Anti-semitism and New York

Submitted by David on Wed, 2019-12-11 14:26

Feeling reminded of the following quote from the New York Times article Is It Safe to Be Jewish in New York?:

If anti-Semitism bypasses consideration as a serious problem in New York, it is to some extent because it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy. During the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group, Mark Molinari, commanding officer of the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, told me.

Wonder if that latter claim is still the case after the most recent mass shooting targeting a Kosher deli in that vicinity. Was seeing various tweets like this in the parts of Twitter that I see which seem to hint at this being Trump-inspired. Who committed this latest attack though? Seems to have been someone affiliated with the Black Hebrew Israelites. If that name rings a bell here's where I suspect you last heard of them:

In January, a video of a confrontation involving students from Covington Catholic High School in northern Kentucky at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington went viral, appearing to show the students yelling at a Native American activist.

The students later said they had been responding to a group of Hebrew Israelites, and further video footage showed the group had begun screaming invective at them and the activist.

After the conflagration, some of the Hebrew Israelites involved described it as a win, for elevating the fringe group to the national stage.

Wonder how much new coverage of this will highlight any of the complexity there, and the relative risk of being the victim of a hate crime. Going back to that first New York Times article:

Contrary to what are surely the prevailing assumptions, anti-Semitic incidents have constituted half of all hate crimes in New York this year, according to the Police Department. To put that figure in context, there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews — 142 in all — as there have against blacks. Hate crimes against Jews have outnumbered hate crimes targeted at transgender people by a factor of 20.

The New York Times has previously noted that "many of the assailants arrested by the police have been young men of color", amongst them a Democratic volunteer "working on initiatives to combat hate crime, sexual assault and domestic violence" who was prominent enough to have been profiled in the New York Times.

The best conclusion to me is perhaps the following: