During a Monday interview, Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., was asked if he had conversed with any of his progressive fellow lawmakers regarding his previous tweet calling out his progressive colleagues’ “silence” on condemning anti-Semitic attacks as the nation sees a rise.
"And just as the former president called COVID the ‘China flu’ — which wrote the tax on Asian-Americans — calling Israel a terrorist state or an apartheid state, to me, is doing the same thing to the Jewish community, which has been persecuted for so many generations," Phillips said.
The Democratic congressman said it was"time to stand up" and called on his progressive colleagues"to recognize what is at stake here."Phillips also told his colleagues to look to the past in pre-World War II Germany, when Jewish people felt as safe there"as they do in America right now." "But these are the signs and signals that are very disconcerting for the community and I feel an obligation to point that out and not condemn, but invite my progressive colleagues to help us," he added.
The two-term congressman called out his progressive colleagues on social media for not showing the same amount of"vigor" in pushing back against anti-Semitic attacks as they do other"areas of activism.