DeSantis takes heat for calling all Palestinians antisemitic

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ declaration that all Palestinians are antisemitic was blasted by Democrats including U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, who asked why he didn’t condemn neo-Nazis in Florida with the same fervor.

“What a racist comment from a racist man,” Frost, D-Orlando, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “… The Nazis that have been marching up and down the state harassing the public [and] synagogues wave DeSantis 2024 flags.”

The governor first made the remarks at a presidential campaign event in Iowa on Saturday. He repeated them in a Sunday interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation” as part of his argument that the U.S. should not take in Palestinian refugees in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel and the Israeli response.

“We cannot accept people from Gaza into this country as refugees,” DeSantis said in Iowa. “I am not going to do that. If you look at how they behave, not all of them are Hamas, but they are all antisemitic.”

CBS anchor Margaret Brennan pressed DeSantis on the comments on Palestinians and asked him about the estimated 600 Americans in Gaza, as well as the fact that half of the 2 million residents of Gaza are under 18.

“How can you paint with such a broad brush to say 2.3 million people are antisemitic?” she asked.

In response, DeSantis called the Gaza Strip “a toxic culture” where they “teach kids to hate Jews.”

“And I think if we were to import large numbers of those to the United States, I think it would increase antisemitism in this country, and I think it would increase anti-Americanism in this country,” he said.

Brennan said that there had been no talk among U.S. officials about taking in refugees from Gaza, but DeSantis said “some of the far left” had called for it.

“I just put my stake in the ground,” DeSantis said. “That’s where we’re going to be, and I think that everyone running for president on the Republican side should follow suit.”

State Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, wrote on X that DeSantis’ rhetoric on Palestinians “is so incredibly dangerous and only further fuels violence towards innocent Palestinians who are experiencing forced relocation and have been cut off from electricity and water. This is a de-humanization tactic and we need to push back on it.”

The controversy over DeSantis’ remarks comes amid reported increases of both anti-Muslim and antisemitism acts in the U.S.

In Illinois, a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy was stabbed to death by his mother’s landlord in what authorities called an anti-Muslim hate crime.

Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League estimated that preliminary reports of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. have spiked almost 300% from the same time last year in the week since the war began. Attacks or vandalism of synagogues in Miami, New York, and California have been reported over the past few days.

Frost noted that DeSantis’ comments come after years of neo-Nazi activity in Florida that he said have gotten weak pushback from the governor and other Republicans.

Members of the neo-Nazi group Order of the Black Sun waved a DeSantis flag outside Walt Disney World last month and later demonstrated across the Orlando area waving Nazi flags and saluting Adolf Hitler.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement later arrested four alleged members of the Black Sun group on charges of hanging antisemitic banners on an Orlando highway bridge.

After a previous neo-Nazi incident in Orlando in January 2022, DeSantis responded to a question by immediately blaming “these Democrats who are trying to use this as some type of political issue to try to smear me as if I had something to do with that. We’re not playing their game.”

DeSantis also called the group “some jackasses doing this on the street.”

In July, DeSantis’ presidential campaign fired a speechwriter who retweeted a video with a Nazi symbol superimposed over DeSantis’ face. Axios reported that the staffer, Nate Hochman, actually made the video himself.

The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

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