Reply #22: The most prominent sign-holder was there long before OWS

[starroute]

This originally appeared at Salon, though for some reason the link isn't coming up there.

http://occupywallst.org/forum/homeless-anti-semite-was-around-long-before-occupy/

Exhibit A in the ad (watch it below) is a sign-bearing man who yells that “Jews control Wall Street!” Now, as I’ve previously reported, Occupy protesters have taken to surrounding the man, who gave his name to me recently as David Smith, with rebuttal signs, including one that reads, “Asshole —>”. Smith has been hanging around Zuccotti Park nearly every day for a couple of weeks.

But as Josh Nathan-Kazis reports at the Forward, Smith started carrying anti-Semitic signs around the financial district long before Occupy Wall Street existed . . .

During a trip to Zuccotti Park to observe the early stages of the protest on September 19, two days after activists first set up camp there, the Forward’s Nate Lavey and I watched as Smith entered the plaza with his cardboard sign, was confronted by one vocal passerby, and then was chased out of the occupied plaza by a shouting mob of activists. Police eventually intervened to separate him from the crowd.

Smith is a familiar face to those of us who work downtown. The Forward office is a few blocks from Wall Street, and I saw him at least once earlier this summer, picketing silently near the New York Stock Exchange.