(Photo by Eliana Golding)

About 200 protesters with the Jewish activist group IfNotNow rallied in the lobby and outside of a Farragut Square office building this morning where the president-elect’s transition team has been meeting. The group demanded that Donald Trump fire former Breitbart News leader Steve Bannon as his chief strategist and renounce racism and Islamaphobia.

Shouting “Fire Bannon” and holding up signs that read “Jewish resistance”—both of which were also used as hashtags on social media—the group of protesters said they wouldn’t sit by silently in the face of white supremacy.

The KKK and neo-Nazis have heaped praised on Bannon’s appointment. “You have an individual, Mr. Bannon, who’s basically creating the ideological aspects of where we’re going,” former KKK leader David Duke told CNN. “It’s good to see that he’s sticking to the issues and the ideas that he proposed as a candidate. Now he’s president-elect and he’s sticking to it and he’s reaffirming those issues.”

A former spokesman for Breitbart recently told Washingtonian that Bannon’s White House appointment is terrifying. Nearly every House Democrat has signed a letter calling for Bannon’s firing.

IfNotNow describes itself as “a movement to end the American Jewish community’s support for the occupation and gain freedom and dignity for all Israelis and Palestinians,” and the group has been critical of many mainstream Jewish organizations’ silence on the issue of Bannon’s appointment. While the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement, several other groups have declined to speak out.

“It is unconscionable that any Jewish American organization would give the benefit of the doubt to a white supremacist movement,” said Jenna Bluestein, one of the protest’s organizers.

Shortly after the protest, IfNotNow said their website appeared to be the victim of a cyber attack.

Filed Under: election 2016, ifnotnow, president-elect trump, protest, steve bannon,