WASHINGTON EXAMINER -- Michael Sinensky, co-founder of Israel Friends , a charity that has raised over $26 million for Israel since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, told the Washington Examiner he is facing death threats and accusations of Nazi affiliation following a report on his last-minute funding push for Omar’s opposition.

A handful of messages from a WhatsApp group chat were leaked in a Sunday report from the Intercept which detailed the efforts of Sinensky and others to infuse cash into the race. The Washington Examiner obtained every message from the group chat dating back to Oct. 23, 2023.

‘WEAPONIZE OUR TERROR’: SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT ON SINENSKY

The outlet wrote that Sinensky, who has donated to several Democratic campaigns, “justified his support for the far-right” in messages where he framed the 2024 election landscape as a battle between parties whose fringe groups include “alt right Christian Neo Nazis” in the GOP and “socialist, Marxist, anarchists who are supporting radical Islam” among the Democratic ranks, in which the right-wing radicals are currently the lesser of two evils for Jewish Americans.

The messages were from July 12, a couple of weeks after the June 25 New York Democratic primary, when the group chat was called “Jews for Richie Torres.” The WhatsApp group has undergone three name changes and involved several different groups of people over the course of nine months. It was titled “Zionists for Don Samuels Against Ilhan Omar” during the Minnesota primary campaign, and the group’s name has changed again since.

Omar chided the group for what she described as “discussing their preference for ‘alt right Christian Neo Nazis’” in a Sunday press release responding to the report.

“The media often sensationalizes or mischaracterizes snippets of conversation to support the story they want to tell, and this case was no exception,” Sinensky said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The outlet took screenshots from a private chat without providing the full and honest scope of the larger discussion.”

He explained, “The bottom line is that no Jew wants to support people who hate us. Unfortunately, we are currently living in a nation — and world — where antisemitism has exploded on every side of the political spectrum.”

“The awful position we as Jews find ourselves in is to identify the less imminent threat and hedge for our own survival, distasteful as it may be, in the short term,” he added. “That is how dire and serious the situation is.”

The Jewish entrepreneur said that Omar and her anti-Israel colleagues have “actively contributed to the firestorm that has bred” the rise of hate crimes against Jews following Oct. 7. He mentioned two recent examples of anti-Jewish stabbings in New York, as well as an incident caught on video where his wife was chased into his apartment building by a man yelling, "Die, Jews, die!"

“Instead of having empathy for American Jews, whom the country has put in a position to choose the party whose fringe is the lesser enemy, or unpacking their own role in creating such a horrific zeitgeist,” Sinensky said, “This publication chose to weaponize our terror to further vilify us, only further fanning the flames of antisemitism and hate in general.”

Photo: Reuters