While Barron might not be an anti-Semite on the order of Louis Farrakhan (a man for whom he frequently professes admiration), he is obsessively hostile to Israel—a country whose founding he rejects as historical crime. After a 2009 trip to Gaza with British MP George Galloway’s anti-Israel group Viva Palestina, Barron told reporters that the Gaza Strip was a giant “concentration camp.” Considering this description a touch understated, he traded Dachau for Auschwitz, comparing the Palestinian territories to a modern “death camp.” Israel, he added, “deliberately cause[s] the death of innocent children” and is guilty of “genocide.”

Barron routinely conflates Jews and Israel, decrying the influence not of an “Israel lobby” but of the “Jewish lobby,” a distinction that even Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer considered important. In 2003, Barron cast the only dissenting vote after the City Council tabled a resolution denouncing anti-Semitic remarks by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad: “I will be voting against any resolution pro-Israel [sic] in this council until this council has the heart to be fair with the Palestinian cause and come up with a [similar] resolution.” For Barron, a condemnation of Mohamad’s claim that “the Jews rule the world by proxy” amounted to an endorsement of Israeli policy.

At a pro-Qaddafi rally in Harlem organized by Farrakhan, he happily shared the stage with second-string anti-Semites like New Black Panther Party Chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz (“Who is it that has our entertainers … and our athletes in a vise grip? The Jews!”). Barron has also declared his admiration for Khalid Muhammad, the viciously anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader who said there was “no evidence” the Holocaust happened and thundered against the “hook-nosed” Jews who control the “Jew-nited Nations in Jew York City.”