Baltimore County Councilmember Julian Jones on Wednesday denounced a digitally altered image of him circulating on social media.
The image depicted him having a Hitler-like moustache, raising his arm in a “Heil Hitler” salute, and wearing a keffiyeh on his head in the style Yasser Arafat did. Jones, a Democrat running for Baltimore County Executive, called it “a highly offensive meme circulated in attack of my campaign” in a statement he posted to Facebook.
“This was shocking and horrible,” Jones said in a phone call with Baltimore Fishbowl. “Exploiting the legitimate fears of the Jewish community at a time when bigotry and antisemitism is on the rise, they’re basically exploiting that fear to weaponize that fear against my campaign. I have a long history in Baltimore County, where … I have very great relations with the Jewish community. They’re my neighbors.”
Jones said he learned about the image after Monday’s County Council meeting, and that people had seen it circulating before then. While he is not planning to investigate who created and distributed the image, he wanted to call attention to it, calling it the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“I just felt like this is a bit much,” Jones said. “I got to call this out and call on my colleagues or my competitors to denounce this behavior, because it has no place in our politics. And unfortunately, when you’ve seen this done against President Obama and Michelle and you’ve seen this done against Governor Wes Moore and against Brandon Scott. I mean, with the ability of these AI tools, people are able to do a lot of terrible things with them. And this is brought it up, and I’m hopeful that whoever did it will feel the shame and not do it again.”
As Jones mentioned, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott was also targeted with derogatory AI images when Baltimore City Inspector General Isabel Cumming shared a social media post of him appearing to be surrounded by piles of money, smoking a cigar, and holding shopping bags. After significant backlash, she removed the post and said it would not happen again.
In Jones’ statement, he called on his fellow candidates to denounce the tactics used against him. So far, only Democratic candidate Nick Stewart has done so publicly, in the form of a social media post denouncing hate in general. Jones said that fellow councilemmber Pat Young, also a candidate for Baltimore County Executive, reached out to Jones privately to condemn the image and assure him his campaign had nothing to do with it.
A few commenters on Reddit suggested the image was created in response to one of Jones’ campaign volunteers, who has made antisemitic comments on social media years ago. Haki Shakur Ammi has shared photos of himself with Jones’ County Executive campaign signs, which Jones has liked and reshared on social media.
On LinkedIn, Ammi describes himself as an author, organizer, writer, and global strategist. He addressed the comments in a Facebook post yesterday, though did not apologize for them.
Jones dismissed the notion that an unpaid volunteer’s antisemitic comments from 2015 would prompt accusations that Jones himself is antisemitic.
“He’s a Democratic activist,” Jones said of Ammi. “He’s been around for quite some time. He’s helped on many campaigns, and he shows up. He’s not on a payroll or anything like that. He’s shown up to help out from time to time. He put up a couple of signs, from what I understand, or help put up a couple of signs … I’ve known him for some time, and he’s never said anything to me that resembles any type of antisemitic comments or any hatred towards anybody.”
Jones said people trying to paint him as antisemitic by doing research on every person with whom he comes into contact is “disgusting,” “vile,” and “racist behavior.” He would rather people focus on who will make citizens’ lives better in Baltimore County, not criticize him by association with a campaign volunteer. When reminded that the volunteer had made deeply antisemitic comments in the past, Jones said he was unaware of them until this AI image came to light.
“I denounce those comments in the strongest terms,” Jones said, speaking of the posts from 2010-2015. “I never saw them. Never knew they existed until, once again, people started showing me this stuff.”
As for why anyone might create such an image of him, Jones said he could think of several reasons but does not want to speculate or dwell on the incident.
“People have told me where they think it came from, but I’m very careful not to engage in this type of behavior, because it doesn’t end,” Jones said. “In other words, I’ve accused somebody and I have no proof … this is all distracting.”
