Earlier today there was a story about a coffee shop whose owner posted a bunch of anti-Semitic vitriol to the coffee shop's Instagram site. Here's David Colon at Brokelyn:
Whoever is running the Instagram account for The Bushwick Coffee Shop (203 Wilson Avenue), most likely owner Michael Avila, who posted the same rant to Facebook, took time out of posting selfies, inspirational image macros and coffee pictures to post a picture of the words "greedy infiltrators" and then commented with a long screed about Jews buying Bushwick and how glad he was his neighbor didn’t sell to Jews, who "function via greed and dominance."
Check out Brokelyn for screenshots of the offending posts.
Anyway, after reading that, I joked:
Pretty sure this guy is just an anti-Zionist. http://t.co/1INbStZjdw
— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) October 2, 2014
The lulz, of course, come from the way that anti-Semites always couch their anti-Israel, anti-Jew invective as "anti-Zionism." So what did we see earlier this evening? You guessed it!
After a flood of negative responses to the post, Avila told DNAinfo New York Thursday that he was "misunderstood."
"I'm anti-Zionism. It's about politics, it's about greed," he said. "I’m certainly not anti-Semitic. That would stand against everything I believe I stand for."
The post was intended to create awareness about greedy landlords, he said.
People "are taking it quite personally" even though his post did not apply to all Jewish people, he said. Many Jewish people may have similar feelings about wanting the same "beautiful community in Bushwick" that he does, Avila added.
As we all know, the Zionist movement is all about keeping communities in Bushwick "beautiful" (i.e., free of dirty Jew landlords).
The next time you hear someone say they aren't anti-Semitic, just anti-Zionism, keep this in mind, mmkay?