#rev mitchell ikenna johnson

[eretzyisrael]

by Gabby Deutch

Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson, the newly appointed president of the Chicago Board of Education, has a lengthy history of posting inflammatory antisemitic, anti-Israel and pro-Hamas content on social media, according to a review of Johnson’s public and private Facebook posts following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks last year. 

After the 2018 Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, Mitchell added a banner to his Facebook profile picture that said, “Together Against Antisemitism.”

But since Hamas’ terror attack last year, which killed more than 1,200 Israelis, he has used Facebook to share dozens of posts praising the terrorist group, justifying the Oct. 7 attacks and slandering Jews who support Israel. 

“How can a group of people who have suffered from the Holocaust; today join with the Alt Right Community?” Johnson asked in a post last December. 

He continued to invoke the Holocaust in numerous posts that followed. 

“The Nazi Germans’ ideology has been adopted by the Zionist Jews,” Johnson wrote in February. “The Israeli government offers a renewal of Nazi language once directed toward European Jews, ‘savages, dogs, vermin,’” he wrote in March. 

Johnson’s posts did not just attack Israel and Jews. He routinely made clear his support for Hamas: “I have been saying this since October 2023. People have an absolute right to attack their oppressors by any means necessary!!!” he wrote in March. 

Last Christmas, Johnson shared a video showing Miko Peled, an anti-Zionist writer, defending the Hamas attacks as merely prisoners breaking out of their jail. 

“The single most direct video that has crossed my feed,” Johnson wrote. “I invite my once Jewish friends to respond to this video with honesty, integrity, and morality.” 

Earlier this month, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson appointed Rev. Johnson (no relation) to the Chicago Board of Education amid a turbulent time for the body. 

All seven members of the Board of Education resigned in early October after clashing with the mayor over budgetary and personnel issues. Mayor Johnson replaced them with a new slate of officers, including Rev. Johnson. He can remain as president in January if the mayor allows it. 

Mayor Johnson, a progressive, has clashed with Chicago’s Jewish community in the months following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. In January, he cast the tie-breaking vote on a contentious cease-fire resolution, making Chicago the largest city in the country at the time to back a cease-fire. In August, before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he called Israel’s war in Gaza “genocidal.”

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Alexander Nazaryan

Chicago is one of the great centers of Jewish life in the United States—or used to be, in any case. Several recent events, taking place in brutally quick succession, have raised the question of whether the city’s 300,000 Jewish residents are as safe as they should be. Will city officials do more than the bare minimum to protect them? Will the media cover their travails with the moral clarity victimhood purportedly deserves?

This month, two openly Jewish students were assaulted on the DePaul University campus; protesters were charged with vandalism after entering the Chicago Loop Synagogue and damaging property there; two Jews were attacked outside a performance by the unabashedly pro-Israel actor and comedian Michael Rapaport. The Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson, the just-appointed education-board president, had to step down after The Jewish Insider unearthed his anti-Ssemitic social-media musings. “People have an absolute right to attack their oppressors by any means necessary,” went a characteristic post-Oct. 7 missive. There were also posts hinting at 9/11 denialism and misogyny, which seem to have done more to seal his fate than mere Jew-hating. 

“I feel so helpless,” a Jewish woman wrote on Reddit this year. The Midwestern branch of the Anti-Defamation League pointed out that the number of attacks against Jews had tripled in the past year. “We can’t help but to ask: Is this the new normal for Jews in Chicago? We hope not,” the head of the organization said.

An even darker thought is that this is the new normal for everyone in Chicago. As city government under progressive Mayor Brandon Johnson retreats from exercising the moral authority that should undergird the practice of politics, it is only inevitable that one group or another will bear the blows. Jews tend to get it earlier, and sometimes harder, than others—but from the pathologies we face, few ultimately escape.

Those pathologies have been on ugly display since Oct. 7, which the local Black Lives Matter affiliate seemed to celebrate with a social-media post. The offending post was deleted, and the group apologized, but a tone had been set from which Chicago has, to its own detriment, declined to deviate.

That is largely due to Johnson, who was elected last year. He began 2024, his first full year in office, by expending significant political capital to pass a Gaza ceasefire resolution—a vote for which he assiduously lobbied city aldermen and in which he served as a tiebreaker. To his credit, Johnson had also presided over a resolution condemning the initial Hamas attacks the previous October. So what does he really believe? Nobody knows—not on Israel, policing, taxes, or much of anything.

Having followed his career closely, I doubt the charge that he bears some deep animus toward Jews. But having promised Chicago progressive governance, he has delivered little governance of any kind. At this point, I suspected that not a few Chicagoans would be happy to have Donald Trump on the fifth floor, as the mayor’s City Hall office is known, which may explain why Trump nearly doubled his vote share here to 21.4 in 2024, up from 12.4 percent in 2016.

Trump even had the chutzpah to campaign in the Windy City, showing up the day before the presidential election to denounce the recent spate of anti-Semitism. Trump’s own commitment to racial and religious comity is questionable, but his nose for conflict is unerring. A true tabloid man, he knows that when it bleeds, it leads—and the Jews of Chicago had been bleeding.

In the heavily Jewish neighborhood of West Rogers Park—think a less remote Bensonhurst, or a leafier Williamsburg—a 39-year-old Orthodox Jewish man was shot on his way to synagogue. The suspect, Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi, aged 22, was an undocumented immigrant from Mauritania. Abdallah shouted “Allahu Akbar” as officers confronted him, firing on them also. Both victim and suspect survived the incident.

This was the most serious of the recent ant-Semitic incidents—and the response the most telling. The Chicago Tribune, from whose pages the legendary columnist Mike Royko launched daily assaults at bastions of cultural and political power, played keepaway: “Police: Man, 22, Critically Injured in Far North Side Shootout With Officers,” its viral headline said, as if Abdallahi were the true victim in all this; the headline went instantly viral, and not in a good way.

“This should be a national scandal,” said Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. It wasn’t. Perhaps feeling no real pressure from the media, Johnson, the mayor, took several days to issue a statement. When he finally did, it made no mention of the religious factor that had obviously been at play.

This, too, went viral—unintentionally, again. “The victim was a Jewish man, who was wearing traditional Jewish garb, walking to a Jewish place of worship on the Jewish day of rest,” wrote an outraged Alderwoman, Debra Silverstein, the only Jew on the City Council, which has 50 members. Months before, she had been heckled for speaking out against the Gaza ceasefire resolution. Back then, Johnson had seemed indifferent to her plight; little appears to have changed.

To add insult to injury, the Chicago Police Department declined to file hate charges, citing a supposed lack of evidence. Police chief Larry Snelling did finally relent, adding counts of terrorism and hate crime, which he announced at a news conference. Johnson also spoke at the event. “Anti-Semitism in Chicago does not reflect the soul of Chicago,” he said.

Johnson is fond of invoking “the soul of Chicago,” which he did more than a dozen times in his inaugural address in the spring of 2023. Today, that soul is roiling, and the anger is mostly directed Johnson’s way. His approval rating is an almost unbelievable 14 percent, making him the least popular mayor in Chi-town history—and as Royko would have happily told you over a beer at the Billy Goat Tavern, this town has had some pretty lousy mayors. 

[sethshead]

When someone who traffics in a slew of old antisemitic libels is appointed to an important post by an “anti-racist” mayoral administration, you get the sense that “anti-racism” doesn’t mean what its users think it means.

If a statement is unacceptable directed at any other group, it’s unacceptable when applied to Jews. If Mayor Johnson and those in power in the city of Chicago cannot understand that, then there are words for such antisemitism: systematic and structural.

[buttercupkg66]

Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson, the newly appointed president of the Chicago Board of Education, has a lengthy history of posting inflammatory antisemitic, anti-Israel and pro-Hamas content on social media, according to a review of Johnson’s public and private Facebook posts following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks last year.