The New Jersey terror attack
The shooting attack on the kosher grocery store in New Jersey in which three Jews were murdered after a police officer was gunned down was a terrorist atrocity directed at Jews. New Jersey officials have confirmed that Jews were the target of the shooters who specifically selected the kosher store for attack.
The incident began at a cemetery where a police officer was shot dead by two people, subsequently identified as 47-year-old David Anderson and 50-year-old Francine Graham, whom the officer had recognised as connected to a murder. Surveillance footage shows these two then deliberately drove a van to the kosher store, which they entered firing their guns before being themselves shot dead by police. Investigators later found 300 rounds of ammunition and three pipe bombs in the van.
Yet what happened immediately afterwards added another sickening level to this atrocity. A representative of Americans against Antisemitism captured on video local residents blaming the Jews for the shooting and calling on them to get out of the neighbourhood. You can watch this on his tweet here.
The residents spewing this hatred at Jews were black. After the shooting, investigators found an antisemitic and anti-police manifesto published online by Anderson. According to NBC New York, he was a “one-time follower of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement”, a virulently antisemitic group.
In Brooklyn, there have been repeated violent attacks on orthodox Jews mainly by black or Latino perpetrators. Yet mainstream media reporting of these has been patchy at best. And even the reporting of the New Jersey murders has been relatively muted. If such an attack had been perpetrated by white supremacists, there would have been wall-to-wall coverage and outrage. Yet when the perpetrators are from an ethnic minority, there’s low-key coverage and virtually no outrage at all.
Indeed, Rashida Tlaib, one of the “squad” of ethnic minority congresswomen who have became infamous for anti-Israel or anti-Jewish remarks, actually tweeted after the New Jersey attack: “This is heartbreaking. White supremacy kills” before deleting the tweet, doubtless when she realised the attackers were in fact black. It would appear this fact transformed her heartbreak into indifference.
Antisemitism is currently rampaging out of control in the west. As I write, most British Jews are awaiting the result of today’s general election in a state of unprecedented dread and anxiety lest Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, which has become institutionally anti-Jew, comes to power.
Many Americans view with horror the antisemitism that is now epidemic on the British left as if their own country is somehow immune. But the refusal by the Democrats to address anti-Jewish bigotry on their own side from Louis Farrakhan to the “squad”, and their similar refusal even to acknowledge the significant problem of Jew-hatred within the black community while instead noisily blaming antisemitism on the far-right, has unquestionably emboldened anti-Jewish hatred in America – just as the Labour party’s denial of its own descent into anti-Jewish depravity has emboldened it in Britain.
