for the Trump administration to stay out of it; Kushner’s line of thinking won out.
Following the missile strikes, Trump’s biggest alt-right fans railed against the administration for carrying out the strikes after the President had run on an “America first” message during the campaign.