Finally, the DSA found a candidate who makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez look credible. Meet Julia Salazar.
She’s a Democratic Socialist, except when she was on Beck’s show. She’s militantly anti-Israel, except when she was pro-Israel. And she’s Jewish… except when she wasn’t.
Even her birthplace is subject to serious debate as this blockbuster Armin Rosen and John Paul Pagano piece in The Tablet shows.
Julia Salazar has earned media attention that most state senate primary candidates could only dream of, including serious treatment in The New Yorker, and friendly profiles in New York magazine, The Forward, The Intercept, and Vice.
So you know she’s a terrible human being in every possible way. Which she is. First politically.
Her fellowship biography identified her as senior editor of Unruly, the “intersectional blog” of the anti-Zionist and pro-BDS Jewish Voice for Peace’s Jews of Color and Sephardic/Mizrahi Caucus.
… who are generally not Jewish. As appears to be the case with Salazar. Instead she’s Rachel Dolezal. Or Elizabeth Warren.
She “comes from a unique Jewish background,” as The Forward put it. “She was born in Colombia, and her father was Jewish, descended from the community expelled from medieval Spain. When her family immigrated to the United States, they had little contact with the American Jewish community, struggling to establish themselves financially.”
Salazar touts her immigrant background, and has claimed that she moved to Florida at an early age. “My family immigrated to the US from Colombia when I was a baby,” she told Jacobin, a leading socialist journal. Salazar is “a working-class Colombian immigrant,” according to a lengthy profile in The Intercept written by a fellow DSA activist:
(Tablet sent over a short list of questions about Salazar’s history with Jewish and Israel-related issues at 1 p.m. today, including one about where Salazar, who has claimed to be an immigrant from Colombia, was born. An hour later, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published a story about Salazar in which she acknowledged she was in fact born in Miami.)
It gets way worse.
Salazar quotes a pastor at Apostles Church in New York in a tweet that includes the hashtag #John13, referring to a chapter in the New Testament. “A thought I plan to ruminate on this week:” she tweeted in September of 2012, “Follow #Christ for his own sake, if you plan to follow Him at all,” quoting the 19th-century Anglican Bishop J.C. Ryle. One acquaintance who knew Salazar during her time as a CUFI activist said that she wasn’t shy about her religious faith, dropping the occasional “praise Jesus” into casual conversation.
A 2009 funeral notice for her father, a former commercial airline pilot named Luis Hernan Salazar, indicates that the service was held at the Prince of Peace Catholic Church in Ormond Beach, Florida. When reached by phone, Alex Salazar, the candidate’s older brother and the operator of a number of Florida mango farms, said that one of their father’s brothers was a Jesuit priest. (He also seemed to know very little about her campaign and seemed surprised when I told him she stood a good chance of winning.) “There was nobody in our immediate family who was Jewish … my father was not Jewish, we were not raised Jewish,” he said. Their mother, Christine Salazar, indicated in a public September 2012 Facebook post that she planned on attending services at the Brooklyn Tabernacle, a nondenominational evangelical church in downtown Brooklyn.
Now the same lefties who scream about cultural appropriation, will scream just as loudly that their latest Rachel Dolezal has the right to define her own identity. And Jews have no right to object to an anti-Semite appropriating Jewish identity to attack Jews.
Going in reverse chronological order, Salazar has also been a contributor to Mondoweiss, an IfNotNow demonstrator, a Bridging the Gap fellowt hrough Brooklyn College Hillel, a World Zionist Organization campus fellow, a co-founder of the Columbia University chapter of J Street, an AIPAC Policy Conference student attendee, and founder of the university’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI) chapter.
Mondoweiss openly features anti-Semitic content and defenses of anti-Semitism. If Not Now harasses Jewish charities.
But, like Cortez, Salazar was one thing before she was another. Fake Bronx girl meet fake Columbian girl.
Salazar touts her immigrant background, and has claimed that she moved to Florida at an early age. “My family immigrated to the US from Colombia when I was a baby,” she told Jacobin, a leading socialist journal. Salazar is “a working-class Colombian immigrant,” according to a lengthy profile in The Intercept written by a fellow DSA activist:
Salazar’s mother grew up in New Jersey and attended West Morris Central High School in Chester Township, according to her Facebook page—in that same New York magazine article, she’s identified as “Italian-American.” (Alex Salazar told Tablet that his mother’s mother immigrated to the United States from Italy.)
“We were born in Miami, both of us,” Alex Salazar told Tablet.
And, oh yes, she used to be on the right.
This past July, the New York Daily News reported that Salazar had only registered as a Democrat “a year ago.”
Social media postings, various articles, and the recollections of people who knew her at Columbia University show that in her early 20s Salazar was a right-wing pro-Israel Christian. In 2012 and into 2013, she was the president of Columbia Right to Life, the campus’s leading anti-abortion group. It was a position she took seriously.
In October of 2012, Salazar hailed the university’s decision to end a supplemental program funded through student fees that paid for abortions, while also decrying that students were never informed that they were underwriting abortions through these fees. When a version of the fund was re-introduced, Salazar wrote an April 2013 op-ed in the Columbia Spectator wondering why there wasn’t similar help for students who decided not to terminate their pregnancies: “It is unacceptable for the University to provide support for students who have abortions while simultaneously failing to provide resources to accommodate those who keep their baby … we appear to imply that a ‘pro-life’ pregnant woman does not deserve the same rights as the woman who chooses to abort.”
In January of 2012, Salazar appeared on conservative firebrand Glenn Beck’s online show, where she was interviewed from Christians United for Israel’s annual Student Advocacy Leadership Training in San Antonio, Texas. “The anti-Israeli professors at Columbia—how many are there do you think?” asked Beck, who had proclaimed that some of the university’s faculty were “Muslim Brotherhood and communist” just moments earlier. “I think there are probably several,” Salazar replied. “They are using the classroom as their podium to spread lies about the State of Israel, to delegitimize the State of Israel, and to spread propaganda to Columbia students.”
Will the media back off in their support for Salazar after all this? Don’t count on it.
They’ll spin excuses, claim that she’s a “young woman of color” under attack by racist trolls. And trot out the usual routine. They won’t address any of the issues except to wave their arms about and transform her into the victim.
When a 41-year-old escort who goes by the name Lana Marciano went from apartment to apartment in Brooklyn as part of a push for sex workers’ rights, she seemed pleased that no one slammed a door in her face.
Marciano was among 35 sex workers and their allies who recently campaigned for a legislative candidate seeking to decriminalize prostitution, the latest example of activism in a community that includes escorts, adult film stars, strippers and phone sex operators.
“People will say that this is radical,” said Julia Salazar, who met with the volunteers as part of her Democratic primary campaign for New York State Senate. “But we all know that it needs to be the norm. And by talking to our communities, by speaking openly about this, we’re getting closer to this becoming the norm.”
When they go low… we find a sewer so deep that it escapes the pull of gravity.
Leave a Reply