Carrie Prejean Boller Refuses To Address Candace Owens's Anti-Semitic Comments

Owens: "Jewish people were in control of the slave trade." Boller declines to comment.

The Atlantic interviewed Carrie Prejean Boller, the recently removed commissioner of the White House Religious Liberty Commission. (Boller insists that only President Trump can fire her, and not the Chairman; I'm sure she will sue.) Boller maintains that her Catholic faith is inconsistent with (how she perceives) Zionism, and that it is "anti-Christian" to accuse her of anti-semitism.

Yair Rosenberg, who wrote about the Volokh Conspiracy back in 2014, asked Boller to address blatantly anti-semitic comments from Candace Owens. I'll let the interview speak for itself:

As it happens, Owens has said many deranged things about Jews, plenty of which have nothing to do with Israel. So I was surprised to hear her so vigorously defended at a hearing ostensibly devoted to combatting anti-Jewish bigotry. I raised the subject with Boller, who regularly reposts content from Owens on social media, and I quoted several recent claims that the podcaster had made.

On February 2, for instance, Owens praised the decision of General Ulysses S. Grant to expel all Jews from his military district in 1862, during the Civil War. The move was soon reversed by President Abraham Lincoln, and Grant later disavowed it—but Owens did not. "Jewish supremacists," she said, "had everything to do with the Civil War in America. They excel at creating the false dialectic, the North versus the South, the left versus the right. Ulysses S. Grant notoriously expelled Jews from his military district: Tennessee, Mississippi, Kentucky. You think he just—he was just, like, what? Another white supremacist? Everyone's just a white supremacist," she said. "Well, they would have called him a white supremacist" or said that "he was anti-Semitic."

I read this monologue to Boller and asked her if she thought it was anti-Semitic to defend expelling American Jews. "I'm not going to get involved in any of that," she said. "I watched her show, and I have never heard anything out of her mouth that is anti-Semitic. So I'm not gonna make a statement on something that I haven't heard the full context of." I offered to play Boller the audio of this remark in its full context. She declined to listen. So I moved on to another of Owens's greatest hits: blaming American Jews for the African slave trade. This canard has been repeatedly debunked by historians and repeatedly invoked by Owens. "Jewish people were the ones that were trading us," she said in December. "Jewish people were in control of the slave trade. They've buried a lot of it, but it's there and you can find it."

Was this anti-Semitic? "From what I've heard from my ears, from her mouth, I have not heard anything that is anti-Semitic," Boller repeated. Okay, but if someone such as Owens did say such things, it would be anti-Semitic, right? "I'm not playing the 'What if?' game," she said, her previous moral clarity abruptly turning into cagey ambiguity.

I had hoped to ask Boller for her opinion about other claims made by Owens—that "Talmudic Jews" think "that we're animals, that they have a right to own us, that they have a right to make us worship them," and that Israel was complicit in the 9/11 attacks and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—but she refused to engage and eventually ended the call. Rather than reckon with anti-Semitic statements from those she had defended at a hearing intended to confront anti-Semitism, she repeatedly attempted to reroute our conversation back to the safer ground of criticizing Israel. She either did not realize that she was using anti-Zionism as a pretext to launder vulgar anti-Semitism and its purveyors into the public square, or she did not care.

I think there is enough here for a fifteen minute video.

Anti-semitism is as anti-semitism does. Please do not believe the canard that the fixation on Israel is because of Zionism. The hatred of Jews predates Christianity. It has existed since before the beginning of recorded history. My Christian friends often ask me why have Jews always been persecuted in every civilization. I wish I had an answer. When I was about 10 years old, I asked my Uncle, a Holocaust survivor, that question. He did not have a good answer, though he suggested that it took something like the Holocaust for the Jewish people to return to the land of Israel, and fulfill the biblical covenant. For a very brief moment, the world saw with clarity the need for a Jewish home state in Israel. That moment was far too brief.

More Christians need to speak up to preven Boller and others like her from hijacking their faiths. I appreciate the support from Kelly Shackelford of First Liberty and Bill Donohue of the Catholic League:

Kelly Shackelford, who is president, CEO and Chief Counsel for First Liberty Institute and a member of the Commission, said Ms. Prejean Boller's "attempt to hijack the Commission meeting … was intended to promote an antisemitic agenda, and that was disgusting."

"First Liberty Institute proudly represents synagogues and other Jewish clients, and we will continue to represent their cause as a core part of our mission to defend all people of faith in America," he said.

Ms. Prejean Boller defended her actions on Tuesday, saying on social media that the commission was threatening to remove her over her Catholic faith, which she had converted to in April.

"Can you even imagine this? A Religious Liberty Commission prepared to fire a commissioner for her Catholic faith?" she wrote. "If that happens, it proves their mission was never religious liberty, but a Zionist agenda. I refuse to resign."

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, crowed in a statement Wednesday that the dismissal came just minutes after he called for it.

"At 9:57 a.m. I called for the ouster of Carrie Prejean Boller from President Trump's Religious Liberty Commission. I just learned that the Commission chairman, Dan Patrick, gave her the boot at 10:03 a.m. Kudos to him," he said.

This issue is not going away.