RUTHFULLY YOURS

Maryland’s attorney general has temporarily suspended an official on the state’s Commission on Hate Crime Response who compared Israel to Nazi Germany in a series of social-media posts and claimed that reports of Hamas murdering Jewish babies were “fake.”

Zainab Chaudry is the Maryland director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and was appointed to the hate-crime commission by Maryland attorney general Anthony Brown in August. Made up of 20 stakeholder representatives, the group is designed to “develop strategies to prevent and respond to hate crime activity and evaluate state laws and policies relating to hate crimes.” The commission’s first annual report to the General Assembly is slated for December 2024 and will detail recommendations on addressing hate crimes.

Following Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis, Chaudry made a series of antisemitic social media posts. On October 17, she posted a photo of Israeli flags at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin next to a photo of Nazi Germany flags at the same gate in 1936. She captioned the post: “That moment when you become what you hated most.”

“The Commission must serve as a model for the entire State on how to respond to incidents of hate and bias,” Brown said on Tuesday. “The Commission is facing its first test. How we respond has deep implications. I take this very seriously, and I will do everything possible to bring people together to move forward the critical work of this Commission.”

Directly after Hamas invaded Israel, Chaudry referred to the attack on Facebook as an “uprising in Palestine.” She asked followers to remember that Palestinians “are a people who are illegally occupied.”

“Militarized occupation is inherently evil and violent,” she continued. “The state of Israel was created through the oppression, persecution and subjugation of Palestinians. It sits on the graves of martyrs and people forcibly displaced from their homes, forced to endure humiliation, terror, desecration of their holy spaces.”

Chaudry accompanied her post with a Malcolm X quote: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

On Facebook two days later, Chaudry criticized elected officials for showing “support for an apartheid government that has been waging terror against Palestinians for decades.”

“Who gets to decide which pain is more valid?” Chaudry asked. “Who gets to decide which communjty [sic] deserves to be humanized? Why is white pain centered in global consciences at the expense of others’ grief and suffering?”

Although she is not Palestinian, Chaudry said that “double standards and willful ignorance over the atrocities committed against Palestinians” compel her to speak out on the issue. “Our government is complicit in war crimes against humanity. Billions of your tax dollars fund the military occupation of Palestine and the siege of Gaza,” she added.

Commission spokeswoman Jennifer Donelan said that the group will “develop policies and protocols governing its work and the way in which its members engage on the issues that define its mission.”

“We understand that there are many viewpoints regarding current events in the Middle East. The Commission will do its best to explore the impact of those events on our community, and to determine how best to address escalations in hate and bias incidents across the state,” Donelan said.

Antisemitic hate crimes in Maryland increased 98 percent in 2022. The state ranked tenth that year for the highest number of reported antisemitic incidents in the country. Since Hamas’s October 7 attack, vandals have drawn swastikas on residential streets, Maryland schools, and apartment buildings.

CAIR is an active part of the interfaith coalition of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, that is fighting to restore an opt-out option for the district’s lewd gender and sexuality curriculum. Montgomery County has a massive Jewish population of 105,400 people, about 10 percent of its population.

After Jewish Insider first exposed Chaudry’s antisemitic remarks on Monday, Chaudry posted on social media that “your discomfort with my posts on Palestine isn’t greater than my discomfort over your silence and complicity in crimes against humanity.” The CAIR official said that she was at a CeasefireNow rally on Monday night in the “same location where hate filled Zionist counterprotestors threatened violence at another rally last week.”

She also accused Israel of teaching Jewish children to “normalize and celebrate Israel’s psychopathic cruelty and barbaric crimes,” claimed that the 40 babies Hamas reportedly slaughtered at the Kfar Aza kibbutz were “fake Israeli babies,” and called the thousands of Americans who attended Washington, D.C.’s March for Israel “genocide sympathizers.”

Gazan children as young as ten joined Hamas in its murder spree last month, a dozen Israeli survivors told the Washington Free Beacon. Boys reportedly accompanied armed terrorists, looted kibbutzim, and were “apparently enjoying themselves.”

A Department of Justice grant funded a one-year, $114,400 contract for the commission to hire an assistant attorney general. Maryland will raise the position’s annual salary to $136,000 by 2025. It is unclear how long Chaudry will be suspended from the commission.