PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — Living in central Pennsylvania during the 1980’s opened my eyes about anti-Semitism, an attitude so deeply entrenched there that I feared American Jewry could one day be targeted – like our forebears in Nazi Germany. I must have been paranoid.
I was never the victim of a bias crime, but I departed the community with emotional scars, after more than four years. My mind changed steadily after leaving said community and recognized that this place was not all of America. A few years later, I reported for a newspaper on a vandalized synagogue in a Philadelphia suburb. When I arrived at the shul, a number of people were busy cleaning it up. Many were non-Jewish neighbors who, I like to joke, would not let their Jewish friends mess up the job.
I like to think I have managed to maintain perspective. Anti-Semitism is extensive in America, but the vast majority of Americans are supportive of Jewish life. In recent years, my past paranoia moved closer to reality with searing memories of the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life temple, the killing spree at a Jersey City kosher grocery store and the murder of a congregant at Chabad of Poway near San Diego.
These inflamed feelings intensified on Monday when the FBI reported that bias-motivated murders in 2019 increased as well as bias crimes in general, with a 14 percent surge in anti-Semitic incidents as part of it, according to media sources.
More of such homicides were recorded than ever before, with 23 of the 51 deaths attributed to the mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart in August 2019, The New York Times reports. Eleven congregants were murdered at Tree of Life on Oct. 27, 2018.
“The FBI collected data on 7,314 criminal incidents motivated by bias toward race or ethnicity or gender identity in 2019,” the Times article recounts. “It was the third straight year the metric surpassed 7,100 incidents and it was the highest number since the FBI reported 7,783 incidents in 2008.”
It is an ongoing frightening dilemma that defies understanding, made all the harder by the limits of available information. Of course, Jews share in this terroristic pattern that also targets blacks, Hispanics, Latinos and gays.
As I read analyses produced by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, I thought of the 80-mile train trip from my apartment to Jersey City, the 300-mile turnpike ride to the southwestern end of my state and the five-hour flight to southern California. I have passed through Jersey City on my many trips to New York, visited Pittsburgh for a weekend long ago and toured Los Angeles, more than 100 miles north of Poway.
SPLC affirmed that “white supremacist terrorists…pose the largest domestic terror threat in the United States.” Quoting a Department of Homeland Security report, SPLC noted that supremacist attacks made 2019 the “most lethal year for domestic violent extremism in the United States since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.”
“For a growing segment of the white power movement,” the SPLC analysis states, “violence isn’t only a way to inflict harm…but a strategy to alert other white people to the perceived dangers of immigration, racial integration and the decline of white people as a percentage of the American population. (They) are meant to spur further violent action.”
The shooters in the Poway and El Paso murders both referenced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy in which the Jews are orchestrating the replacement of white people “through immigration and intermarriage,” according to the SPLC analysis.
Such a theory clashes with the fact that most American Jews are white, and many Jewish families are resistant to intermarriage with non-Jews no matter what their race. There is also racism among some Jews, and black and Cuban Jews are known to have felt unwelcome in synagogues and Jewish communities.
It is challenge enough to tackle this mammoth series of attacks upon Americans because of what they are, or those supporting these groups. It is much tougher when we know less about it than we should.
Heather Heyer’s death in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12, 2017, after she was in a crowd rammed by a white nationalist’s car, was absent from these stats, according to the Times. While more than 15,000 law-enforcement agencies participated in the data collection effort, it was only 2,172 of these agencies – less than 14 percent – that reported one or more bias crimes, the SPLC analysis adds.
“Because of the nature of hate-crime reporting,” the SPLC report states, “the FBI’s annual report vastly understates the real level of hate crimes in the country.
“Local and state law enforcement agencies are not required by law to report hate crime data to the FBI,” the analysis continues. “In addition, many hate crimes go unreported because of inadequate training and a lack of trust between law enforcement and the communities they police. Previous Department of Justice studies estimate that an average of 250,000 people are victimized by hate crimes each year.”
Agencies serving more than 70 cities with populations over 100,000 either reported zero hate crimes to the FBI or did not report any data, including Hartford, Conn., Duluth, Minn., Kansas City, Mo., Savannah, Ga., and Des Moines, Iowa, according to The Forward.
So, how can we possibly solve the problem if we do not have enough facts to understand it all?
“This is a big problem,” said ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt, as quoted in The Forward. “We will continue to press not just law enforcement agencies themselves directly, but state and federal authorities” to expand reporting.
ADL, SPLC and other organizations are urging Congress to pass the “Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer National Opposition to Hate, Assault, and Threats to Equality (No Hate) Act,” which would promote hate crime training and prevention and provide funds to develop state hate crime reporting and victim services.
In its report on the FBI stats, SPLC states it is pressing President-elect Joe Biden to implement a series of proposals to fight hate crimes which covers: requiring federal collection of bias-crime data; move funding for Department of Education programs aimed at preventing extremism and promoting deradicalization from punishment models to initiatives that build community resilience; and provide funding for the DOE to develop a curriculum on structural racism and funding for states to implement their own related initiatives.
It all sounds like a good start. However, I notice that gun control is not mentioned. I believe that would ultimately reduce the use of arms.
Our government, our society, all of us have our work cut out for his. Maybe a year from now the FBI will report a downward trend. With comprehensive stats.
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Bruce S. Ticker is a Philadelphia-based columnist. He may be contacted via bruce.ticker@sdjewishworld.com