Yesterday on Facebook, celebrity Second Amendment fan Ted Nugent posted photos of a dozen gun control supporters, all of them Jews, as indicated by the little Israeli flags over their faces. The headline: "So who is really behind gun control?" The captions on some of the photos mention additional offenses, such as "ISRAEL FIRSTER" (Alan Dershowitz), "gave Russian Jew immigrants your tax money" (Frank Lautenberg), "served in Israel's army during Gulf War" (Rahm Emanuel), and "Nanny State troublemaker and 911 Israeli agent" (Michael Bloomberg). According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the grid of 12 anti-gun Jews "was apparently not created by Nugent, but has appeared in the past on anti-Semitic web sites" (such as this one). The bow-hunting rock 'n' roller added this commentary:
Know these punks. They hate freedom, they hate good over evil, they would deny us the basic human right to self defense & to KEEP & BEAR ARMS while many of them have tax paid hired ARMED security! Know them well. Tell every1 you know how evil they are. Let us raise maximum hell to shut them down!
In response to the predictable flood of criticism from both supporters and opponents of gun control, Nugent professed to be utterly flabbergasted that anyone thought the array of gun-controlling Jews was anti-Semitic. His point, he insists, was that Bloomberg et al. are betraying their own people by seeking to disarm them:
Just when you hope that mankind couldnt possibly get any dumber or more dishonest, superFreaks rise to the occasion. What sort of racist prejudiced POS could possibly not know that Jews for guncontrol are nazis in disguise? "NEVER AGAIN!" Anyone? Anyone?? RUFKM! The founder of Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership called me his 2nd Amendment/Freedom hero. The NEVER AGAIN battlecry was universally embraced by all good people who will make sure another Holocaust never happens again. Freaks have plummeted to whole new low. Plummet on punks. Plummet on. Meanwhile I adjust my yamika at my barmitzva playing my kosher guitar. My dad killed nazis & saved Jews in WWII. Eat me.
Nugent followed that up with a photo of Nazis rounding up Jews whom he identified as "soulless sheep to slaughter." Or as he put it in a separate comment: "NEVER AGAIN mthrfkrs!"
Ted Nugent has a long history of being an equal opportunity offender. But his latest share on Facebook, making the outrageous suggestion that Jews are behind gun control, is nothing short of conspiratorial anti-Semitism. Regardless of one's views on gun control, this kind of scapegoating of an entire religious group is completely unacceptable and completely divorced from reality.
It should go without saying that anti-Semitism has no place in the gun control debate. Nugent should be ashamed for promoting anti-Semitic content, and we hope that good people on both sides of the gun control debate will reject his tactics and his message. We hope that Nugent will have the good sense to remove this share immediately so that it does not spread virally across the internet.
Former Klansman David Duke sprang to Nugent's defense, noting that the ADL supports gun control. "If Jews have a problem with the truth," Duke wrote, "then the truth is…AntiSemitic!" While some of Nugent's defenders claimed they perceived no anti-Semitism in the original post, others seemed to especially like that aspect of it.
