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Does Someone Have to Die?
I’ve been reaching a point where I dislike beating the drum about anti-Semitism. But the recent crimes in New York City and the denials that have accompanied them have convinced me that I can’t beat that drum enough. The media is reluctantly covering the story of the latest attacks on Jews in New York:
In Rockland County last night, during a Chanukah celebration at a synagogue a man stormed in with a machete and stabbed at least five victims, who were taken to the hospital. This is the latest in a string of antisemitic attacks in the New York City area, coming in the wake of the tragic killing of four people during an attack on a Jewish grocery store in Jersey City.
Several excuses have been given for the most recent attacks: Bill DeBlasio has blamed a white supremacist group; others have blamed the rhetoric of Donald Trump inciting people (which is absurd, given the fact that his daughter and son-in-law are Jewish). But it’s a good idea to look at some facts:
In 2018, almost half of all anti-Semitic assaults nationally occurred in New York. There, the New York Police Department’s hate-crime-unit data indicate a substantial increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes (a broader category than just assaults). The number jumped from 17 in 2017 to 33 in 2018, and is on pace to rise again in 2019, with 19 in the first half of the year.
These are also relevant facts:
Indeed, in 2017 and 2018, 37 blacks compared with 46 whites were arrested for anti-Jewish hate crimes, the majority of which were for property vandalism and harassment — statistics consistent with national data. The city, of course, has a history of such incidents, dating back to the riots in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights in the 1990s.
Now we’ve gotten to the crux of the matter: the Left doesn’t want to acknowledge that most of the crimes are being committed by blacks. In one podcast, the participants thought it was important to point out that the perpetrators were often black teenagers.
So what?
An additional problem might be the city’s approach to crime:
In an attempt to reduce arrests and incarceration, district attorneys in Brooklyn and the Bronx have been decriminalizing many crimes, and police have been more reluctant to make arrests. In light of the killing of Eric Garner, who was placed in a chokehold while being arrested for illegally selling loose cigarettes, a Manhattan source told a New York Post reporter in August that this ‘would never have happened today — because the city has told officers to back down on making such quality-of-life busts.’
Frankly, I’m sick of excuses. It’s time that Bill DeBlasio offers more than rhetoric and actually does something to address and mitigate these attacks.
Does a Jew need to die first?
Published in Culture
Zafar, this is a good point. Thanks.
My main point is that, given the low numbers of reported incidents, there is little reason for Jewish-Americans to feel particularly targeted. It is always possible to focus on a few terrible events, and suffer unnecessary anxiety as a result.
I’m not sure about this part. It may escalate, or it may not. Usually not, I think, though it would be hard to find empirical data on this. We don’t have any history of anti-Jewish pogroms in this country, so I find such escalation unlikely in the US.
I haven’t seen a decline like this in the US. Quite the contrary. Our history, generally speaking, has been one of improving relations between different racial, ethnic, and religious groups. It is quite possible that you are correct, as to different places.
I see your point about vigilance, but it brings another problem. “Equal protection” is an American ideal, though difficult to implement. The general idea is that everyone is treated the same, under our law, or perhaps more precisely that everyone is treated in accordance with their individual actions and not their group membership. Giving special attention to crime against members of one group, compared to the attention given to the same crime against members of other groups, violates this principle and will tend to cause the very racial and ethnic resentment that we’d like to avoid.
It is quite a complicated mess. Thanks for your insights.
I didn’t mean to denigrate your points at all, Jerry. I think it’s useful to put numbers to these things, in order to place them in context, but we can’t ignore our civilisation’s history on this either. America may be different from Europe in terms of how it deals with difference, but I don’t think that it is that different – the fault lines have historically fallen elsewhere, but the basic instincts are common. (Perhaps to humans?)
The slate is not that blank, but America overwhelmingly has a history of Jewish integration which is pretty awesome and which should be recognised.
American history is (1) quite short and (2) sits within Western history. America is an island (well a continent, close enough, right?) but its history and culture is not an isolate, rather it is part of a larger Western whole. Which comes with some great stuff, but also with some less convenient cultural baggage. Two sides of the same coin.
If anybody is being targeted because they’re members of a particular social group that is qualitatively different from being targeted individually for individual reasons. Whether it’s because they are Jewish or Black or Muslim or WASPs etc.. And whether they’re being targeted by Jews, Blacks, Muslims, WASPs etc.
Jmho.
While I understand the Jewish aspect of this, the truth is that an event done by a protected minority against whites is not a hate crime, in many cases not even a crime. It has been that way for a while. Protected minorities such as blacks, Hispanics, Muslims pretty much do not need to worry about laws applying to them. In this case it seems that Jews are moving into White status where crime against them is given a pass because of the “disadvantages” the “protected minorities” supposedly come from.
To be fair, in our ‘outrage’ culture accusations of various kinds of prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, islamophobia, etc.) are too often used in order to ‘win’ an argument, or to close a discussion down.
The unfortunate outcomes:
People might actually believe it when they say it – so feelings take the place of facts for a critical mass of the population, which degrades debate and culture.
People might use these epithets in bad faith because the culture ‘rewards’ this; which similarly degrades culture.
Other people eventually start taking these accusations less seriously because of how they’re so frequently misused – and that is a big deal, because it makes us less quickly switched on to it when it actually happens.
As, imho, it did in these instances: somebody was walking down a street, another person comes up, calls them a dirty (?) Jew and then hits them in the face. I can’t see it as anything but sheer antisemitism, no matter if the term is misused or overused elsewhere.
from the Althouse posts:
“So why has the news that a synagogue in the Netherlands stopped posting the time of services upset me above all?”
Posted: 29 Dec 2019 02:03 PM PST