See, earlier Gray Journalism: How the NYT Makes A Story About NYC's Surge In Anti-Semitic Black Violence Dull
From The Tablet:
As the leading targets of hate crimes, Jews are routinely being attacked in the streets of New York City. So why is no one acting like it’s a big deal?
By Armin Rosen, July 15, 2019 • 9:30 PM
The incidents now pass without much notice, a steady, familiar drumbeat of violence and hate targeting visibly Jewish people in New York City.
Early on the morning of June 15, a Saturday, two men in a white Infiniti drove around Borough Park, a vast, traditional Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in central Brooklyn. Surveillance footage posted on the local website BoroPark24 showed a man jumping out of the car’s passenger side as someone in a shtreimel and long black jacket walked down the sidewalk in their direction. As the car idled, the passenger approached the Jewish stranger, lunged at him in a linebacker-like stutter-step, and then darted to the waiting vehicle, which promptly sped away. Levi Yitzhak Leifer, head of the Borough Park Shmira neighborhood patrol, said there were at least six and as many as nine reported incidents that night involving the same vehicle. Beresch Freilich, a rabbi who serves as a community liaison with the NYPD in Borough Park, said that some of the targeted individuals sensed a violent intent: “The car passed by going back and forth, and they felt it was trying to run them over.”
Granted, the race of the two men in the white Infiniti remains a mystery, but notice that their Infiniti was white.
… Indeed, these seemingly random incidents—just the first few days of May saw an unprovoked attack in Lefferts Park in which a woman tried to pull off her victim’s sheitel, two violent assaults on Hasidic men in Williamsburg, and a possible attempted vehicular attack in the same neighborhood—is part of a typhoon of violence that in other contexts might call for a Justice Department Civil Rights Division investigation. The fact that the victims are most often outwardly identifiable, i.e., religious rather than secularized Jews, and the perpetrators who have been recorded on CCTV cameras are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, inverts the perpetrator-victim dynamics with which most national Jewish organizations and their supporters are comfortable. A close look at these cases reveals no apparent connection to neo-Nazis, the alt-right, Donald Trump, jihadism, the BDS movement, or any other traditional cause of anti-Jewish behavior.
The latest wave shows some marked differences with past manifestations of anti-Semitism in the city, primarily in that no one can figure out precisely what’s causing it. “If we could figure out why it was happening, it would be easier to curb it,” said Mark Molinari, the inspector in charge of the NYPD’s hate crimes unit. “It’s gratuitous violence,” said David Pollack, a rabbi and director of public policy and security for New York’s Jewish Community Relations Council. “That’s what distinguishes this from anything else we’ve had in the past: People are physically attacking identifiably Orthodox Jews for no apparent reason.”
Past spikes were seemingly less nebulous in origin. About five years ago, the so-called “knockout game”—a trend of teenagers committing or filming public sneak attacks—resulted in approximately 19 assaults on Jews in the city, according to Evan Bernstein, the New York and New Jersey regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. “The knockout game was definitely a real thing,” Molinari said, though he noted that the fact the attacks were apparently motivated by a quest for social media fame usually undermined the chances of pursuing hate crimes charges, including when visible Jews were the target. The difficulty was due to a 2000 New York state law stipulating that hate crimes must be “motivated in substantial part or wholly by the identity of the person”—a difficult standard to establish in seemingly random, chaotic acts of violence carried out by young people. …
This latest wave has no evident organizing principle behind it aside from pure hostility against targets that are unmistakably Jewish.
The reason The Establishment isn’t doing much against the current wave of anti-Semitic violence in NYC is that NYC now has so many security cameras that the attacks can’t be blamed on the desired Unusual Suspects: smirking MAGA-hat wearing Covington Catholic bros named Haven Monahan.
Another reason is that Jews in NYC who wear identifiably Jewish garb typically voted for Trump.
