Let’s go over everything that’s wrong with progressive thinking among minority groups....A hateful black man stabs Jews, & there is an immediate focus on black Jews & white supremacy. White supremacists & black Jews were not involved here... #Monsey pic.twitter.com/99O8JAPa1c— Rocky KAG 🌐 (@IWiIlkaga) December 29, 2019
After Saturday night's stabbing, Monsey families are no longer thinking of sweet celebrations. Moms told me they plan to teach their kids self-defense tactics to use walking to the bus.
— Emma Green (@emmaogreen) December 29, 2019
This is what anti-Semitism is doing to American Jewish communities.https://t.co/7amduhp4iN
After the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Shabbat that killed 11 people last year, and another fatal shooting at a shul in Poway, California six months later, one often heard that the great threat to Jews – even the only threat – comes from white supremacy. Conventional wisdom said it was the political right, and the right’s avatar in the White House, that was to blame for the rising levels of hate against Jews.
But the majority of the perpetrators of the Brooklyn attacks, and the suspects in Jersey City — who were killed in a shootout with the police — and now Monsey, were not white, leaving many at a loss about how to explain it or even talk about it. There is little evidence that these attacks are ideologically motivated, at least in terms of the ideologies of hate we are most familiar with.
And therein lies the trouble with talking about the violent attacks against Orthodox Jews: At a time when ideology seems to rein supreme in the chattering and political classes, the return of pogroms to Jewish life on American soil transcends ideology. In the fight against anti-Semitism, you don’t get to easily blame your traditional enemies — which, in the age of Trump, is a non-starter for most people.
Of course, the rise in anti-Semitism is not incidental to the times we live in. While the Brooklyn attackers are, at least according to demographic trends, extremely unlikely to be Trump supporters, our president, who has a penchant for anti-Semitic tropes, is a conspiracy theorist, and anti-Semitism often manifests as a conspiracy theory about secretive Jewish power.
But conspiracy theories flourish on the left as well in today’s day and age. They twist and torque those rigid ideologies to which so many are enslaved, reshaping the extremes from polar opposites into a horseshoe whose ends meet — again and again — to justify, excuse, or muzzle criticism of anti-Semitism.
It has resulted in a staggering, shameful silence when it comes to speaking out on behalf of the wave of pogroms against the Orthodox. For many people, it seems when they can’t blame the other side of the political aisle, they would rather say nothing at all.
This is not acceptable. The Jewish community’s most visible, vulnerable members need Americans to stand up and say “no more.” They need us to climb out of our trenches and find common ground to fight this ugly resurgence of anti-Jewish hatred.
We can only fight this fight together, because it is a pox on all of our houses. It is only by remembering what unites us as Americans that we can help our fellow Jews and, as “Maoz Tzur” suggests, hasten the time of salvation.
I first wrote about the uptick [of anti-Semitic attacks] in May. The reason the city’s liberal political class was ignoring it, I argued, is that the criminals don’t fit their picture of Evil Bigots. They aren’t, for the most part, MAGA-hat wearing white guys with tiki torches. In fact, many of the attackers are people of color, as investigative reporting by Tablet’s Armin Rosen and others has shown.
Imagine if they were white nationalists. How much faster would the mayor and other city leaders have taken action?
“A lot of folks were told it was unacceptable to be anti-Semitic,” de Blasio said in May. “It was unacceptable to be racist, and now they’re getting more permission.” The message was subtle but unmistakable: De Blasio was trying to pin the attacks in bright-blue New York on President Trump.
Hizzoner didn’t surrender the fantasy for some time. In June, he said: “I want to be very, very clear, the violent threat, the threat that is ideological, is very much from the right.”
He left unclear how the Big Apple had come to be populated by ideological far-right types beating up on Jews. His comments underscored his inability to truly counter the type of street-level anti-Semitism spreading through the city.
Will he face the facts now? Or will Jews need to actually die, not just be pummeled, for our leaders to grasp the threat?
“Anti-Semitism is an attack on the values of our city — and we will confront it head-on,”
De Blasio tweeted after this latest round of violence against Jews. He has to stop beating around the bush. These attacks aren’t an attack on “our values.” They’re attacks on visibly Jewish people.
De Blasio needs to stop trying to find a “them” to be the opposite of his “us.” His juvenile obsession with having the right adversaries allows anti-Semitism to flourish.
I used to write about Europeans and their apathetic attitudes toward the Jew-hatred around them. Synagogues torched, Jews beaten — just another day on the Continent.
But now the demon is here, in America. Worse, it’s stalking Jews with increasing regularity in New York City, my city, home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel. Hizzoner’s vague universalist rhetoric obscures this raw reality.
And it isn’t just his ideological blinders. The mayor has also helped create an anti-police atmosphere, in which the vigilant presence of officers is considered a bad thing. At an anti-police rally last month, there were signs calling for violence against the NYPD.
De Blasio’s response? He insinuated that the idea that there’s anti-police sentiment in our city is, yes, another right-wing plot.
In 2020 I don’t want to read another column like this one...
That Jews cannot walk the streets of New York City without the fear of being attacked is outrageous.
— American Jewish Committee (@AJCGlobal) December 27, 2019
We need to wake the world up to rising antisemitism.
Please watch and share this video. pic.twitter.com/nYOVWvcJyr
I often relay stories of being stopped from eating off nonkosher menus in NYC by non-Jewish workers (say, in Dunkin Donuts, which has a kosher and nonkosher list of products). Being visibly Jewish in NYC meant something very special, very warm, very home.
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) December 27, 2019
Now it means fear.
The attacks are against those clearly wearing Jewish attire, so most Jews don’t see anything different about their daily commute, while their Orthodox neighbor has to go incognito for fear of being thrown in front of a train.
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) August 29, 2019
Leave you with this: Everybody knows. Everybody knows. Everyone. No one gets a pass: https://t.co/jNUzUxTNA6
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) August 29, 2019
The radicalization of an alleged domestic terrorist https://t.co/R5pSbDGyLk pic.twitter.com/n1XRCWbPl6
— CNN (@CNN) October 30, 2018
They don't realize their lies will motivate their opponents. My new @townhallcom column does.🛳🤷🏼♂️🐿🇺🇸— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) October 29, 2018
Democrats Blaming Normal Americans for Nuts Will Blow Up In Their Faces at the Ballot Box https://t.co/2OnPQSKTfO
You know, there's nothing that Normal Americans can identify with more than a guy living in a Ford panel van covered with Trump memes and soccer manifestoes who sends bombs that don't work to Democrats who support policies that don't work. Likewise, Normal people totally identify with – let me get the liberal narrative du jour right here – a Trump-hating freak who shoots up a synagogue. And I think it’s a terrific midterm strategy for our Democrat friends is to keep making that idiotic case. (extreme sarcasm for the benefit of the willfully obtuse)More.
The Official Media is in a frenzy explaining how Donald Trump personally instructed Kooky Weirdo de Florida to mail pipe bombs to washed up Dem hacks and that nameless garbage being in Pittsburgh via a series of cunningly encrypted dog whistles. “Make America Great Again” is apparently code for “Mail bombs!” Nothing says “Murder Jews” like moving the embassy to Jerusalem and ending the Iran deal.
Oddly, of 63 million Trump voters, only one jerk managed to decode this cipher. The other hated Trump for liking Jews too much. But, as CNNMSNBC’s brain trust and such thinkers as rock legend Joe Scarborough teach us, their crimes are on all of us anyway for some reason.
We’re all to blame for one kook’s real terrorism because…well, he thought Trump was part of the giant Zionist conspiracy to make him a friendless loser, so it’s not clear why. Maybe it being a useful lie is reason enough.
We’re also to blame for the other idiot’s pantomime terrorism pursuant to the dippy moral calculus proposed by the same peeps who spent eight years slobbering over the protege of Bill Freaking Ayers. Ayers, as you would never know from watching our media, was a leader in an actual campaign of political bombings that actually maimed and killed actual people. So, when libs feigned shock at those raising the possibility that leftists might be responsible for doing something leftists had a history of doing (as well as a history of faking hate crimes where they were the victims) at a politically convenient time, the faux outrage rang hollow.
And how faux the outrage was - and so very selective too. Leftists demand you ignore the near-miss massacres at the Family Research Council and the baseball field by committed leftists who were not any crazier than their political allies, only more proactive. The message is that you Normal Americans are complicit for voting for a guy who doesn’t hate your guts.
I think that on November 6th, the Democrats are going to get a message back from the people they are shamelessly lying about.
Normal voters are not going to look at this blood libel and say, “Yeah, I feel personally responsible for the actions of that Elizabeth Warren-channeling fake Indian stripper guy with a kilometer-long rap sheet who totally would not have done anything nutty if it weren't for Trump. And also for the crimes of a scuzzy coward who hates Trump. I guess I have a moral obligation vote for people who will ruin this surging economy, restore America to its rightful place as a laughingstock on the world stage, and attack my rights of free speech, free exercise of religion, and to keep and bear arms to protect myself from exactly these kind of aspiring Stalins. Because that idea makes sense. I'm convinced.”
I think Normal people are going to be furious at these lies...
Perspective: How much responsibility does Trump bear for the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh? https://t.co/na05EDgw6b— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 29, 2018
This might be one of the most ridiculous things ever said on @CNN.@GQMagazine's @juliaioffe just claimed @realDonaldTrump has "radicalized so more people than ISIS ever did."
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) October 29, 2018
Sheer lunacy.
And oh by the way, no push-back from @jaketapper. pic.twitter.com/suFC2WKHya
.@jaketapper gives @juliaioffe time to clean up her comments near the end of the #TheLead. Ioffe says her rhetoric "was not factual." pic.twitter.com/X9Gwqx4ysQ
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) October 29, 2018
Me on America, Jews, and anti-Semitism: https://t.co/ZAmYuHu7v4
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) October 29, 2018
Today's cover: Victims of deadly Pittsburgh synagogue shooting identified https://t.co/EZlQoiKN0p pic.twitter.com/QK18Ivp8A5
— New York Post (@nypost) October 29, 2018
On this day of all days it needs to be said: America has been a blessing for the Jewish people unlike any other blessing given any other people in the history of the world.RTWT.
One crime — or 29 separate crimes, committed at the same time by a monster in human form — cannot be allowed to overshadow this extraordinary fact.
My own gratitude to America is actually greater today than it was yesterday because of the outpouring of grief and rage and common humanity we have witnessed in the response to the horror in Pittsburgh.
The philo-Semitic response to this unspeakable act of anti-Semitism reveals how American Jews are anchored in America in a way that Jews who live anywhere else outside of Israel are not anchored to the lands in which they reside or have ever resided.
We are Americans. And we are Jews. And there is no contradiction between the two. When people talk freely and foolishly and noxiously about America as having been built on racism, there is one simple answer to their libel: George Washington’s letter to a synagogue in Newport, written in August 1790.
“The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” Washington wrote. “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
That final phrase, taken from the prophet Micah, was violated in the most obscene way on Saturday. But the story of America is a story of a country that has indeed served as vine and fig tree for the world’s most beleaguered peoples.
America has allowed us to sit in safety. America has allowed us to flourish due to its “enlarged and liberal policy” that assumes all human beings have inalienable rights.
From the time of the Jewish expulsion from the Holy Land in the first century after the death of Christ, Jews lived all over the world, but none of those places constituted a home. Even when we were treated relatively well, we were other. We were apart.
Because nothing is unmixed, because good can come out of bad, it has to be said that this forced separation is one of the reasons the Jewish people survived when thousands of ancient Middle Eastern tribes died out.
We believed what the Bible told us — that we had a special role, a special mission, a special place in the destiny of humankind. And that kept us alive.
America took us in, by the many millions, and the founding doctrine to which George Washington alluded in his letter made this country something vastly greater than just another dot on the millennia-old map of the diaspora.
The only true threat to the Jewish people from the American experiment comes not from hate but from love. The problem for American Jews, the late Irving Kristol used to say, isn’t that they want to kill us, but that they want to marry us. Our difficulty is maintaining the separateness necessary to the continuation of the Jews as a people — because America has so taken us to its bosom.
This is a tragically low moment, a day when the words we speak on Passover really came home: “In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us.” But this time it was not “they” who “rose up against us to destroy us.” And that makes all the difference.
It was not the Nazi regime. It was not the Spanish Inquisition. It was not Crusaders. It was not Russian or Polish soldiers. It was not an organized effort to extirpate.
It was the work of a lone villain poisoned by the ancient temptation that has guided the hands of Jew-haters from the days of Amalek — the temptation to believe that whatever ails you can be cured by the extirpation of Jews. Any Jews. All Jews...
President Trump didn’t cause the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue. Nor did conspiracy theories or MAGA rallies cause a madman to mail bombs to congressmen. No, the root of these things is social collapse, and yet folks still want to blame everyone else rather than looking within.Click through and read the whole thing. (There was an awful lot of leftist nastiness yesterday, and of course on Friday, but even by our regular standards things this week have been especially bad.).
Oh, there’s plenty of finger-pointing to go around. Take, for example, what happened when Rep. Steve Scalise, a shooting survivor himself, expressed his sadness at the carnage in Pittsburgh...
How are Americans ever going to 'come together' if the first thing a political party sees when it sees dead Americans is a partisan cudgel? https://t.co/tOIWmv2Boe— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) October 28, 2018
It was ironic to see many of the same liberals, who recently fought to prop up the world’s most powerful Jew-hating terror state, lecturing us on the importance of combating anti-Semitism. But there they were yesterday.Keep reading.
The same Voxers who had long rationalized, romanticized, and excused the Jew-killing terror organization of the Middle East were now blaming the existence of the evil, anti-Semitic Pittsburgh shooter on Republicans. The same Pod bros whose echo chamber deployed anti-Semitic dual-loyalty tropes to smear critics of the Iran deal were now incredibly concerned about the Jewish community.
There were many others, and that was bad enough. But others decided to dip into a little victim blaming, as well. Hadn’t American Jews been little too Jew-centric and pro-Israel for their own good?
Franklin Foer of The Atlantic demanded that Jews finally dispense with their faith, adopt his, and start expelling co-religionists for their political opinions. (If you want to read about the left’s co-opting of American Judaism, I recommend Jonathan Neumann’s excellent book, “To Heal The World?”) Wire creator David Simon went bold, embracing a transparent anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, accusing the Israeli government of intervening in the American democracy.
For those who confuse progressivism with Judaism — which is to say many — it might be difficult to understand that undermining the Democratic Party isn’t an act of anti-Semitism. The Trump administration, in fact, has been the most pro-Jewish in memory.
Every Jew who’s ever prayed understands the importance of Jerusalem in our faith, culture, and history. It was President Trump, not any of the other presidents who promised the same, who recognized Jerusalem as the undisputed Jewish capital, putting an end to the fiction that it’s a shared city.
It was Trump who withdrew from the Iran deal and once again isolated the single most dangerous threat to Jewish lives in the world, the Holocaust-denying theocrats of the Islamic Republic.
It was Trump who cut more than $200 million in aid to a Palestinian government that was not only inciting terrorists (including the murder of a Jewish-American citizen named Ari Fuld; but since he never wrote for The Washington Post, you might not have heard of him) but also rewarded the killers’ families.
It was his administration that kicked the Palestine Liberation Organization, the most successful Jewish-civilian murdering organization of the past 60 years, out of DC. It was the Trump administration that cut funding to the anti-Semitic U.N. Relief and Works Agency. It was also the Trump administration that turned around the unique Obama-era legacy of standing against Israel at the United Nations. And it is his administration that cracked down on anti-Semitism on college campuses and that deported one of the last real-life Nazis.
At the same time, the liberal activist resistance wing is being led by a couple of Louis Farrakhan fangirls, and most Jewish Democrats are scared to death to say a single word in protest. But that’s another story...
Dear Britons: For the love of all that is good and just, please don't elect Jeremy Corbyn--the Hamas-hugging lunatic from the People's Republic of Islington--to No. 10 Downing Street. https://t.co/KRhvs7j2dT
— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) August 14, 2018
