Rep. Cori Bush (D-Victim) is supposed to be a serious human being; after all, she is an elected official in one of the nation’s highest legislative assemblies, and one might have thought, in more naïve times, that such a position carried with it a certain gravitas, as well as a certain responsibility. But those days are long gone, as the presence of Nathaniel Davis on Bush’s staff demonstrates. Davis is ostensibly just a bodyguard, but as Lincoln Brown detailed Tuesday, he is a member of Bush’s inner circle, despite being a veritable wellspring of comical and ridiculous ideas. But some of his statements aren’t so funny: Davis is now trying to deflect criticism of his vehemently anti-Semitic remarks by claiming to be a Jewish “high priest.”
Davis’s statements about himself are a peek into the strange and lurid world of the paranoid racist sects that arose among black Americans in the Jim Crow America of the early twentieth century; the best known of these is, of course, the Nation of Islam, which teaches that the white man is the devil, a demonic race cooked up by a mad scientist, Dr. Yaqub, on the island of Madagascar. Wallace Fard, the founder of the Nation, before he struck out on his own was a member of the Moorish Science Temple, which teaches that black Americans are the descendants of the Moors of North Africa. (In fact, many North Africans tend to regard sub-Saharan black Africans with contempt, as has been abundantly illustrated recently during Tunisia’s mass deportation of sub-Saharan migrants.)
Differing from that view are the Black Hebrew Israelites, who claim that black Americans are actually descendants of the Biblical Hebrews, and are thus the real Jews, as opposed to those who bear the name. Davis’ bizarre self-image shows some similarities with Black Hebrew Israelites as well as with the Moorish Science Temple (he has a Facebook account under the name “Aha Davis Zadok El”; Moorish Temple members like to add “El” at the end of the names).
The bulk of his strange fantasies, however, seem to be all his own. The Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday that Davis “claims he is a 109 trillion-year-old spiritual guru named Aha Sen Piankhy.” He also claims, according to the Free Beacon, to be able to “summon hurricanes, levitate, and retrieve winning lottery numbers ‘from the spirit realm.’” But when the Free Beacon reported on Davis’ vociferous anti-Semitism, the trillionagenarian got his back up. He insisted that it was “impossible for him to be anti-Semitic because he himself is a member of the Tribe of Issachar, one of the lost tribes of Israel.” Davis asked angrily: “That makes me Hebrew. How can I be anti-Semitic? You’re literally dealing with the priesthood, literally.” Literally!
Black Hebrew Israelites often tend to be anti-Semitic themselves, as they claim that actual Jews have stolen the Jewish identity that they claim rightfully belongs to them. Davis, the Free Beacon notes, “denied ever propagating anti-Semitic tropes, including the claim that the Rothschild family secretly rules the world. He claims he merely accused one specific member of the Rothschild family of controlling the Western Hemisphere in a July 23, 2020, Facebook post.” Oh, well then! That makes it all right!
Related: Cori Bush’s Security Guard Is 109 Trillion Years Old
Despite having written all this and other anti-Semitic material, Davis maintains that he is not and cannot be an anti-Semite: “If you could retract the whole anti-Semite, because I’m not, man. I’m not. I got bar mitzvah’ed in this city. There’s no way I can be anti-Semite. No way. You didn’t complete your homework.” It was a missed opportunity: Davis wasn’t asked whether he thought that the Jews down at the local synagogue were really Jews at all or imposters who have illegitimately supplanted the Black Hebrew Israelites.
Nonetheless, Davis said quite enough to cause concern. If we had any journalists today, Bush would be fielding questions these days about the anti-Semite on her staff, and about whether she herself harbors anti-Semitic views. In today’s Congress, she can join the Squad and claim, as they do, that she is merely engaging in criticism of Israel, not in anti-Semitism as such. That’s how anti-Semitism is being mainstreamed these days on the Left. Nathaniel Davis, being 109 trillion years old, has seen it all happen before and likely knows where it leads.
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