THE TIME IS NOW TO CONFRONT RISING ANTI-SEMITISM:
On Saturday night, British journalist Hannah Partos was on a bus in central London, returning to her home. “(A) group of men behind me just started shouting ‘Are there any Jews on the bus, Jews get off the bus, (expletive) Jews,’ ” Partos live-tweeted. “I was shocked, turned around, thought of saying ‘yes, me, please stop.’ Thought better of it. Never seen anything like it.”
Partos’ ordeal in the middle of the capital of the world’s great parliamentary democracy is sickening to consider, but unsurprising. The most civilized nations, no less than others, are gripped by a tsunami of anti-Semitism, and it grows uglier and uglier, with Jews trapped in a pincer movement from the hard left and the hard right. Any conceit that this cancer has not metastasized in America is fanciful. The Anti-Defamation League’s annual audit of anti-Semitic incidents found that anti-Semitic assaults, harassment and vandalism have reached near-historic levels. Last Tuesday two anti-Semitic ideologues slaughtered innocents in a kosher market in Jersey City.
This is how the New Yorker reacted:
And here’s how Joan Terrell, a Jersey City Board of Education Trustee reacted on Facebook:
“Mr. Anderson and Ms. Graham went directly to the Kosher supermarket,” Terrell wrote. “I believe they knew they would come out in body bags. What is the message they were sending? Are we brave enough to explore the answer to their message? Are we brave enough to stop the assault on the black communities of America?”
Residents with kids in the school system were shocked and dismayed by the posting.
“I was outraged,” said Valeriy Verkhovskiy. “I’m a parent, those remarks are unacceptable should not have been mentioned. What does people moving into a neighborhood with a terrorist attack?”
Josh Sotomayor Einstein, a Jersey City resident, said Terrell is blaming the victims.
“This was anti-Jewish, and Joan Terrell needs to understand that there are extremists in every community, they can be black or white,” he said. “But she appears to be saying it was all right for these bad individuals to do what they did. She is trying to sweep naked bigotry under the rug and pretend to raise questions about gentrification. You can’t have socially acceptable bigotry. These were horrible people who did the killing and conducted a violent attack on a minority group.”
Natalia Loffe, a former candidate for the Board of Education, said there appears to have been unspoken agreement to suppress or acknowledge the antisemitic tensions going on in the city.
“You [InsiderNJ] were the only people to acknowledge the effects of overdevelopment on that area,” she said. “Everybody else seems to either blame the Hasidim or present the tensions don’t exist.”
As Twitchy adds, “Good of her to add that disclaimer at the end that she’s speaking as a private citizen. Otherwise we might think that she’s in a position to influence people with her anti-Semitism!”
