The Democratic Party chairman of a Florida county said Wednesday at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, N.C., that he believes Christians want to see Jews either killed or converted to Christianity.
Palm Beach County Democratic Party chairman Mark Alan Siegel, a Boca Raton attorney and former eight-term New York state assemblyman, told Patriot Update video reporter Scottie Hughes that Christians who profess support for Israel are “the worst possible allies with the Jewish state.”
“The Christians,” Siegel said, “just want us to be there so we can all be slaughtered and converted, so they can bring on the second coming of Jesus Christ.”
Watch:
“They’re not our friends,” Siegel continued. “They want Israel to pursue policies which are antithetical with [sic] their security and existence.”
“Fundamentalist Christians,” he said a second time, “… want Jews to die and convert so they can bring on the second coming of their Lord. It is a false friendship. They are seeking their own ends, and not ours.”
A video of the exchange appeared on YouTube late Wednesday. In addition to reporting for the Patriot Update website, Hughes reports for the Tea Party News Network. She told The Daily Caller that she conducted the interview Wednesday around 5 p.m.
“I noticed a man who had a Hebrew language pin which was obviously for Obama,” Hughes told TheDC. “And I simply asked him, ‘As a man of Jewish faith, why do you support Barack Obama for a second term when the DNC platform almost completely ignores Israel?'”
The Democrats’ convention platform, as approved Tuesday, controversially omitted language from 2008 that affirmed Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The language was reinserted Wednesday on the convention floor on the third attempt at a voice vote. The first two votes were evenly split, and loud boos followed the final vote.
Language re-inserting “God” into the platform was also approved in the same contentious process.
“I have heard from both Christians and members of the Jewish faith who are upset and ashamed of this man’s comment,” Hughes added. “I find it ironic that while we here at a convention focused on Unity, the first quote I get is filled with so much hate.”
Siegel is no stranger to scandal. In 1992 the Associated Press reported that Charmain Neary, a former Siegel staffer in the New York Assembly, told a state task force hearing that sex harassment was widespread in the New York Legislature, prompting a rare sensitivity-training seminar with required attendance by all 150 state lawmakers.
She testified that Siegel, then her ex-boss, “introduced sex into almost every encounter with women.”
“This is not news to anyone up in Albany,” Neary told the AP. “I’m just the first person who has given a face and a name to it.”
Siegel denied her allegations. Nearly twenty years later, in 2011, the Florida Sun Sentinel asked him to react to the sexual tweeting scandal that engulfed then-Rep. Anthony Weiner.
“It is always terrible to see a very valuable guy catch fire and explode,” Seigel said.
UPDATE: In an email to The Daily Caller that was received after this article was published, Siegel said he was “referring only to the extreme fundamentalists who, partnered with extreme Jews, want to restore Israel to its biblical boundaries. This policy is opposed by both the governments of both Israel and the United States. Ordinary Evangelicals and other Christians obviously do not hold these views. The TV tape was maliciously edited to broaden the reference I made far beyond what I said.”
