‘I just couldn’t stay silent. It bothered me so much I had to speak out,’ he says.
By Dave Gordon, JNS
A straight-talking, no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is Instagrammer might not necessarily be unusual, except when it comes in the form of a non-Jewish American black man who speaks truth to power on Israel.
“Go home, Susan. You’re drunk,” he posted over a recent video of actress Susan Sarandon, singing with middle-aged women in the halls of Congress for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which would effectively allow the terrorist organization to get away with the murder of more than 1,200 people, most of them civilians.
He holds the handle “Wyzewurdz74” and goes by the name “Biggah” (he says he cannot reveal his real name, owing to the fact that he’s already been doxxed twice). His account has about 39,000 followers, including Jessica Seinfeld (the wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld); human-rights attorney Brooke Goldstein, founder and executive director of the Lawfare Project; and pro-Israel communications consultant and journalist activists Virag Gulyas, a former diplomat to the European Union; and Shai DeLuca, a Canadian-Israeli interior designer, international broadcaster and activist.
February being Black History Month, it was appropriate to mention that it is “one of the main goals” for him to positively connect the black and Jewish communities using social media. “It’s something that’s going to be arduous, in order to build that alliance,” he says.
Groups like Black Lives Matter “use words like apartheid, colonizer, genocide, resistance—and these words are triggers for people of color because of our lived experience. So all of those things kind of culminated into what we’re seeing now as far as people just blindly following the stupidity,” he tells JNS. He adds that he understands why the Jewish community “would be rather apprehensive in entertaining a connection” and “right now, the climate isn’t really very permissive.”
It also means that he has more work to do to dispel the myths and bridge the divide, he says.
In one video, he discusses how the pro-Palestinian movement’s “mental manipulation” has managed “to co-opt the struggle of black Americans and people of color within America.”
They do that by showing that “hating on Israel is the same thing as black people hating on America,” he says. He wrote in the post that “they somehow managed to connect the struggles of black people to the dominant oppressors in the Middle East. They are manipulating us by using white guilt as well.”
But he explained that Israel is far from dominant, he continued, being the size of New Jersey and “literally surrounded.”
“Yet they managed to make the West think they are the bullies,” he wrote.
“They’re also trying to rebrand oppression” and keep a secret about how the Islamic world has “the largest slave trade in the history of the world,” and yet manages “to hide the fact that this slave trade is still going on to this day.”
He says it’ll be his mission “to expose how this is being done when and where this is being done” and “figure out ways to combat it aside from exposing it publicly.”
‘Straight-up lies about Israel’
What began his journey as an online Israel advocate was when his wife, an Israeli, woke up crying on Oct. 7, explaining to him that amid rocket fire from the Gaza Strip at civilian areas in southern Israel, Hamas terrorists infiltrated the Israeli border and murdered hundreds of people. (The estimated number started in the tens, and by the end of the day had reached the mid-hundreds, increasing over the next few days to 1,400 until a more accurate count of 1,200 was confirmed by Israeli authorities.)
He grabbed his phone and made a quick video in his car, saying: “‘You stand against Israel, I’ll stand on you.’”
“Between the antisemitism and the misinformation that was going around, I just couldn’t stay silent. It bothered me so much I had to speak out. I couldn’t just keep it at one post,” he says.
“I realized that so many people were just like my wife—that had so many of their friends turned their backs on them. So I had to be somebody that they can talk to. I felt it was necessary. So that’s why I’m still, even to this day, making as many videos as I can.”
He kept seeing “straight-up lies about Israel” from comments on his wife’s Instagram page and was baffled why people couldn’t be bothered to simply Google (or grasp) the truth: “How are people still this ignorant? But again, this is one of the oldest hatreds in history, antisemitism.”
He estimates that he’s made about 100 videos on the topic of the Hamas-Israel war since his first one on Oct. 8. “It’s all from the heart,” he notes, as most are done in a single take.
One video takes on some of the anti-Israel demonstrators who have been marching, protesting, and blocking transportation hubs and other venues throughout North America these past four months: “If you’re protesting outside a hospital, you’re an idiot. If you’re ripping down posters of hostages, you’re also an idiot. If you think by protesting, by blocking a highway is really doing something, you’re also an idiot. … If you’re protesting for Palestine and not calling for the end of Hamas and the immediate return of the hostages, not only are you an idiot. But you’re an antisemitic piece of sh*t. I said what I said.”
Still in another, he screen-grabbed the Hamas Covenant, writing: “I believe that a majority of the people throughout the world who are participating in these Pro Palestine rallies have been duped. I believe that trigger words have been used such as genocide, colonizer and apartheid and because of that in combination with the visuals that we are seeing in Gaza people on their support … if you do not support what is in this Charter it is on you to find a different way to actually support the people of Palestine as opposed to loaning your support to Hamas, which is what you have been doing.”
Much of the information he brings to his channel comes from online sources, as well as “connections” at the Tel Aviv Institute.
By invitation from Gilad Erdan, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, he and other black leaders came together to see the raw footage of the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7, including dashcam video, CCTV surveillance camera video and longer video clips than what is publicly unavailable. Beforehand, they were made to sign documents specifying that no one would sue for the trauma that could be incurred just by seeing the images. “The stuff that you see on the Internet is, is really disturbing. But the raw footage is outrageous.”
At the same gathering, the group met with two of the family members of Israeli hostages who have been held captive in Gaza since Oct. 7 (an estimated 134 are still there, though Israel has confirmed the deaths of 32 hostages; 112 have been released). “Being up close and personal is definitely one of the reasons why I’m more than ever online,” he says. “At the forefront of my mind now are the hostages. These people were either partying or chillin’ at home doing what they would normally do on a Saturday morning. Had their lives turned upside-down.”
‘My moral compass is centered on humanity’
Raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., the father of four grown children currently works in security on the Las Vegas strip. Former clients included notable artists Wu-Tang Clan and Jay Z.
As might be expected, he’s received hate messages—some 5,000 of them in the form of DMs and countless others in the comments, including the epithet of being an “Uncle Tom.”
He retorts: “As if I, as a black man, could not possibly actually do research on my own” or have “my own opinion.”
Trolls accuse him of being a paid puppet of Israel, or that his Israeli wife is writing the scripts. “She sees the videos when Instagram sees them,” he states.
“I post what I post because my moral compass is centered on humanity,” he says in one post, addressing the trolls who accuse him of being a paid influencer. (If he was, he said he’d be able to afford better editing and sound equipment, he quipped.) The potshots are the “battle scars I know I have to take, to do this job.”
Still, as a result of his newfound “fame,” he said he’s received thousands of messages of praise, and from time to time, he does get recognized in public and is asked for selfies.
He credits his great-grandmother Thelma for his activism—she played a major role in his upbringing and instilled an ethic in him that he lives by today: “You see somebody in trouble, you help them.”
“She is the reason that I was the bully of the bullies,” he says. “Growing up, I was always big for my age. And, of course, people would pick on me, but that was one thing. If I saw somebody getting picked on, I would go and defend them.”