Anti-Semitism as Domestic Terrorism

"This is terrorism, it is domestic terrorism."
"These are people who intend to create mass harm, mass violence, generate fear based on race, colour, creed."
"This is an intolerant time in this country. We see anger, we see hatred exploding. It is an American cancer in the body politic."
New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo

"We have nothing to indicate at this time that there were other people [involved], but that will be part of a very lengthy, very methodical and thorough investigation."
New York Police Department Commissioner Dermot Shea

Members of the Rockland County Sheriff's Office escort Grafton Thomas from Ramapo Town Hall to a law enforcement vehicle on Sunday

Crimes of ethnic and religious hatred targeting Jews have been occurring steadily and increasingly throughout the world. In the United States, once considered the most accepting, safest place for Jews to live and contribute to their society, episodes of virulent anti-Semitism have exploded in numbers. Episodic harassment of Jews are regularly increasing occurrences in public, and violent attacks are no longer strangers to the streets of New York in particular.

When someone is publicly and verbally attacked passersby simply pass by; no one seems to want to become involved, to muster the interest or the courage to come to the aid of a victim. And nor do people appear to react one whit when attacks transcend the verbal and become violent. So, despite what Police Commissioner Dermot Shea contends, there are other people involved in the sense that they deign not to become involved. It's a Jewish problem, evidently, not a societal one.

The machete attack by a 37-year-old man who went to the trouble of looking for prominent Jews and Jewish Orthodox Synagogue locations before carefully planning where he would travel some distance from his home to access an area with a large Jewish population for the express purpose of exposing his Jew hatred through a vicious attack on unarmed and unsuspecting celebrants at a Hanukkah party taking place in a private home of a rabbi whose synagogue was located right next door was planned and atrocious.

The attacker stormed into the home of Rabbi Chaim Leibush Rottenberg at around 10pm last Saturday and began wildly swinging a knife at some 60 worshipers gathered for a candle-lighting ceremony for the seventh night of Hanukkah

Grafton Thomas whose home is in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., travelled to the town of Monsey with a purpose in mind. And after he had invaded that private home and viciously assaulted the celebrants, stabbing five people, a number seriously enough that brain damage is suspected of a 72-year-old victim, he fled. And would have escaped had not one of those present taken down the license plate number of his vehicle, enabling police to arrest him as he drove through Manhattan.

The man's family was quick to respond, declaring him to be suffering from mental illness. One might logically suppose that anti-Semitism is a mental illness. An ageless pathology of unreasoning, viral hatred that afflicts people with often violent tendencies. Arraigned on five counts of attempted murder, held on $5-million bail, the 'motive' in the stabbing, according to Ramapo town supervisor is yet to be determined. This is a  man who upon entering the rabbi's home said "Nobody going anywhere", as he launched his stabbing attack.

This is an attack that is by no means isolated. Patrols being stepped up in heavily Jewish neighbourhoods will do little to ease the fear of residents of those neighbourhoods who fear for their children's safety, and will henceforth go out and about with an anguished sense of isolation where once they felt themselves equal members of the nation in which they and their predecessors have lived for centuries.

Preceding this attack were numerous others. Following in the wake of this horrifying attack, has been another succession of blatantly hateful attacks on other Jews, vulnerable and victimized. The shoppers killed in a shooting rampage at the kosher grocery store in New Jersey would never have imagined their time to live life to its fullest was soon to be abruptly cut off. The Poway attack in San Diego where a woman rabbi was killed and three others wounded left no doubt that Jews are targets.

Josef Neumann was among the five people injured in the Hanukkah stabbing attack in Monsey, New York last Saturday. His family released this harrowing photo of him in hospital and said they fear he will never regain consciousness

"Our father's status [72-year-old Josef Neumann], is so dire that no surgery has yet been performed on the right arm."
"Doctors are not optimistic about his chances to regain consciousness, and if our father does miraculously recover partially, doctors expect that he will have permanent damage to the brain, leaving him partially paralyzed and speech-impaired for the rest of his life."
Neumann family statement

Neighbours gather to show their support of the community near a rabbi's residence in Monsey, N.Y., Sunday, Dec. 29, 2019, following a stabbing Saturday night during a Hanukkah celebration. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)