Bar Employee's Confrontation With Customers Is Going Viral
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On March 12, a group of ten men meeting at the Lucky Labrador Beer Hall in Portland, Oregon garnered the attention of the staff, who suspected that the men might be responsible for leaving promotional material for hate groups at the bar the previous week. The tone of the group's conversation led one of the employees, Ilan Moskowitz, who is Jewish, to confront them about the flyers, even though the men reportedly outnumbered the bar staff by a 2-to-1 ratio.
"My whole life, I hear about this shit," he told the Willamette Week. "My grandfather survived two prison camps. I'll tell you what was going through my head: 'This is how Hitler got started. In a beer hall.'"
Corey Pein, a writer at the Willamette Week, outlined the tense stand-off in a tweet thread that's getting a lot of attention.
After hearing the anti-Semitic conversation, Moskowitz said he confronted some of the men in the bathroom and then the whole group at the table. The group of white men allegedly said they were a "black power group" and called Moskowitz a "fake Jew."
The men refused to leave the bar at first and another customer called the police.
The group then went outside the bar and one of them played the bagpipes, however they were gone by the time police arrived.
Pein tweeted that Moskowitz's actions are "something to think about" when racist or anti-Semitic groups show at up at your "local watering hole."
Pein also offered a picture of flyers found in the community. The Daily Stormer is an online publication the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a "Neo-Nazi" website.
The incident is a part of a disturbing trend in the Portland area during the month of March.
- On March 4, Steven Shane Howard, who the SPLC says is an "imperial wizard" of the North Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan appeared at a Trump rally near Lake Oswego in Oregon.
- On March 6 a Jewish community center in Portland received a bomb threat.
- On March 11, during a Jewish holiday, residents in Southeast Portland found swastikas and hate messages spray painted on cars fences and trees.
Jewish Centers across the country are receiving bomb threats.
More than 80 Jewish community centers and schools in the U.S. and Canada have been the targets of bomb threats since January, a trend that some experts attribute to the rise of alt-right or radical right ideologies. The Southern Poverty Law Center's Senior Fellow Mark Potok told ATTN: in February that the "radical-right" is growing and entering mainstream politics.
"We've never seen radical right wing politics in the political mainstream in the way we're seeing right now," he said.
