Four people were murdered last Tuesday in a brutal anti-Semitic terrorist attack at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City. The shooters, who were gunned down by police, had planned to attack the yeshivah next door, where as many as 50 children were studying at the time. Officials say that the tragedy could have been the equivalent of the Sandy Hook massacre if it hadn’t been thwarted as soon as it was.
Despite the clear optics of the attack, Democrat politicians and the mainstream media were reticent to confirm it as a hate crime until days after the fact, and still, a week out, many have remained silent or shared only muted commentary on the incident.
Their silence on this attack – and their denial of the tide of anti-Semitism that the US has seen in recent months and years – is part of a pattern: The Left is invested in promoting a false narrative about the victimization of certain minority groups while denying the victimization of others. Simply put, intersectionalism means that attacks against Jews don’t matter and that the successes of minorities in Trump’s America don’t exist. They use this false narrative to pander to identity groups that they feel will keep them in power.
In a dramatic turnaround from declines that had lasted more than a decade, anti-Semitism in New York, across the US, and around the world is indisputably on the rise.
The Anti-Defamation League this year reported an abrupt 48% spike in anti-Semitic incidents nationwide since 2016, with the Orthodox, and others easily identified as Jewish, being the most commonly targeted. From 2015 to 2016, there was a 34% jump in anti-Semitic incidents, including assault, harassment, and vandalism, and from 2016 to 2017 the number increased by 57% – the largest single-year increase since the 1970s, when the ADL began measuring such data in the 1970s. Last year saw a slightly smaller increase in the rate of anti-Semitic incidents, but total attacks – particularly assaults – were still way up compared with previous years.
Not only is anti-Semitism on the rise, it’s also the most common type of religious discrimination in the US. Jewish Americans were this year, and in recent years, the religious group most targeted by religiously-motivated bias crimes, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Hate Crime Statistics Act report. Out of 7,120 overall hate crime incidents in 2018, 920 were motivated by perpetrators’ anti-Jewish bias. In addition, a record number of those crimes were violent crimes: 105, up from 73 in 2017.
Attacks against Jews are also increasingly violent. In April, a shooting at a San Diego synagogue left one worshiper dead and three others, including the rabbi, wounded. In October of 2018, a shooter murdered 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in the deadliest attack in US history.
New York, home to the US’s largest Jewish population, has been a hotbed of anti-Semitic incidents. Hate crimes against Jews this year were up 51% from the same period last year and included a string of assaults against Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn and a spike in anti-Semitic graffiti including swastikas and Jewish slurs.
Things are even worse in Europe – most notably in Paris, London, and Berlin – where men wearing kippos in public are beaten by gangs of Muslim thugs and a Holocaust survivor was thrown out of a window.
Despite all the evidence, both Leftist leaders and the mainstream media seem determined to suppress news of this alarming spike in anti-Semitism. Either they deny it completely, and act as if it hasn’t happened, or they pervert it to suit their purposes.
Democratic politicians like AOC and Ayanna Pressley, who take to twitter at the drop of a hat to lob spurious accusations of racism, sexism, and transphobia over nothing, were notably silent in the wake of this latest attack, making no mention of the victims in Jersey City and no condemnation of anti-Semitism. Fellow “Squad” member Rashida Tlaib was quick to blame white supremacists for the attack when it first happened, but deleted her post entirely when it was revealed that the killers were black. Not just black; in fact, they were members of the Black Hebrew Israelites, a virulent anti-Jewish extremist hate group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Mayor Bill de Blasio waited until Wednesday morning, at a press conference, to denounce the attack as an “act of terror.” Senator Corey Booker of New Jersey did not deem the mass-murder worthy of his time; he chose to continue on the campaign trail and was pictured the next day laughing in the cornfields in Iowa.
The New York Times relegated its coverage of the story to a small lower column on the paper’s front page, giving the headline to the Democrats’ years-long ongoing impeachment charade. But this is typical.
They, and other mainstream news outlets, also conspicuously failed to report the fact that the killers in Tuesday’s attack were members of the same hate group that had provoked January’s supposedly “racist” confrontation between a Catholic high-school student and a Native American protestor in Washington, D.C.,
by shouting anti-white and homophobic slurs at the boy. A clear and fair presentation of the facts of a mass murder was apparently was less important to the Times than upholding their already-disproven narrative about Maga-loving racist white teenagers.
On Monday, an Israeli Jewish woman was violently assaulted by a black woman on the subway, who screamed anti-Semitic slurs. Despite the fact that the whole incident was recorded on cell-phone video, which subsequently went viral, not a single mainstream news outlet has covered the attack. On the other hand, viral videos of non-violent verbal or even written insults against black or gay victims are regular, front-page news for mainstream outlets.
Editors of The New York Times have even announced their intention to suppress coverage of anti-Jewish hate crimes perpetrated by black assailants (which comprise the majority of anti-Semitic hate crimes in New York), because it doesn’t fit their desired narrative of dangerous white supremacists - or, at the very least, “toxic white privilege” - and oppressed African-American communities. The Times even unveiled an unprecedented reporting agenda, the ‘1619 Project,’ to highlight the ways in which modern US culture, economy, and race relations are a direct legacy of the impact of slavery.
But why? Why not cover the news that’s “fit to print,” rather than sweeping certain news under the rug (news about anti-Semitic hate crimes, regardless of who is perpetrating them) and cramming down what is essentially editorial content in the guise of fact (cooked-up and spurious accounts of racism against blacks, anti-trans hate crimes, and baseless charges of sexual assault by men against women)?
The answer is “intersectionalism.” The Left – and its wingman, the mainstream media – have realized that the only way to maintain their electoral appeal, and discredit the very obvious gains that Trump has brought majority and minority communities alike since his elections, is to promote a fallacy of “institutional racism” against black and brown people in the US. It’s the same vicious lie that Barak Obama used to race-bate after his 2008 election by a majority-white electorate. They claim that trans people are being murdered at an unprecedented rate, when in fact statistics compiled by left-leaning researchers themselves completely disprove that assertion, and instead prove that America is the safest and most supportive nation in world history for people of alternative lifestyles.
When the media and leftwing politicians hear of stories like the Jersey City anti-Semitic terrorist attack, their reaction is not one of empathy; it is instead one of strategy. They wonder not how can we bring the facts to the forefront, but instead, how do we maintain our narrative of intersectional oppression in the face of evidence that disproves it? A murder should be treated as a murder, whether its perpetrators were white nationalists or, in this case, members of another “oppressed” group. It is long past time for the Left to acknowledge that Jews are at great risk in this nation. Until they do, things will continue to get worse.
By Emily Cohen