Our organization has come under fire recently from Rabbi Ari Jun, the Director of Cincinnati’s Jewish Community Relations Council and an outspoken Cincinnati Zionist. On June 17, CityBeat published an article on our informational picket outside US Representative Greg Landsman’s office in Walnut Hills. Journalist Lily Ogburn quoted Jun as calling us “tasteless” and “looking like an extremist or hate group.” Remarkably, Rabbi Jun does not deny that our organization has a democratic right to hold Rep. Landsman accountable for his actions; nor does he make any substantive criticism of any of our public claims. Jun’s objections to our political speech, like those of other local Zionist spokespeople, is vague and impressionistic; like them, when Jun cannot provide reasoned arguments, he offers a smokescreen of catchphrases, speculation, and buzzwords.

We are a coalition of organizers here to share the problems of Corporate Pride, Police in Queer spaces, and to expose that a number of the corporations sponsoring pride are directly linked to the oppression of queer communities and the genocide of Palestinians.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism is a reactionary stratagem to quell legitimate anti-Zionism and to establish Zionism itself as a kind of secular American religion. Cincinnati Socialists without reservation condemns antisemitism and just as emphatically opposes Zionism as a form of national chauvinism and a tool of the international ruling class.

Mayor Meyer and his friend, former City Commissioner Steve Frank, are colonialist talking heads. Meyer has shown repeatedly that he is nothing more than a weapon wielded by Covington’s business class to silence opposition and to make exploitation and corruption palatable. The bourgeois state will always be an exploitative hindrance, not a vehicle for our collective liberation.