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Butch's beliefs

Jill Stein’s running mate celebrated violence against Israelis

Rudolph 'Butch' Ware, a deep-pocketed professor of history, endorsed violence and applauded Oct. 7 in music and social media

Mattie Neretin/Getty Images

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein speaks at a Pro-Palestinian protest in front of the White House on June 8, 2024 in Washington, D.C.

Rudolph “Butch” Ware, the running mate of Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein, in recent months celebrated violence against Israelis—including the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks on the Jewish state.

Ware, an associate professor of history from University of California, Santa Barbara, joined Stein’s ticket in mid-August — less than two weeks after Ware’s hip-hop duo, Slum Prophecy, dropped an album-length tribute to the Oct. 7 attacks.

Marketed until earlier this month on a Shopify account bearing the name Ink of the Scholars, a California limited liability company registered in Ware’s name, the 11-track digital release extols the bloody Hamas raid even in its name: Aqsa Flood, after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, as the terrorist group termed the surprise attack.

An archived version of the now-deleted page makes this connection explicit.

“Eight brand new tracks from Slum Prophecy plus three remixes. All focused on the global uprising sparked Palestinian resistance which named their most recent insurgency Operation al-Aqsa Flood,” the description reads.

The title track turns on an Eastern-flavored vocal refrain, with the lyrics “Flood, pouring through/Cleansing you/Wash away lies with truth/Set you free/Breaking loose/To fulfill a prophecy” — while the rapped bridge bars run “you know you hear it/The flood is nearing/To Bethlehem/We getting in/Righteous mayhem.” 

Other tracks involve similar fantasies or fetishization of violence. Besides “bodying cops” from “the rooftop,” the second track, “Kill Shot (Pick ‘em Off),” describes “Spitting like Iranian missiles/Crack the Iron Dome/Evacuate Israeli officials/Send ‘em flying home/The Fall of Rome” — months after an April attack in which Iran launched approximately 300 missiles and drones at Israel. 

Another song is titled “Intifada,” an Arabic term meaning “shaking off,” which in the Israeli-Palestinian context refers to the twin yearslong campaigns of protests and reprisals, the latter of which was notorious for suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians.

“Intifada/Hit ‘em harder/Rising up for land and honor/Blood is thicker than the water/Life more sacred than the Kaaba/Karma for the pain and trauma/Sizing up the devils’ armor/Rifles in the sniper tower/Fighting to the final hour,” the lyrics go.

As with other popular music genres, the adoption of fictional perspectives and personae is common in hip-hop. The vice presidential contender produces and emcees under the pseudonym B-Ware. 

But Ware, a Muslim convert with a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, has also voiced support for terrorism on his personal social media accounts.

“Oppressed people don’t have a RIGHT to resist occupation, we have a RESPONSIBILITY to resist,” he wrote on X.com, formerly Twitter, on Oct. 11, adding: “I’ve never in life condemned armed anticolonial resistance, and I’ve been doing this since the 80s.”

In June, he shared a post on Instagram calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and denouncing the Jewish state as “a fake colony that never should have existed & will hopefully cease to exist very soon.” Ware generally avoids writing out the word “Israel” on social media, instead referring to it as “the Zionist entity,” the preferred term of actors like Hamas and Iran that refuse to recognize the country as a nation-state.

Ware has also repeatedly denied the incidents of sexual violence Palestinians committed against Israeli women on Oct. 7, despite the evidence compiled by multiple media outlets and the United Nations — even comparing them to the baseless claims that led to the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. 

On Oct. 7, 2023 itself, Ware posted no acknowledgments of the victims of the attack, who included not just hundreds of Jews murdered, injured or taken prisoner, but also numerous Arab Israelis and Thai and Nepalese kibbutz workers. Instead, Ware simply shared a black-and-white image on Facebook and Instagram reading “From the river to the sea, Palestine will soon be free.”

“Oppressors, whatever ‘faith’ they may claim, are doomed in this life and in the next,” he wrote in the caption.

The following day, he shared a clip of a decades-old interview with late Palestinian writer and politician Ghassan Kanafani, in which Kanafani explicitly rejected the suggestion of conducting peace talks with the Israelis. 

“May God accept him as a martyr,” Ware wrote in the caption.

Kanafani served as spokesman and platform author for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an internationally recognized terrorist group that participated in the Oct. 7 attacks. During Kanafani’s tenure, the outfit masterminded the 1972 Lod Airport massacre, in which gunmen killed eight Israelis and 17 Puerto Rican Christians on a religious pilgrimage.

The official PFLP organ that Kanafani ran heralded the slaughter as a triumph, but it led directly to his assassination in Beirut by Israeli security forces weeks afterward.

The same clip of Kanafani rejecting dialogue and negotiation plays on the Slum Prophecy track “Intifada.”

Such rhetoric contrasts with the pacifist tone struck by the Stein campaign. In a statement released on the one-year anniversary of the Hamas-led attack, the three-time White House contender, Jewish herself, hewed to a line common in left-wing circles. She denounced the brutality of the assault while asserting that Israeli policies toward the West Bank and Gaza Strip had fomented it — and decried the devastation that the subsequent Israeli campaign to defeat  Hamas and other terrorist groups has since caused.

“While we abhor violence, we must understand that settler colonialism, occupation, genocide, and all forms of oppression have always provoked resistance,” the statement read. “The events of October 7th, 2023 have been weaponized to justify the genocide of Palestinians.”

The radicalism of Ware’s stances, and even the name “Slum Prophecy,” also contrasts with the life he’s chosen to live. Far from surviving in a slum, he resides in a five-bedroom, four-bathroom home in Goleta, Calif. that real estate listing pages show he put on the market earlier this month for an asking price of $1,777,000. 

Goleta sits adjacent to UC Santa Barbara, and boasts a median income of $113,889. However, Ware’s earnings are far higher than that. The database Transparent California reveals his pay and benefits package for 2023 came to $229,214 — and he appears to earn substantial outside income in addition to his salary, since the Internal Revenue Service’s Small Business/Self-Employed Division filed a $111,400.81 tax lien against him in April of this year. 

This is one of two tax warrants currently outstanding against Ware. Santa Barbara County records show the California State Franchise Tax Board lodged a $34,767.45 lien against him in 2023. 

And while campaigning for vice president, Ware has also actively been working to create an “anti Zionist media” network co-founded with a personality from MintPress News, a blog known for its mysterious funding and aggressive promotion of Russian propaganda, disinformation defending Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and antisemitic conspiracy theories involving billionaire George Soros.

The Stein campaign did not answer questions about its vetting process, or about whether it was aware of Ware’s musical and social media output. Ware himself did not respond to repeated requests for comment, although Jewish Insider received multiple insulting messages from anonymous email accounts regarding queries sent to the professor.

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