Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff is putting incumbent Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) on blast over the Republican’s Facebook campaign ad featuring a manipulated image of Ossoff, who is Jewish, that had been edited to enlarge his nose.
“So now Perdue refuses to take responsibility for his extremely obvious anti-Semitic attack, seen by thousands,” Ossoff tweeted on Tuesday afternoon after the Perdue campaign removed the ad and claimed that the alteration was an accident.
The Democratic candidate called on Perdue to “donate the money he raised using a doctored image of my face to a nonpartisan group that promotes tolerance, peace, and reconciliation.”
On Monday, Ossoff slammed the ad, which was first reported by the Forward earlier that day, via Twitter for using “the oldest, most obvious, least original anti-Semitic trope in history.”
“Senator, literally no one believes your excuses,” he tweeted.
The ad used a Reuters photo of Ossoff with a nose that had been artificially magnified. He appears next to an unedited image of Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is also Jewish, with text that warned “Democrats are trying to buy Georgia!”
John Burke, the Perdue campaign’s communications director, told TPM via email that the senator was unaware of the ad’s content.
“I want to make it abundantly clear that Senator Perdue did not see this ad before it was put out,” Burke said.
The campaign added in a statement that the photo of Ossoff had been “resized and a filter was applied, which appears to have caused an unintentional error that distorted the image.”
