Suwanee candidate drops out after tweets about Jews

Joe Briggs says he’s anti-Israel but not anti-Semitic.

The Suwanee City Council candidate who drew ire last week for a series of inflammatory tweets about Jews and Israel has ended his candidacy, city officials confirmed Monday.

Joe Briggs, a 59-yearold engineer, will no longer challenge incumbent Suwanee Councilwoman Beth Hilscher in today’s election, city spokeswoman Abby Wilkerson said. Hilscher will be unchallenged for her Post 4 seat.

“The ballots are what they are, since early voting has already started,” Wilkerson said. “We will have signage [Tuesday] morning in front of City Hall, alerting voters to the change.

“Neither the community nor my family deserved this,” Briggs, who has said he’s anti-Israel but not anti-Semitic, wrote Monday in an email to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He clarified he was speaking about the backlash to his tweets.

“We need to be able to have frank discussions about delicate topics without fear of reprisal,” Briggs wrote in another email.

Last week, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an article about tweets written by Briggs over the last year-plus. They compared Jews to Nazis, refer to Zionists as “cockroaches” and called American slavery “cheap labor to big business.”

“Get the Jews out of the White House and out of POTUS’ ear,” Briggs wrote in a tweet from September that referenced the U.S. weighing a more “aggressive” approach in Iran.

The tweets, many of which had been deleted or placed behind a privacy wall, were obtained by the AJC after the wife of a current Suwanee city councilman posted about them online. Briggs confirmed them to be authentic.

But Briggs, who had campaigned on promises to stop what he dubbed Suwanee’s “over-development” problem, previously told the AJC that he was “not racist in the least.” He described himself as a critic of the Israeli government, not an anti-Semite.