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Prospective Fact Check on Monsey Machete Attack
There has already been plenty of finger pointing over the attempted massacre of a group of Orthodox Jewish men in Monsey, New York. The FBI is now on the case. Whatever explanations are offered up, by whatever source, check them against the map and what we have been told about the location of the attack and the attacker’s life.
We are told that the attacker lives in Greenwood Lake and the attack occurred in Monsey, New York. This was not a resident of the same town, rather the attacker had to drive over 20 miles just to get from town to town. Further, we are given that the particular residence, the home of an Orthodox rabbi, was situated in the heart of an Orthodox community. So, the attacker, an outsider from a town 20 miles away, had to somehow know to bypass a number of other homes and to target this home before turning to the more obvious religious building next door.
As to the attacker, we are told by the New York Post that Grafton Thomas lived with his mother, that he had long term mental problems apparently starting in adulthood; that he had rambling hand-written notes and a hand-written resume that was loosely connected with reality. So, how does this fellow end up charging through the rabbi’s door swinging a machete? This is not on the same level as young black men or women accosting people on the street who wear identifiably Jewish garb.
The FBI is on this case, so Attorney General Barr is accountable for the outcome of the investigation. We should expect that he will not accept a coverup; whatever the facts may be, he should insist they be clearly told.
Published in Domestic Policy
I’d like to know why they cry “hate crime” at the drop of a hat unless it’s something like this one.
No you wouldn’t.
He may have had mental problems but, as you point out, he went well out of his way to find a Hasidic rabbi’s house . . . during Hanukkah. Depression and Anti-Semitism are not related.
This is not far from my neck of the woods so let me just say that your driving app may be right for the middle of the night, but at rush hour you are looking at more like 50 minutes to an hour.
So far, the FBI charged violation of 18 U.S.C. Section 247 (a)(2):
Move down two sections and you get 18 U.S.C. Section 249 – Hate Crime Acts
You can see why the feds have to be very careful in throwing the term around, whatever pundits and politicians say.
The FBI complaint is the first indicator of possible awareness of “Black Israelite” ideas. The FBI agent asserts claims about what she says she read in a notebook. Of course, we all have reason to question FBI sworn assertions, so the court should have required at least copies of the referenced pages.
Clifford, I want to make sure that I understand the implication of your post. Are you suggesting that the attacker did not act alone? Or are you suggesting that there may be some unknown personal connection between the attacker and one or more of the victims? Or perhaps both?
There’s not yet evidence of such possibilities, but I don’t think that either of these suspicions are unreasonable in the circumstances.
I think the idea is that the authorities seem to be going out of their way to dismiss this as a lone nut who didn’t necessarily target Jews. The long drive to get to this particular location would argue against that.
It seems that the attacker was definitely full on mentally ill. He kept journals—literate schizophrenics often do—filled with, well, crazy stuff. Hitler, Nazis and whatnot. It wouldn’t be surprising if he mentioned the Black Hebrew Israelites, or identified with them somehow.
As with the shootings of black men by the police, every situation is not like every other situation. This looks to me—at the moment, anyway—like yet another case of a severely mentally ill person not receiving anything like the level of care required to manage his illness. So he’s been suffering for years and now he has caused horrible suffering to others.
There’s a young man here in Maine who bludgeoned his mother, grandparents and a caregiver to death with a baseball bat last year. God knows what he thought he was doing—killing demons of one kind or another, I suppose—but there’s nothing to suggest that he “hated” his relatives in any deliberate sense.
If it hadn’t come on the heels of the Jersey City episode and all the random bashings, the root cause of this calamity would’ve been understood (correctly, I think?) as mental illness and our lamentable unwillingness to deal with it.
Yes, but, high functioning mentally ill. Apparently he was able to navigate society well enough to locate a community of orthodox Jews, the house in which they’d be celebrating Hanukkah (and know that it is the season of Hanukkah), and drive himself to the location armed with a machete and ill-intent. We used to call people like this dangerous psychopaths and keep them locked up, back when we dealt with reality.
I agree, at least in the sense that I believe that he needed to be institutionalized long before this event. It’s worth reading Aaron Miller’s latest post to get a better understanding of how mental illness presents itself; I’ve got a loved one with a mental illness and, at least in the lead-up to full-on psychosis, she could drive a car, go to work, make plans and function…and she was bonkers. Not violent, but definitely bonkers.
A young man who lived near us bludgeoned his mother, grandparents and a care giver to death a couple of years ago. He grew up and went to high school in the area, was well-known and loved, had recently graduated from a prestigious music conservatory. His parents recognized his illness and feared that he was suicidal; his mother had driven to Boston to pick him up and bring him home, stopping to see her parents along the way. Her son got hold of a baseball bat and killed everyone in the house, telling the police later that he had “freed” them.
The onset of serious mental illnesses often happens in young adulthood and sometimes the progression is swift and ferocious. Grafton Thomas (Monsey) had been very obviously ill for some time. I don’t fault his parents for failing to prevent the attack; even if they knew he was “decompensating” and off his meds, there is almost nothing that can be done for a mentally ill adult against his (damaged, delusional) will, and not all that much even if he is cooperative, unless you’re ready and able to spend an astounding amount of money.
A major difference between these two incidents is that the man who bludgeoned his family and caregiver committed his crimes against people he knew well in the course of his everyday life, with no apparent motivation preceding the onset of his mental illness. In the New Jersey case, I suspect his mental illness aggravated an anti-Semitic foundation that existed prior to its full onset, and the victim profile suggest someone chosen outside of a full-blown psychotic episode.
I’m not even a particularly well-informed bystander, much less an experienced expert who knows the full meaning or implications of what a ‘psychotic episode’ is, but these factors do make me inclined to believe this was more than just a consequence of poorly managed mental illness.
Yes, not a crazy looking to randomly kill someone but a crazy guy looking to kill Jews.
Clifford, I think that it’s “Black Hebrew Israelite,” not just “Black Israelite.” Unless you’re referring to a different group. It does strike me as quite a fringe group, which I first learned of in connection with the Covington student incident.
Cliff,
You are right on target. Of course, this guy has a long history of mental illness but there is nothing random or triggering about a Chassidic Rabbi’s house in Monsey. How does a guy decide to target this Rabbi on Hannuka? We have seen that radicalization can happen quite quickly. Only a year or two of exposure and someone probably predisposed can fall into an obsession. The target had to have been suggested to him by something or someone. This is important because even very small organizations of this type are still very dangerous.
If the FBI does their job, I expect there will be more coming on this.
Regards,
Jim
They sorta kinda can be, because depression and obsession can often be co-related. A pathologically obsessive person just needs something to obsess about, and Jews can be a convenient object of obsession for such a pathology.
That’s not to say that something else couldn’t also be going on, but without more evidence one cannot immediately rule out the explanation that he was a lone nut whose obsession just happened to be focused on Jews.
There is something dissatisfying in classing it as untreated mental illness and anti-Semitism; if we can’t properly slot a problem, we can’t properly ‘address’ it (not that either of those things usually has any effect).
Consider our movies with vigilantes or vampires who only kill ‘the bad people’.
The murderous and crazy want to be understood and ‘vindicated’ in their actions, they are still human beings in part, and if they pick a target they believe other people hate (or in @GrannyDude‘s example love, but what greater love is there than to save them by killing them?) they imagine they will still be thought of as ‘ok’ in some sense.
Both-And.
Psychotic people with delusions of grandeur generally claim to be Jesus in Christian countries and Krishna in Hindu ones. (Edit: Even psychotic atheists.) The content of the delusion, as mentioned elsewhere, does not have to be created out of whole cloth but is, rather, some element in what we might call ordinary society or an ordinary personality, just blown way out of proportion.
The practical question is: What course of action had the best chance of preventing this (or some similar) attack? If your answer is “reducing anti-Semitism in our culture/sub-cultures,” I disagree…but sympathetically.
Watch this
https://twitter.com/Israelcohen911/status/1211553439924273153
I don’t care where this person came from if he know the Rabbi or not.
it was an anti-semitic attack in a continuing long string of attacks. If someone else was involved great I hope they rot in jail but that is not the point & looking for conspiracies only serves to obfuscate the actual issue
My mentally-ill loved one, when psychotic, was convinced that she was an architect and had designed the hospital she was, at the time, confined to. She is not an architect. She has never shown the slightest interest in architecture either before or after this episode. Had you met her on that day, she would’ve nonetheless convinced you that she was the Frank Lloyd Wright of loony-bin design.
My theory is that the content of delusions or hallucinations are a little like the content of dreams. There are (metaphorically speaking) file folders in our heads that tend to pop open during the general, neurological tidy-up that goes on in there while we sleep.
If there is a particularly fat file folder, or one you’d just had open recently during waking hours (e.g. “something weird wrong with the car” or “I hope Mom’s mammogram turned out okay” ) you might dream about a first day, perhaps combined with whatever was in another folder that happened to pop open at the same moment, and dream (or hallucinate) about a car with painfully squashed headlights, plus maybe a cinnamon bun or a wallaby, who knows why?
Generally speaking, the best chance of preventing violent crime is to lock up offenders, early and for a long time. It is a very unpleasant option. It is generally what we have been doing over the past 20-30 years, and is probably responsible for the significant decline in crime.
The worst cost is not the government expense of incarceration, though that is significant. It is truly terrible and tragic that so many people are imprisoned, but I think that it is necessary for the protection of others.
I worry that this successful, though costly, approach is being rejected not only in Leftist areas like NYC, but even among conservatives. I worry about the criminal justice reform passed at the federal level in 2019, though I haven’t investigated it in detail. It did have bipartisan support, including President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Senator Mike Lee (of Utah, who is quite a solid conservative guy generally). However, it was opposed by several Republican Senators, including Tom Cotton, Ben Sasse, and Marco Rubio.
The worst cost is not incarcerating criminals. I’m going by memory, which could be faulty, but Thomas Sowell says that the cost of incarcerating a career criminal in Britain is like 15,000 pounds a year, but the cost of leaving them out is about 60,000 pounds a year. The difference is that the cost of the free criminals is paid by civilians, and the cost of incarceration is paid by the government, which makes it look bad.
I agree, except in the analysis, the resulting lack of crime is not a cost of incarceration, it is a benefit.
There is a genuine and serious cost in the loss of liberty of those incarcerated. It is a terrible and serious cost, even though it is arguably warranted by their criminal actions. Some loss of liberty is warranted, but when debating whether the proper sentence for a particular crime is, say, 5 or 10 years, I don’t seen an obvious reason to choose one over the other. The punishment should be proportional in some degree, so that a more serious crime receives a harsher sentence. Beyond this, I generally think that the cost-benefit analysis should govern, and should probably disregard the cost on the convict himself.
Yup. And the best chance of preventing the deterioration of a mentally ill person’s condition (whether or not this may result in violence) is early and sustained, preferably residential, treatment. For some, supportive housing may need to be provided for a lifetime. For others, once the skills are learned and the medications balanced, transition to truly independent life will be possible.
Either way, the same cost-benefit analysis applies: Lives saved, terrible pain and trauma averted, citizens granted better and longer lives.
The real issue you raise is not relevant to either attack in a house of worship this past week. The Texas killer had a long history of mental illness and a violent personality. He had a series of minor scrapes with the law. He briefly channelled that in boxing. He terrified his first and second wife. However, if we locked up all such and threw away the key, we’d need a massive system of prison colonies. The New York machete-wielder had no such reported personality or history of felony violence.
At a different time and place he might have wanted to kill John Lennon or Ronald Reagan, he grew up in a community that suffers no sanction for wallowing in anti-Semitism and that’s where he focused his dysfunction. Until Blacks in general, and Black immigrants in particular, are held responsible for their slurs on Hymies in Hymietown this will continue.
It seems to me people have the right to their prejudices (freedom of conscience is presupposed by free speech). Are you suggesting government should hold bigots and antisemites responsible somehow (minus illegal behavior)? I hope you mean black communities need to reform themselves (in the way we’re continually told Islam is capable of being reformed — without evidence). Social stigma worked on cigarette smoking, so now the Left is trying it on gun ownership. God help us if they succeed.
It’s a delicate operation removing dangerous psychopaths to secure society. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done. I’m saying we should proceed cautiously, and not necessarily with “hate speech laws” and by giving more power to government. Unfortunately, there will always be nuts causing tragedy. I realize I’m not really offering any solutions.
That is a troubling video. It is one thing to read of random attacks, another to see them.
There has to be a concerted effort to end this and the media has to be shamed about its willful blindness.
The conceit that all problems have solutions, especially government solutions, has caused a lot of suffering.