Monday, May 07, 2018
VIDEO OF MAN BERATING HASSIDIC BOY GOES VIRAL
A video of an adult man berating a small hassidic boy over his appearance was pulled from Twitter late Sunday night, but not before it had been viewed more than 1 million times and liked more than 100,000 times.
The video, posted by the account @_LoveMeSomeJess early Sunday morning, featured an unseen male behind the camera who comes across a young boy on the street who appears upset. The boy's hair is closely shaved except for his long sidelocks, in keeping with hassidic tradition.
"I'd be crying if I looked like that too bro," the man says to the little boy. "That's f*cked up what they be doing to you."
The boy, who appears to be about three or four years old, stands silently staring at the man while he continues talking.
"You probably had the full wash and set - they should be fired if they ain't cut your sh*t," he added. "F*ck it though bro, it's your life."
A representative for Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The video appears to have been taken by a man named Quai James, who first posted it on Facebook on Saturday.
"Had to really let my son know how i felt about the whole Jewish Haircut... Pray for the lil homie," James first wrote. He later edited the post, and removed the word Jewish from the caption. The video is still available on his Facebook page.
While the tweet from @_LoveMeSomeJess was retweeted close to 40,000 times by people who seemed to find it hilarious, many were angry at the content and reported it to Twitter as abusive.
"Wtf kind of person speaks this way to a child - to a CRYING child - and what kind of sick f*ckers like and share this," Batya Ungar-Sargon, the opinion editor at the Forward, tweeted on Sunday. "This is what happens when we allow an entire community to be spoken about like they are subhuman: it becomes ok for a grown ass man to approach a crying child and make fun of him....What's so upsetting is the glee with which his dehumanization of a tiny child was met, the lipsmacking delight with which garbage people on the internet gobbled this up."
New York City council member Brad Lander wrote that the video was "gross viral anti-Semitism" and it is "critical to push back against this small-minded & dehumanizing hate."
Mordechai Lightstone, the social media director for Chabad.org, appealed to Twitter to remove the video.
"I love Twitter and the community it builds - but a video of someone making fun of a small child for his religion is too much," he wrote.
Writer Emily L. Hauser tweeted on Sunday that "I think a lot about the fact that people forget that Jews were regularly killed, over the course of centuries, for their names, noses, or haircuts up until a single lifetime ago. Murderous antisemitism is neither made-up nor ancient history."
Late Sunday night, the tweet was gone, and the account who posted it claimed that she deleted it herself. Earlier, @_LoveMeSomeJess had said that she didn't take the video, but only posted it, and wouldn't provide any further details. She also said that - despite the many reports - her Twitter account had not been suspended, writing "LMAO THEY TRIED SO HARD."
The video, meanwhile, is still available on Facebook on James's account, where it has thousands of shares and comments.
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