The head of a conservative media group asserts that leftists attempted to get him killed in a “swatting” incident for spotlighting radical anti-Semitic activists.
A SWAT unit from an unidentified North Florida sheriff’s office showed up at the home of Adam Guillette, president of the conservative nonprofit group Accuracy in Media, after he dispatched trucks featuring digital billboards that posted the names and faces of the pro-Hamas activists at Ivy League campuses.
Guillette told the New York Post in late October that the SWAT raid was an effort “to get me killed” in response to his own activism to expose supporters of Hamas at Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.
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The SWAT incident traces back to mid-October, just days after the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel murdered more than 1,200 Jews and more than 30 Americans.
At Harvard, as CNN reported, a coalition of left-wing groups called the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups issued a statement that said it held Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” in the region.
In response, Guillette traveled to Harvard and sponsored a truck featuring a digital billboard that posted the names and faces of the pro-Hamas activists who signed the statement blaming Israel.
The truck also posted a banner that declared the signers “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites,” and provided a website dubbed HarvardHatesJews.com, where visitors were encouraged to send a message to the university.
Predictably, liberals were more upset with Guillette than with Hamas or its fans. Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, a radical leftist, told CNN that Guillette had “put targets on their backs,” and added, “We shouldn’t repeat the McCarthy era’s excesses in the interest of moral clarity.”
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Yet after Guilette used the trucks at Columbia and Penn, it seems pro-Hamas provocateurs were the ones putting a target on his back.
According to the Post, and the Daily Mail, which also covered the SWAT raid, heavily armed sheriff’s deputies approached Guilette’s home around 1:30 a.m. on Oct. 27. Guilette asked the Post not to reveal which Florida county he lives in.
Deputies had received a call falsely claiming that Guillette was inside the home and holding a gun to his wife’s head. Guillette was actually with his wife in Texas to attend a wedding.
According to the news reports, heavily armed deputies approached the door and knocked and when no one responded, entered by using a security code on the front door. They eventually exited moments later without incident. In all, six deputies searched Guillette’s property.
Guillette was a victim of what’s become known as “swatting.”
The Anti-Defamation League says on its website that swatting is a “deliberate and malicious act of reporting a false crime or emergency to evoke an aggressive response (often a SWAT team) from a law enforcement agency to a target’s residence or place of work to harass and intimidate them.”
Or perhaps to kill them, depending on the reaction to the SWAT unit entering the residence.
The ADL notes that in 2017 an online dispute between gamers over a “Call of Duty” game ended in tragedy when Wichita, Kansas, police went to the home of a man they believed had killed his father and was holding the rest of his family hostage.
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Police apparently had been given the address where one of the gamers had previously lived, and when the current resident, who was not involved in the “Call of Duty” incident, opened the door, police fired and killed him.
“Swatting wastes resources and puts people in danger. These hoaxes take first responders away from actual emergencies, potentially endangering the safety of others,” the ADL adds.
As for the incident at his home, Guillette told the Post, “I’ve been getting threatening phone calls, emails, social media messages nonstop since our antisemitism accountability project began. If you antagonize enough antisemites, they will call law enforcement and tell them you have a gun to your wife’s head. Then a SWAT team shows up. Thankfully, we’re out of town.”
It’s unclear what, if anything, happened to those behind the swatting attempt.
Guillette told the Post his lawyers would look into tracing the call to deputies.
He added that he was “not going to be intimidated or bullied, and this is a great reminder of why we need to double down on our efforts.”
On AIM’s website, the group notes, “It is time for elite universities to be held accountable for allowing antisemitism to run unchecked throughout their campuses.”
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