An “anti-gentrification group” called Defend Boyle Heights recently protested the grand opening of a kosher café in downtown Los Angeles due to the immigrant business owner’s support for President Donald Trump. David Shalom, son of the café owner Asher Shalom, described the ordeal to SiriusXM hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Tonight.
Defend Boyle Heights used its Facebook page to organize its campaign against the Asher Caffé & Lounge, the newly opened kosher restaurant.
Assorted negative reviews of Asher Caffé on Yelp evoke left-wing political messaging, including an accusation against the restaurant owner and his family of saying “racist s***,” a description of the owner as supporting “a person who has directly attacked the residents of the community,” and a call for patrons to “give your money to small businesses run by people of color.”
Shalom recalled the online campaign to agitate against his family’s restaurant, “Ahead of this grand opening event, on social media people started spreading that my father is a Trump supporter, and people started posting photos of his retweets and reposts of the president, and so there’s a group called ‘Defend Boyle Heights,’ which is an anti-gentrification group, and they started inciting a lot, and they were calling on everyone to protest this grand opening, and there were really nasty and pretty scary comments that were getting hundreds of likes and all that.”
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Shalom described the scene of Asher Caffé’s grand opening, “They showed up and they protested aggressively, viciously, and people who saw what was happening and who were supposed to join in the grand opening actually left, so to a certain extent they did succeed. Police were able to escort people in and out. They even had to protect the valet. It was a mess. … They were screaming, ‘Racist! Xenophobe! Pedophile!'”
Shalom said anti-Semitic slurs were directed at his family.
The Boyle Heights Chamber of Commerce revoked Shalom’s father’s membership days before his restaurant’s grand opening, issuing the following statement: “Boyle Heights thrives because of our diverse immigrant population — The Chamber will always celebrate and support this fact. We will not support anyone who chooses to conduct themselves in a hateful manner, especially toward members of our community.”
Shalom’s father, Asher Shalom, is himself an immigrant who originally emigrated from Iran to the United States via Israel.
“My father was born in Iran, and he escaped oppression,” David said. “He made his way to Israel, and from Israel he made his way to the United States about thirty years ago. Fifteen years in, he became a citizen. He says he cried like a baby that day. It was very emotional for him.”
Mansour encouraged Los Angeles-based listeners to patronize Asher Caffé, which gives a 10 percent discount to locals and 40 percent discount to law enforcement.
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