Shortly after President Donald Trump formally recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Sebastian Gorka, Fox News national security strategist and former White House adviser, responded to critics of Trump’s move with a tweet that said “the left’s anti-Semitism veiled as anti-Israeli ‘policies’ is the real threat to peace.”

Yet while Gorka has referred to Israel as the “greatest nation made by the Lord,” an investigation by The Forward found that he had connections to far-right groups in Hungary, making political allies from a nationalist Hungarian party that published articles about “the roots of Jewish terrorism” on its official website, and writing for a paper known for anti-Semitic views. He also donned a medal of Nazi collaborator Adm. Miklós Horthy.

Gorka’s tweet is an example of how the far right uses the label of anti-Semitism to shut down criticism of Israel, all while hiding its own ties to actual anti-Semitic groups. And it is precisely these concerns that grassroots group Jewish Voice for Peace tried to raise at a panel in New York last week on the dangers of conflating anti-Semitism with critiques of Israel.

The panel had already drawn the ire of right-wing critics. The New York Post published an op-ed calling it an “Israel bash fest.” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, tweeted that having Linda Sarsour, a well-known Arab-American activist, and Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, lead a panel on anti-Semitism was “like Oscar Mayer leading a panel on vegetarianism.” Attempts were made to cancel the event, according to JVP, and when it eventually rolled around, approximately 30 protesters gathered outside, carrying posters that accused JVP of spewing “anti-Semitic, anti-Israel hatred.” The panel was twice interrupted, first by a group of attendees shouting unintelligible comments and then again by an individual loudly criticizing the panelists during the Q&A session.

In fact, the protests only reinforced the panel’s central concern: the rising tide of actual anti-Semitism and the redefining of any criticism of the state of Israel as anti-Jewish.

“Anti-Semitism in the United States is frighteningly and ever more visibly real,” Vilkomerson told the crowd at the event, which was co-hosted by JVP, Haymarket Books, Jacobin Magazine, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and the New School. But at the same time, Vilkomerson argued, “It’s profoundly dangerous, unethical, and inaccurate to characterize people in groups like JVP that support the full civil and human rights of Palestinians as not only anti-Semitic, but equivalent to Nazis. It minimizes the true fight against anti-Semitism we all desperately need to be waging, and it’s a blatant attempt to shut down a much-needed conversation about Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.”