Anti-Semitic Trouble in My Old Los Angeles Hood

For most of the last three decades, until my recent move to Nashville, I drove up and down Los Angeles’ La Brea Avenue at least once, often many times, a day. I ate at restaurants there, bought supplies there, drove to the offices of PJ Media along that major urban artery.

Almost always I saw ultra-Orthodox Hasidim walking around the neighborhood, often with dozens of kids in tow. (They take the Biblical dictum to be fruitful and multiply quite literally.) But never did I see a vicious anti-Semitic attack like the one caught on video last Friday night when a 32-year-old Somali named Mohamed Mohamed Abdi, yelling “F**king Jews,” tried to run down worshipers in front of their synagogue on Shabbat. Where did he think he was? Paris?

Okay, not funny. Not funny at all.

Especially since Pittsburgh. Especially since we have been told there has been a rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. recently. Especially since some jejune young lady who just got elected to the House seems to think there’s some equivalence between migrants being held up at our Southern border and Jews fleeing the Holocaust. (Good thing there’s no IQ test for getting into Congress.)

But what about it? Is there a rise in anti-Semitism and, if so, where is it coming from? I won’t disguise my view. Pittsburgh aside, today’s anti-Semitism is largely, with minor sporadic exceptions, the product of an unholy alliance between the left and Islam. (No, I don’t mean radical Islam, bad as it is. I mean Islam. That religion has, with some notable and thankfully growing exceptions, long been anti-Semitic in action and in doctrine.)

This alliance between the left and Islam, exemplified — although far from exclusively — by Linda Sarsour, who refuses to abjure the notoriously anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan while telling Jews she is “sorry,” leads to mind-bending behavior by “feminists,” like support for the hijab and patriarchal Sharia law. What next? Clitoridectomies? Evidently.

Meanwhile, the BDS movement on American campuses has become chic, with resistance, at best, sporadic. Jewish students feel threatened at many of our colleges as social justice warriors with no knowledge of the Middle East (or anything, for that matter) blame them for what the SJWs think is happening in Israel. UCLA might as well be an outpost of Tehran or Mecca, even though Los Angeles has a half-million Jews. Columbia University, the city with the most Jews in the entire world, is even worse. Call it an outpost of Hamas.

Groups like the sclerotic ADL almost seemed relieved when this Bowers character went and shot people up at the Pittsburgh synagogue. The old days of redneck KKK anti-Semitism (even if the perp hated Trump) were back, temporarily anyway. They didn’t have to confront the reality of how things actually are now. They could still blame Trump for the supposed rise in anti-Semitism, even though all the evidence that we were told pointed to POTUS turned out to be bogus and even though he is the most pro-Israel president ever, with Jewish grandchildren.

As some then will recall, the Pittsburgh rabbi was “surprised” that Trump was actually warm and empathetic after the horrific occurrence. Given the level of propaganda, it’s easy to see why.

“Liberal” Jews can’t face the reality of all this or don’t want to, so they ignore it and don’t think about it, continuing to spout bromides that were tired in the 1930s. (I apologize for using all the scare quotes, but the English language has been effectively destroyed.) Those bromides bear a distinct resemblance to those that were current in Berlin in those same 1930s.

They have even infected, again temporarily, the investigation of the near-murders on La Brea. Pittsburgh notwithstanding, the police were reluctant to call it a hate crime, deeming the situation at first merely a traffic accident. (Mohamed Mohamed cracked up during his rampage.) Since then, the LAPD has sobered up and a hate crime investigation is in progress. If only the left would sober up. (I know. I know.)

Roger L. Simon – co-founder and CEO Emeritus of PJ Media – is an author and screenwriter.