Daniel Greenfield: Identity Politics and American Anti-Semitism

When Robert Bowers walked through the door of the Tree of Life synagogue with murder on his mind, he was propelled by identity politics. As a white supremacist, his brand of identity politics is more politically incorrect than the ones that led Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour of the Women’s March to support Louis Farrakhan, but it’s no more violent, racist or evil.

Before the massacre, the most recent high profile anti-Semitic attack had been carried out by a Muslim who was caught on video beating a Jewish man while shouting about, “Allah” and his hatred for Jews.

Another hate crime, also caught on video, was a violent assault with a baseball bat by a black man.

Such assaults are less devastating than the mass murder of eleven people, but also much more commonplace. They repeat from month to month and year to year. They make up much of the toll of anti-Semitic hate crimes so that they top the list of hate crime statistics every single year.

The Tree of Life massacre has been greeted with editorials mourning a “loss of innocence” by American Jews. Such editorials come from a bubble of privilege that is cut off from the way many Jews live.

In 1991, New York City’s first black mayor stood and watched while a violent mob whipped up, by among others, Al Sharpton, went on a violent anti-Semitic rampage in Crown Heights. The Crown Heights Pogrom, as it would become known, took three lives and terrorized a neighborhood.

Sharpton, the black supremacist linked to the anti-Semitic violence, went on to speak at the Democratic National Convention, host a show on MSNBC and become a regular visitor to the Obama White House.

The distance between Crown Heights and Squirrel Hill is more than mere geography, it’s social and cultural. Anti-Semitic violence by black supremacists and Muslim terrorists tends to happen in poorer, urban neighborhoods and is directed against a poorer and more religious class of Jews. White supremacist attacks tend to target more suburban, prosperous and less diverse Jewish areas.

Those are home to the same Jewish populations who are much more likely to write editorials about a loss of innocence. But innocence is a privilege that Jews in poorer urban neighborhoods never had.

> Read the rest of this great essay at “Sultan Knish”

“Who is the perpetrator, who is the victim?” German public TV “reporting” on the anti-Semitic Har Nof massacre – an example of the “balanced” German approach to the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”

Blessed be your quality weapons, the wheels of your cars, your axes and kitchen knives. By Allah, these are stronger than the arsenals of our enemy, because [they are being used] according to Allah’s will. We are the soldiers of Allah. – Sultan Abu Al-Einein, Senior Advisor of Mahmoud Abbas and Member of the Fatah Central Committee, one day after the massacre

How beautiful is your Martyrdom. / You have placed a crown [upon my head] / … / O Ghassan and Uday, / who carried out the operation / blessed be your hands and the tips of your fingers. / Blessed be the womb that bore you /… / Yesterday [I gave] the most beautiful gift. / The Martyrs’ blood was not spilled in vain. / I am a Palestinian. – Mother of Uday Abu Jamal

That – in stark contrast to the Jews or even any other people for that matter – the Germans have learned a lot from the Holocaust has long been perfectly clear. So far, they have already played a leading role in preventing a “new Auschwitz” in Kosovo, Serbia, coincidentally defeating in the process once again their (former!) “arch-enemy”, the Serbs, and carving a second Albanian “state”, a Muslim one, out of sovereign Serbian territory, where now, after a series of anti-Serbian, anti-Christian pogroms, if not much else, you can at least make good money if you’re an Albanian Hitler look-alike. In fact, the Germans have learned so much so that in the evening after the horrific slaughter of five people (four Rabbis and a Druze policeman) and the wounding of 10 others in a synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood last November, an anchor of the major German public television station ZDF, Marietta Slomka, was able to stay perfectly “neutral” and – as they say in Italian – to “take things with philosophy” without letting even this story remind her and her public of anything.

The following is a commented unabridged translation of the entire introduction by Slomka and of the entire following “report” by a ZDF correspondent in Israel for the news program “Heute Journal”. Continue reading “Who is the perpetrator, who is the victim?” German public TV “reporting” on the anti-Semitic Har Nof massacre – an example of the “balanced” German approach to the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”