We are living in a new wave of anti-Semitic violence, from college campuses to the streets of major cities. Why is this happening? Why are our leaders doing so little to stop it?
To understand, we need to look back at the events that set the pattern. worst anti-semitic riot The worst riot in American history occurred in August 1991 in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, and lasted for three days before the city quelled it. why? I just made it short film To answer that question.
The riot started with a traffic accident, but quickly escalated into a murder. The last vehicle in the motorcade escorting the Great Rabbi of Chabad-Lubavitch runs a yellow or red light, crashes into a car at an intersection, swerves from the vehicle, and traps two young black children. Tragically killed one of them. A crowd of young black men gathered and claimed that the accident was intentional and that the Jews were spared everything. As the mob roamed the streets, they found young Hasidim and beat and stabbed them, shouting, “Get the Jews!” He died from his wounds.
the next day, Pastor Al Sharpton et al. I came to Crown Heights. Eventually, the crowd began burning police cars and ransacking Jewish businesses. While chanting “Heil Hitler” and “Hitler didn’t get the job done.” During his interview with Sharpton, he acknowledged that there had been anti-Semitic chants during the march, but blamed other outsiders for inciting them. The New York Times and other media consistently got this story wrong, claiming that Jews and blacks were both fighting each other. In fact, violence was only one way.
New York City’s first black mayor david dinkinsAnd his police chief let the riot stand for three days. The last time they themselves were attacked, they finished it off in three hours. Why were you late?
Mayor Dinkins was clearly not an anti-Semite or a lover of street violence. I think he thought that no matter what the progressive wing of the party said or did, he couldn’t stand up to them. The media’s failure to properly cover the story gave him cover to downplay the violence.
This pattern has been repeated many times since then, most frequently with the recent rise in anti-Semitism. Left-wing anti-Semitic violence has erupted, the media has misreported it, and leaders are acting too little, too late. Last year, demonstrators on university campuses chanted anti-Zionist slogans such as “From the River to the Sea” and “Only One Solution – Intifada Revolution” and called for violence against Zionists, often against Jews. It’s just a secret word for.
Even when Jewish students were physically attacked and made to feel unsafe, university presidents did nothing or little. Are these chants and attacks directed at Black or LGBT+ students who doubt whether university presidents will act legitimately to protect these students?
Our film ends with another Jewish man stabbed to death on the streets of Crown Heights a few weeks earlier. At this time his attackers shouted “Liberate Palestine” This new incident received little coverage outside of New York City. Anti-Semitic violence is often no longer news and is rarely reported. If you want different results in the future, you need to break the pattern.
The first step is to understand the pattern of the 1991 riots and their origins. Second, we must insist that our leaders take swift and decisive action against anti-Semitic violence, increasingly from the right and, more recently, from the left. It won’t happen. If you don’t, you’ll end up getting even more.
Michael Pack is a documentary filmmaker whose latest work is “Get the Jew”: Crown Heights Riots Revisited, available for free at WSJ.com/opinion. He has also produced and directed 15 award-winning nationally broadcast documentaries for public television.
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