Anti-Israel protesters at the Creating Change conference in Chicago on January 22. Photo: Screenshot.

Last week’s Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender-Queer (LGBTQ) conference in Chicago “could have been a scene from the early days of Nazi Germany [with] a raucous mob surrounding a gathering of Jews, chanting vicious slogans, screaming epithets, all the while their faces distorted by a hatred that is as irrational as it is stunning,” wrote Russian-Israeli-American filmmaker Michael Lucas in the gay lifestyle magazine Out on Wednesday.

Lucas, the creator of a company that produces all-male erotica — and defender of the Jewish state’s gay-rights record in independent documentary Undressing Israel — was referring to the 28th annual “Creating Change” conference in the Windy City’s Hilton Hotel that turned violent when participants protested the presence of Jewish and Israeli delegations.

Lucas said such a demonstration of hatred towards fellow members of the LGBTQ community constituted antisemitism, pure and simple, since the “liberal” and “progressive” Jews in attendance, including leaders of the organization A Wider Bridge and Jerusalem Open House – the latter of whom are particularly vociferous when it comes to attacking their own government’s policies and IDF operations – were not spared the vitriol.

Perhaps, Lucas wrote, they “thought that their prior public criticism of Israel would protect themselves from attack — a kind of verbal ‘Iron Dome’ similar to Israel’s ingenious missile defense system.”

If so, he said, “They were sadly mistaken. The 200 thugs who showed up Friday at a Jewish reception were not interested in dialogue. They comprised an enraged gang filled with Jew-hatred, bent on intimidating and silencing LGBT Jews who have any connection to the state of Israel.”

Lucas went on to criticize the sponsor of the conference, the National LGBTQ Task Force, which “did absolutely nothing to safeguard the lives of more than 100 participants at the reception.”

He then described the scene of the reception held by A Wider Bridge with the Jerusalem Open House:

As wild-eyed as they were ignorant, those in the horde cheered in support of one leader of the attack who yelled “We’re going to challenge these Zionist racist motherf******!”

They blocked those who wanted to attend the reception from entering, and held prisoner those already inside the conference room. Several entered the room and commandeered the stage.

…

As that was taking place inside the room, in the hallway there were the usual cries of “End the occupation!” which in the twisted belief of the extreme left is the source of all evil in the Middle East, if not the world. There was a huge banner and smaller signs reading “Cancel Pinkwashing,” the despicable, discredited and deeply moronic theory that Israel’s stellar record on LGBT rights is simply a smokescreen to cover its treatment of Palestinians. And there were charges of Israeli “apartheid” from those who are clueless about what apartheid really means, and who don’t understand what an insult that is to the South African blacks who truly suffered under that system.

Lucas asserted that “while criticism of Israeli government policies can be legitimate, the extreme left has crossed the line into anti-Semitism.”

“The imbeciles yelling in the hallway of that Chicago hotel did not care that the leftist Jerusalem Open House works to protect Palestinian gays, because they don’t really care about the Palestinians,” he wrote. “Their entire obsession is with the only Jewish country in the world, Israel, and their desire to see the Jewish state and its inhabitants destroyed.”

This, wrote Lucas, is despite Israel’s being “the only country in the region where gay people live openly, equally, with all the rights and protections of an enlightened society.”

Watch the video of the protest, provided by A Wider Bridge: