Rev. Frederick D. Haynes III, the longtime pastor at the Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas who is running to replace Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) in her Dallas-area House seat, delivered an anti-Israel polemic from the pulpit on Oct. 8, 2023, the day after Hamas’ attack on Israel.
Haynes, a progressive Democrat who has never held elective office, is a prominent and well-connected pastor — serving briefly as the leader of the Rev. Jesse Jackson-founded Rainbow PUSH Coalition — and Crockett, who is running for Senate, has attended his church.
In a brief clip shared on his Facebook page from his Oct. 8 sermon, Haynes was dismissive of the notion that he would be pro-Israel in the wake of the attack. The sermon was first reported by the Washington Free Beacon.
Citing former President Jimmy Carter, Haynes declared that Israel was engaging in apartheid.
“The Palestinians, who don’t have the weaponry of Israel, the Palestinians don’t have the financial backing from the United States that Israel has, and so they throw their rocks and shoot their arrows, and Israel is able to bomb them and kill them,” Haynes said.
Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza had not begun as of Oct. 8, when Hamas militants were still present in several southern Israeli communities.
“Watch in the news a disparity between Palestinians being killed and Israelis being killed,” he continued. “It is totally unfair, but this country is going to stand on the side of apartheid because that’s its track record. It stood by apartheid in South Africa, because it created apartheid in this country.”
In January, 2024, he called on then-President Joe Biden to threaten to cut off U.S. support for Israel if Israel did not bring the war in Gaza to an end and has since described the war in Gaza as a genocide, funded by the United States.
He suggested in a podcast episode released in April 2025 that U.S. arms sales and aid to Israel are responsible for rising health-care costs in the United States, and described Israel’s founding as the “stealing of that land from the indigenous people.”
Haynes described Christian Zionism as a “warped, even wicked interpretation of scripture that is part of a political agenda of conquest and triumph and has nothing to do, for example, with Revelation.”
On the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack, Haynes was a keynote speaker at a Palestinian Youth Movement rally in Dallas, where he led chants of “We don’t intend on relinquishing our claims” and “We will not bow down to the U.S. war machine,” according to a far-left publication.
In a podcast episode released the next day, Haynes said that the “context of Oct. 7” is often “missing from the conversation,” pointing to the “decades upon decades of the atrocity of apartheid,” and called for an arms embargo on Israel and a “Marshall Plan … to rebuild Gaza, to rebuild Palestine for the indigenous people.”
Haynes was a leading member in January 2024 of a coalition of Black pastors who lobbied for a ceasefire in Gaza.
He claimed at that time in a CNN interview that he had sought “balance” in the immediate aftermath of the attack, to provide “comfort … to the victims’ families” as well as “to make sure that we not make the mistakes that were made in response to 9/11 in response to Oct. 7.”
Haynes called the Israeli response to Oct. 7 “horrifying to watch” and “disproportionate” while also saying that “it does not mean that you are erasing the memory of the horrors of what happened on Oct. 7.”
On his podcast, which he co-hosts with his daughter, Haynes has featured Linda Sarsour and Omar Suleiman to discuss the situation in Gaza, both of whom have extensive histories of stridently anti-Israel and at times antisemitic comments.
Haynes praised Sarsour as a paragon of “moral consistency” and justice, and applauded her characterization of the Anti-Defamation League as the “Apartheid Defense League.”
Haynes also posted a photo with the virulently antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in 2017, from a commencement ceremony for Farrakhan’s granddaughter at which Haynes was delivering a speech.
“His gracious and generous compliments touched my heart!” Haynes said. “A wonderful and great man!”
Haynes and Crockett’s campaigns did not respond to a request for comment.