It all started when Ahmed al Jabali decided to go to a barber to get his beard trimmed and walked into the Yonkers, N.Y., barber shop of Slava Shushakova. Shushakova went to work, but not long after he started, al Jabali became enraged, jumped up, and began attacking Shushakova with his own barber’s scissors.
The bizarre incident ended with Shushakova needing thirty stitches and al Jabali facing a charge of attempted murder. As it turns out, al Jabali made a plea deal and is likely to get only six years in prison, which means he will almost certainly be back on the streets long before those six years are up. And the DA is saying all the right things about how hate has no place in the community. Great. But how exactly do they plan to eradicate it?
The New York Post reported Monday that al Jabali was “boozed up” when he attacked Shushakova but that this wasn’t your garden variety drunken rage. Al Jabali, 34, pleaded guilty to second-degree assault as a hate crime” after attacking Shushakova, who is Jewish, over Israel’s defensive war against Hamas and its allies. The Post noted in an earlier report that al Jabali “had been talking about the ongoing Israel offensive in Gaza during the trimming in the Yonkers Avenue shop.” Shushakova “tried to get Al Jabali to change the subject, but it didn’t work, according to the criminal complaint — and in a flash, the customer grabbed a pair of Jaguar scissors from the counter and lunged at the 51-year-old stylist shouting the vile antisemitic threat.”
Shushakova recounted that al Jabali said to him: “I want to kill you, you f**king Jew.” Al Jabali began attacking Shushakova with the barber scissors. “He cut me one time,” said Shushakova, “and I asked him to stop and [leave] my store. He didn’t. And he said, ‘No, I have to finish [you], and after I’ll go.’ That’s what he wanted.” Shushakova “told al Jabali the cut was serious, and that he’d go to jail for it. But that didn’t matter to the crazed assailant, who said he didn’t care about jail and wasn’t afraid to die.”
Shushakova continued, “He told me, ‘This is right to do, and he’s right, and he has a right as a Muslim to punish Jews.’” He also threatened to burn down Shushakova’s barber shop. Shushakova commented, “This is what he tried to do, if I gave him the chance.”
Now, Westchester County District Attorney Susan Cacace is saying the usual things that public officials say in situations like this. “Hate has no home in Westchester County,” she said piously, as if maybe we all thought that hate had a comfortable split-level in Yonkers. “The rise in antisemitic hate over the last several years is disturbing and completely unacceptable. Today and every day, my office stands with the Jewish community of Westchester and will seek justice for victims of antisemitic violence.”
That’s swell, Ms. Cacace, really swell, but really, what does it mean? How do you propose to eradicate antisemitism from Westchester County? These are pertinent questions because Ahmed al Jabali made it unmistakable that his animosity toward Slava Shushakova didn’t stem solely from Shushakova’s support for Israel. He didn’t say, “I want to kill you, you f**king Zionist;” he said, “I want to kill you, you f**king Jew.” He also asserted that he had “a right as a Muslim to punish Jews.”
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This idea comes straight from the Qur’an, which tells Muslims: “Fight them, and Allah will punish them by your hands, and he will lay them low and give you victory over them, and he will heal the hearts of people who are believers. And he will remove the anger of their hearts.” (9:14-15). This is just the opposite of the Judeo-Christian idea that vengeance is the province of God, not of human beings (Deuteronomy 32:35; Romans 12:19). If Muslims are commanded to be the executors of the wrath of Allah on earth, no designated enemy of Allah or the Muslims is safe, and the Qur’an says that the Jews are the strongest of all people in hostility to the Muslims (5:82).
But is Susan Cacace going to confront Islamic antisemitism and challenge Westchester County mosques to teach against it? Of course not. That would be “Islamophobic.” And so she will end up doing nothing, nothing at all, to prevent future attacks of this kind from happening. The political cost would simply be too high. Eventually, however, the people who are in danger of such attacks will not just be random barbers who happen to be Jewish, and the problem that officials are busy kicking down the road today will be impossible to ignore.
