The recent increase in anti-Semitic attacks in cities and suburbs in New York and New Jersey perplex the left because it’s hard for them to place in the correct category. Hard, but certainly not impossible – where there’s a will there’s a way:
In American society there is generally only place for one kind of racism. There are far-right white supremacists and everyone else. This Manichean worldview of antisemitism and racism means we are only comfortable with one type of perpetrator. An angry white man…
In the wake of all the attacks in New York against Jews, culminating in the shooting attack at the kosher market, it became difficult to ignore the rising tide. But there is discomfort in looking at the depth of the perpetrators. The comfort society has with expecting perpetrators to be “far-right” and “white” even led Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib to blame “white supremacy” for the Jersey City attack. Her tweet was deleted. When it wasn’t white supremacy and there was no one to condemn, it didn’t fit the narrative and was less important.
But the hatred of Jews and almost daily attacks in New York City and surrounding areas doesn’t come from thin air. It is motivated by a very clear ideology that has been appeased and tolerated in the name of tolerance of hatred. Almost every day in Brooklyn Jews are attacked. When this happened in the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire it was called a pogrom…
Hatred of Jews spans the white supremacist far right and the black supremacist far right and milieus in between. The difference is that society condemns and confronts comments by the white supremacists…When dealing with the wider world of antisemitism in the US, that crosses racial lines, it is more difficult to confront. In the US, since it is difficult to accept that minorities might also be racist, the elephant in the room of black antisemitism is not mentioned. Too often, African American officials make openly antisemitic statements without fear of reaction. A school board member attacked “brutes of the Jewish community” after the Jersey City attack.
And so of course when black and/or Hispanic people attack people who are visibly Jewish (who tend to wear identifying garments), it is Trump’s fault. Of course it is:
The Washington Post on Sunday cited Trump’s critics in its report on the stabbings:
“Some House Democrats singled out the president for criticism, arguing that he has been insufficiently clear in denouncing anti-Semitism and has frequently perpetuated offensive stereotypes about Jewish people”…
The article named one Democrat who blamed Trump directly: Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), another frequent critic of Trump, shared a tweet by a New York-based comedian who argued that the Monsey attack followed “3 years of anti-semitism from the Trump Administration.”…
Washington Post correspondent and reporter for other leftwing media Mairav Zonszein said she held the White House “directly responsible” for the rise of antisemitism:
Here is one of the comments I saw at the WaPo:
So the left blames a pro Jewish zionist for attacks by democrat minorities on Jewish Republican supporters,too funny. Maybe the orthodox are being targeted for voting 90% for Trump in 2016.
You better believe that if these latest attacks had actually been committed by white supremacists – or even just white people – we’d be hearing (and seeing) a great deal about that. But because there are a great many black or Hispanic perpetrators involved, that isn’t such a big part of the story when it’s the MSM on the left doing the reporting.
Case in point: CNN manages to list a whole bunch of these recent crimes without mentioning the race of the perpetrators except one time (and that involved one of the more minor incidents, one of a threat that wasn’t carried out). If you want to see an example of differential coverage, look at how the left-leaning NY Daily News covers one of the perpetrators, Ayana Logan, versus how the right-leaning NY Post deals with the same story.
It’s no secret to people who study these things that for a long time the black community has had spokespeople who spread anti-Semitism:
The year 2018 has thus far been toxic for black-Jewish relations. In February, Women’s March co-president Tamika Mallory attended the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) annual “Saviours’ Day” gathering, where sect leader Louis Farrakhan delivered a characteristic anti-Semitic tirade. “When you want something in this world, the Jew holds the door,” Farrakhan declared. “White folks are going down, and Satan is going down, and Farrakhan by God’s grace has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew—and I’m here to say, your time is up.” For good measure, Farrakhan also claimed that Jews control the FBI as well as Mexico, and he repeated a relatively new conspiracy theory, the “Pot Plot,” alleging that Jews promote homosexuality among black men through the distribution of a special form of marijuana.
Farrakhan’s been spewing this sort of hatred for many decades.
And others have also purposely stirred up not just anti-Semitism but violence against Jews; now-elder “statesman” Al Sharpton comes to mind, and well as the Crown Heights riot that took place almost thirty years ago (no doubt that violence against Orthodox Jews was Trump’s fault, too):
The riots began on August 19, 1991, after two children of Guyanese immigrants were accidentally struck by one of the cars in the motorcade of Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of Chabad, a Jewish religious movement. One child died and the second was severely injured.
In the wake of the fatal accident, some black youths attacked several Jews on the street, seriously injuring several and fatally injuring an Orthodox Jewish student from Australia. Two weeks after the riot, a non-Jewish man was killed by a group of black men; some believed that the victim had been mistaken for a Jew.
For three days following the accident, numerous African Americans and Caribbean Americans of the neighborhood, joined by growing numbers of non-residents, rioted in Crown Heights. In the rioting of the ensuing three days, according to Edward Shapiro, many of the rioters “did not even live in Crown Heights.”…
During the riots, Jews were injured, stores were looted, and cars and homes were damaged. The rioters identified Jewish homes by the mezuzot affixed to the front doors.
An additional 350 police officers were added to the regular duty roster on August 20 and were assigned to Crown Heights in an attempt to quell the rioting. After episodes of rock- and bottle-throwing involving hundreds of blacks and Jews, and after groups of blacks marched through Crown Heights chanting “No Justice, No Peace!”, “Death to the Jews!”, and “Whose streets? Our streets!”, an additional 1,200 police officers were sent to confront rioters in Crown Heights.
On the third day of the disturbances, Al Sharpton and Sonny Carson led a march. The marchers proceeded through Crown Heights carrying antisemitic signs and burning an Israeli flag. Rioters threw bricks and bottles at police; shots were fired at police and police cars were pelted and overturned, including the Police Commissioner’s car.
More history from the 1990s:
In a 1992 essay for the New York Times, Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. described anti-Semitism among African Americans as “a weapon in the raging battle of who will speak for black America: those who have sought common cause with others, or those who preach a barricaded withdrawal into racial authenticity.” Anti-Semitism, in other words, is a tool used by political entrepreneurs in a continuation of the internecine fight for black authority. This fight initially pitted mainstream, philo-Semitic, consensus-seeking leaders such as Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin against radical, separatist, black-nationalist figures of varying ideological (and religious) stripes. While it may be accurate to blame individual opportunists or would-be leaders for these controversies, it is nonetheless a dispiriting commentary on the political potency of anti-Semitism within black communities that such tactics often work (just witness the career of Al Sharpton). Attitudinal surveys conducted by the ADL consistently show that African Americans harbor “anti-Semitic proclivities” at a rate significantly higher than the general population (23 percent and 14 percent respectively in 2016).
The recent attackers of Orthodox Jews have varied motives, some of which we don’t know. The Black Hebrew Israelites (neither Hebrew nor Israelites) who were named the perps in the Jersey City murders appear to be political actors, whereas some of the individual perpetrators may be mentally ill. But the atmosphere of hatred in which they’ve been immersed has been created by race-baiting opportunists whose meat-and-potatoes is Jew-hatred, and who encourage the resentments of class and race inherent in the situation. And Donald Trump is nowhere to be seen among them.
[NOTE: Read more here:
…[T]here is also a race element to these attacks against Jews that has made the racial-hierarchy-obsessed left struggle to address the problem with any teeth. The vast majority of hate crimes committed against Jews in New York City have been carried out by people of color, and early reports alleging the identity of the recent murderer reveal the current attack may be no exception. This pattern presents a true problem for the left. As my colleague David Marcus has written, “The notion that hatred is harbored by some in the black community towards Jews does not comport with their hierarchies of oppression.” And indeed, the left, in all its racial obsession, has picked favorites. And they didn’t choose the Jews.
Following De Blasio’s announcement a few days ago that he would be increasing police presence in Jewish areas, leftists rushed to Twitter, condemning the move, alleging that heightened security for Jews marginalized people of color. But this reaction reveals the precise poison of identity politics. There is a hierarchy of victimhood established within the Marxist framework of identity politics, and according to the sheepish left, Jews do not rank high enough on the victimhood totem pole to deserve increased protections, when compared to other minorities.
Actually, Jews don’t rank at all on the victimhood totem pole of the left, unless the perpetrators are white supremacists. Otherwise, Jews are the opressors.
Also, de Blasio gets into the act.]
