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ShinyGodzilla OP t1_j0vtung wrote

Reply to comment by ShinyGodzilla in ‘Inconvenient Anti-Semites’ in New York’s War on Hate by ShinyGodzilla

>The New York Police Department reported 45 hate crimes against Jews in November, more than double the monthly figure from a year ago. It records 278 such crimes this year, up 53%, and 100 arrests, up 61%. Why don’t prosecutions and prison sentences follow? “I’ve asked the question for years with the DAs of the world, with legislators,” Rabbi David Niederman, a top Satmar Hasidic leader in Brooklyn, says in an interview. He gets no answer.

>This is the first blind spot in the war on hate. Determined to “end mass incarceration,” liberals have pulled back police, narrowed prosecutions, restricted cash bail, and gutted mandatory minimums. At the same time, liberals want to crack down on certain “bad” crimes, such as those motivated by hate. But the scholar James Q. Wilson showed long ago that criminals don’t really specialize. Just as substantial proportions of drug and property offenders go on to commit violent crimes, the majority of hate-crime offenders have prior, non-hate-related arrests.

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[deleted] t1_j0vtxxb wrote

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ShinyGodzilla OP t1_j0vu03y wrote

>The second blind spot is the victims. Israel Bitton, head of Americans Against Antisemitism, observes, “A lot of the secular Jews aren’t responding with the same alacrity they would if people started hitting heads of the United Jewish Appeal walking down Fifth Avenue.” Of the 194 anti-Jewish assaults his group has tracked, three-quarters were in four Brooklyn neighborhoods, and 184 of the victims were Orthodox Jews, identifiable by their dress. These are the Jews who can’t hide.

>Less-religious Jews were stunned by Kanye West’s anti-Semitic ravings in a way that Orthodox Jews could never be. For many of the latter, Louis Farrakhan -inspired Hitler talk and conspiracies are humdrum, the stuff of street abuse. “This is an experience of anti-Semitism,” says Rabbi Motti Seligson of Chabad-Lubavitch, a Brooklyn-based Hasidic movement, “that the rest of the Jewish community not only doesn’t experience but is completely oblivious to.”

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ShinyGodzilla OP t1_j0vu2p2 wrote

>The third blind spot is the perpetrators. Bill de Blasio, New York’s mayor from 2014-21, was hardly unique in speaking of the threat to Jews only from white supremacists. Yet the majority of anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York are committed by other minorities—blacks especially, but also Hispanics and Muslims. “These are inconvenient anti-Semites,” Mr. Bitton says. Liberals would rather stick to their story: Minorities are always victims of racism, never racists themselves.

>Meanwhile, surveys since the 1960s have shown that Jew-hatred in America is most prevalent among blacks. As traditional prejudices fused with radical separatist ideologies, anti-Semitism became part of the rhetoric of black politics and protest, the language not only of the street but of preachers and politicians, artists and intellectuals, imbuing criminal violence against Jews with spurious political significance.

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ShinyGodzilla OP t1_j0vu3wx wrote

>When, after a tragic car accident, black rioters in Crown Heights beat up any Jew they could find for three straight nights in 1991, and the Rev. Al Sharpton denounced the victims as “diamond merchants” who reaped what they had sown, liberals looked the other way. Mayor David Dinkins feigned ignorance. The New York Times fudged the story. They couldn’t face up to black violence and Jew-hatred or the costs of hamstringing law enforcement.

>Three decades later, the liberals who run New York are still looking away. That’s what makes them liberals.

>Nothing did so much to improve black-Jewish relations in Brooklyn as the general reduction in crime since the 1990s. But as shootings in New York more than doubled between 2019 and 2021, alongside a deterioration in public order, attacks on Jews surged. Until there are consequences for criminals, including the Jew-haters among them, why should anyone expect the attacks to subside?

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