House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is facing backlash from progressives after condemning Dan Bilzerian’s antisemitic attacks against Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) without mentioning his colleague’s history of inflammatory remarks about Muslims.
Bilzerian, who is challenging Fine in Tuesday’s GOP primary, released an artificially generated video attacking the lawmaker’s Jewish identity. The ad, particularly, portrays Fine as “Satanic” and repeatedly references him as a “fat Jew.” The ad led Democratic and Republican House leadership to condemn the antisemitic rhetoric targeting Fine.
“The hateful campaign being run by Daniel Bilzerian in Florida is blatantly antisemitic and shocks the conscience,” Jeffries wrote. “People of goodwill regardless of political affiliation must reject his vile attacks on the Jewish community. This cannot and will not stand.”
The statement garnered more than 2 million views on X but drew criticism from several prominent voices on the Left, who agreed Bilzerian’s rhetoric was antisemitic while faulting Jeffries for failing also to condemn Fine’s past remarks about Muslims.
“Bilzerian is awful and antisemitic,” Zeteo Editor-in-Chief Mehdi Hasan wrote on X. “Do you have anything to say about the Republican Islamophobe currently sitting in that seat, Rep. Randy Fine?”
Streamer Hasan Piker, who has become a political lightning rod for the Right because of his own past controversial remarks, lambasted Jeffries for “complaining about” Bilzerian while Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) “is carpetbagging to a black opportunity district & running against a more than qualified black opponent … who happens to be progressive.”
Wasserman Schultz’s district was drawn to become competitive, but she opted to run in a safer, historically majority-black seat. Republican-led redistricting retooled the lines so that it was no longer majority-black, and she’s been criticized by some black community leaders for the move.
Drop Site News reporter Julian Andreone said that Bilzerian and Fine were both “bigots.”
“Blizerian’s antisemitism is disgusting. Everybody knows that,” Andreone wrote on X. “His primary opponent, Rep. Randy Fine, has used even more virulent rhetoric towards Muslims than he has towards Jews. Both candidates are bigots unfit to serve in Congress. Hakeem Jeffries could have included a mention of Fine and made it a dual condemnation. He, of course, did not. Why? All Muslim and Jewish people are human beings of equal value.”
Georgia Democratic state Rep. Ruwa Romman even went as far as to write the statement she thought Jeffries should have made:
“A better statement would’ve been: ‘Republicans have leaned so far into bigotry that Republican voters are left picking between a raging antisemite and an anti-Muslim bigot,” Romman, the first Muslim elected to the Georgia legisalture, said on X. “This is the result of Republican gerrymandering that now guarantees all voters in Florida’s 6th district will end up with a bigot representing them no matter the result in this primary of candidates competing for the award for most hateful. As Speaker, I’ll push for a nationwide gerrymandering ban and return the power to voters to choose differently.’”
Fine won a seat in the House last year via a special election to replace U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz. He is one of four Jewish Republicans in Congress. Known as the “Hebrew Hammer” by Florida allies, Fine has been unabashed in his support for Israel amid the Gaza war. He’s also been unafraid to court controversy, such as when he responded in February to a story about a Muslim community advocate calling for a ban on dogs in New York City.
“If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one,” Fine wrote on social media.
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Jeffries denounced Fine’s remarks at the time, calling the Florida Republican “a disgrace to the United States Congress.”
“He is an Islamophobic, disgusting and unrepentant bigot,” Jeffries said. “House Democrats will not let the racist and bigoted behavior of Randy Fine go unchecked. Accountability is coming to all of these sick extremists when the gavels change hands in November, if not sooner.”