Al Sharpton's National Action Network has come to the defense of a Jersey City elected official facing pressure to resign over her anti-Semitic comments regarding a recent attack on a kosher market in the city.
While officials from across the Jersey City community have called on Joan Terrell to resign from public office over a social media comment blaming Jews for an anti-Semitic shooting, a local member of Sharpton's National Action Network said Terrell's critics should "shut their mouths," according to a report by NJ.com.
"How dare they speak out against someone saying how they feel. She said nothing wrong. Everything she said is the truth. So where is this anti-Semitism coming in? I am not getting it," Carolyn Oliver Fair, the executive director of the North Jersey chapter of the National Action Network, said.
Terrell, a member of the Jersey City Board of Education, came under fire this week after penning a Facebook screed accusing Jewish community members of bringing an anti-Semitic shooting upon themselves. The attack left six dead, including a police officer and the two suspects, who were African American.
"Where was all this faith and hope when Black homeowners were threatened, intimidated, and harassed by I WANT TO BUY YOUR HOUSE brutes of the jewish community," Terrell wrote in the now deleted Facebook post. She accused Jewish leaders of forcing blacks out of their homes and of "selling body parts," an anti-Semitic canard.
Oliver Fair also falsely claimed the shooters themselves were Jewish, according to NJ.com.
One of the suspects appeared to have followed the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, which is known to be virulently anti-Semitic and has been labeled a hate group.