Our society has become so incredibly politicized in recent years that perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when even a horrendous tragedy such as the anti-Semitic murders in Jersey City cannot pass without partisans trying to score points.
Many prominent Democrats and liberal pundits claim that white supremacists are to blame for all, or nearly all, Jew-hatred in America today. They then claim that President Trump has somehow “inspired” such extremists. The original “proof” of this claim was the wave of telephone bomb threats made against synagogues and JCCs in early 2017, shortly after Mr. Trump’s election. Later, of course, it turned out that threats were made by a mentally unstable Israeli teenager.
Yet many progressives and others on the far left have become so addicted to blaming all anti-Semitism on white supremacists that their knee-jerk reaction is to reach for that explanation, no matter the circumstances. As soon as the news broke about the Jersey City murders, Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, tweeted: “White supremacy kills.” After a reporter inquired, Tlaib quietly deleted the tweet. No apology. Just a quick and quiet revising of history, in the hope that nobody will notice her irresponsible behavior. But we at The Jewish Voice noticed.
All sources of anti-Semitism must be recognized and confronted, and let the political chips fall where they may. Of course there are anti-Semitic white supremacists out there. But in Jersey City, the Jew-killers were African-American extremists, not white supremacists. And security camera footage of many of the recent violent assaults on Jews in Brooklyn has shown that the attackers were not white. The December 15 arrest of Ahmed A-Hady may be an indication that this attack was connected to Islamic terrorism.
There is no easy answer to the problem of rising anti-Semitism. President Trump’s executive order to combat anti-Semitic incidents on college campus is a very welcome first step. We call on all Jewish Americans to commend President Trump for this important action, instead of just worrying about scoring political points for one party or the other. Shame on J Street for attacking the President over this executive order and kudos to the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt for recognizing this as the achievement that it is by stating that this gave “law enforcement and campus officials an important additional tool to help identify and fight this pernicious hate.”
We close with repeating what we published in our editorial earlier this month on the occasion of Moshe Holtzberg’s bar mitzvah: “Jewish unity and Jewish vigilance are a needed response. All responsible Jewish leaders must place these co-dependent items at the top of their agenda.”
