NY reparations panel members should resign over ‘disturbing’ antisemitic and anti-police views: GOP pols

Two appointees to a new state committee considering paying reparations should resign for making “disturbing” antisemitic and anti-police remarks, New York Republicans said Wednesday.

GOP members of the state Senate called for Ron Daniels and Lurie Daniel Favors to step down from New York’s nine-member “commission to study reparations and racial justice,” which they were appointed to by state Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx).

“The deeply offensive views of these members should completely disqualify them from serving in any government-appointed position, especially one supposedly intended to unify our state,” Minority Leader Robert Ortt and other Republicans in the state Senate said in a joint statement.

“The abhorrent bias of these commission members will no doubt cloud their decision-making and taint their recommendations.”

Daniels has claimed that white people are responsible for climate change and backed Hamas’ terrorist hostilities against Israel, while Favors pushed to defund the police, The Post recently reported.

“When announcing the members of the newly created reparations commission, Governor [Kathy] Hochul referred to the appointees as an ‘extraordinary group of highly-qualified individuals.’ The announcement failed to acknowledge the disturbing antisemitic and anti-police rhetoric espoused by commission members Ron Daniels and Lurie Danie Favors,” the GOP statement said.

“Regardless of any opinion on the necessity of this commission, there should be no doubt these members have no business continuing to serve,” the pols said. “We strongly urge Governor Hochul and the Senate and Assembly Majorities to demand their resignations immediately.”

Calls for the duo’s resignation came just days after The Post’s report on Daniels and Favors’ inflammatory and divisive comments.

“White Folks Messed Up the Weather = Black Folks Save the Planet,” Daniels, a longtime activist who ran for president on the left-wing Peace and Freedom Party in 1992, said in an Oct. 25, 2021 post on X.

He also went after South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the upper chamber’s sole black Republican, calling him “Uncle Tim” — an offshoot of the derisive term “Uncle Tom” used to smear black people who are conservative or too accommodating to whites.

Daniels also made several anti-Israel comments after Hamas attacked the Jewish state on October 7.

“With silence, comes complacency. No Homeland. No Peace. No Justice, No Peace in Israel,” Daniels, founder and president of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century, said on Oct. 25 last year.

“I am not commenting,” Daniels, who served as administrator for the National African American Reparations Commission, told The Post when reached by phone Wednesday about calls for his resignation.

Favors, executive director at the Center for Law and Social Justice at CUNY’s Medgar Evers College, posted on July 7, 2019, “In the name of our ancestors who weep over our fractured communities; in the name of our families whose genealogy is at best a guess and a prayer; in the name of all that is holy & just: F—K YOU & YOUR RACE APOLOGETICS. WE WILL NOT BE SILENT. WE WILL NOT MAKE YOU COMFORTABLE.”

Another X post from April 2021 by Favors said: “Police all across the country are literally proving *daily* why #DefundThePolice is necessary. I’m old enough to remember summa yall claiming activists were going too far.”

Favors had no immediate comment.

Heastie had no immediate comment. The Post also reached out to Hochul and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who between them appointed six of the nine members to the reparations panel. Heastie appointed three, including the two mired in controversy.

One state educator said, “You can’t start a discussion about reparations with commission members who’ve made prejudiced statements.”

Former longtime CUNY board trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld said Heastie had succeeded in replacing controversial former City College black studies professor Leonard Jeffries, who likened Jews to “skunks”,  while calling whites “pathological,” “dirty,” “dastardly, devilish folks”, with other “nitwits.”

“This is graceful. These are very sick people,” Wiesenfeld said.