Screenshot obtained from YouTube channel Hamilton Pulse.
A GOP mayoral candidate in New Jersey is now under fire for his racist, misogynistic, and anti-Muslim social media posts, reports The Trentonian.
One of David Henderson’s Facebook posts included a picture of severed pig heads with the message, “Sharia Law Saturday. Ha! There is no Sharia Law in America.” Another one had a picture of a body builder carrying pigs that declared, “Happy Ramadan.”
Ramadan is the Islamic holy month observed by Muslims, involving fasting from dawn to sunset. Muslims also abstain from the consumption of pork, so Henderson’s mocking posts definitely did not sit well with many.
“If you are going to run for office, you should represent all of the people and have regards for all of the people,” said Imam Qareeb Bashir, president of the Islamic Council of Greater Trenton. “What we have seen on a national level is people continue to support racial comments, bigotry, Islamophobia, etcetera, and people will not stand up. It’s as if people do not have the moral courage to stand up.
“Hamilton Township residents and Mercer County, how will they respond to this?” Bashir added. “If they don’t respond — or if they take a passive attitude, then that is scary.”
Henderson, who supports the construction of the border wall, also suggested Central American immigrants have low IQs in a post.
“The average IQ in Central American countries, Honduras: 81, El Salvador 81, Guatemala 79,” he wrote, “would assign these migrants and their offspring to the ‘educable’ or mildly retarded category in US public schools and unable to master all but the basics.”
Henderson has also posted photos of exposed women, even captioning a photo with the text, “Sideboob Saturday.”
A Mercer County Republican strategist and a former campaign manager, Henderson is running against incumbent Mayor Kelly Yaede in the June 4 Republican primary.
In an interview Friday, Henderson apologized for the “insensitive” posts and promised to learn from them.
In addressing his post about Central American immigrants, he said, “I paraphrased some research documents that I had reviewed. In retrospect, I didn’t do justice to presenting the entire body of work that I paraphrased. I can see that it is very hurtful. It is not me to denigrate Central Americans because there’s a lot of quality [citizens].
“At the end of the day, I’m a human being. I didn’t say I was a perfect human being, and I have my faults. I’ll admit them, and I’ll take responsibility for what I did and I will grow from understanding the hurtfulness of that statement. The people deserve to see it and I’ll have to do my best to show my better side to those people. At the end of the day, I’m a quality person.”
He stated his parents raised him to accept people of every “color, creed and religion” and that he let them down with those posts.
“Since I posted those Muslim things, I’ve realized the insensitivity of it. I’ll take responsibility for that,” he added. “My mother would say, ‘What were you thinking? Why would you say something like that?’ Unfortunately I don’t have her with me anymore to ground me as much as she would.”
According to Yaede, Henderson has become a town pariah due to his posts.
“There is absolutely no acceptable justification for his posts,” said Yaede. “This is the real David Henderson Hamiltonians know. I brought this to the forefront during the last school board election. Add to the fact he has been expelled from youth athletic leagues, banned from eating establishments and barred from the Hamilton Township Republican Club. How so-called leaders and elected officials endorse or continue to work with an individual like this is appalling to me.”
“In my roughly 15 years in local politics, I have never seen a candidate here in Hamilton behave in such a vile and disgusting manner, but this is the real Dave Henderson,” said former councilman Dennis Pone, chairman of the Hamilton Township Republican Committee. “He has repeatedly posted racist and misogynistic pictures with comments like these over the years. Many of his followers feel compelled to make nasty comments along the way.”
Hamilton Council candidate Vinnie Capodanno even compared Henderson to David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. “He was acting like the imperial wizard. Right now he has calmed down, but them rants on Facebook and the things that he said — to me, that was something David Duke would say.”
The New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called on Republican State Committee Chairman Doug Steinhardt to repudiate Henderson’s anti-Muslim and racist Facebook posts, reports Insider NJ.
“The posts to Mr. Henderson’s Facebook page are, by any standard, crude and offensive, not only to Muslims, but to anyone of conscience and compassion,” said CAIR-NJ Executive Director James Sues. “The bigoted views expressed by Mr. Henderson are below the dignity of a public official and should serve to disqualify him as a candidate for an office that claims to represent the interests of all citizens, regardless of their race or faith. This is just another painful reminder of the extreme divisiveness that characterizes the current political climate at the national level.”
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this man is a menace to society