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Wearing a yellow star and carrying a bullhorn, conservative citizen journalist Laura Loomer handcuffed herself to the front door of Twitter’s New York headquarters on Thursday to protest not only her being permanently banned from Twitter, but also alleged widespread censorship and banning of conservatives on the social-media platform.

Loomer contends Twitter employs a “double standard,” allowing the likes of openly anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan while banning her.

“Twitter is upholding sharia when they ban me for tweeting facts about sharia law,” Loomer said in a Periscope livestream that began at about 3:45 p.m. Eastern Time.

“I’m here today to stand in solidarity with the millions of conservatives around the world who have been silenced,” she added, referring to figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Roger Stone and Alex Jones.

Earlier this month, Twitter permanently banned Loomer for “hate speech” against Minnesotan Democratic Representative-elect Ilhan Omar.

“I want my Twitter,” she told NYPD negotiators. “Twitter and Facebook have silenced me.”

Loomer said she would not remove the handcuffs until Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey reinstates her account.

Although a Twitter spokesman stated, “We have notified the relevant authorities who are responding” to Loomer’s protest, and that “law enforcement is taking the lead,” Twitter later announced it would not press charges against Loomer and that she could stay chained to their door as long as she wanted.

Loomer and her aides had started the protest by affixing giant side-by-side replicas of tweets — one by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, explicitly comparing Jews to “termites,” with the caption “not banned.” The other poster was a screenshot of the tweet that got Loomer banned for life from Twitter, in which she characterized Muslim Congresswoman-elect Ilhan Omar of being “pro-Sharia” and “anti-Jewish,” along with the caption, “banned.”

Loomer, one hand handcuffed to Twitter’s door, yelled into her megaphone: “Twitter is essentially upholding Sharia when they decide to ban me for posting facts about Islam. I’m willing to go to jail to fight for my country, to fight for the rights of the millions of conservatives around the world that are being censored and controlled by people in this building.”

https://www.wnd.com/2018/11/jewish-journalist-handcuffs-self-to-twitter-hq/
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A former Romanian Jewish minister accused the country’s president Klaus Iohannis on Wednesday of stoking antisemitism, for stopping the Romanian government’s relocation of its embassy to Jerusalem and rejecting a ministerial post for ex-minister Ilan Laufer.

Laufer, who served as a minister in a previous social democratic government, said “These antisemitic attacks on my behalf are all the more painful as 52 people from my family died during the Holocaust, in Romania,” according to an article in the London-based Jewish Chronicle. He blamed Iohannis, an ethnic German, of colluding with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to block the relocation of Romania's embassy to Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Post reported exclusively last week that a Western source said Merkel called Iohannis to urge him to pull the plug on Romania’s slated plan to move its embassy to Israel’s capital.

The English-language website of the German public news organization Deutsche Welle wrote on Tuesday in connection with Laufer: “For critics of the president, it is clear what that intervention was: About one week ago, Israeli daily The Jerusalem Post reported that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had called President Iohannis last April and urged him to prevent the relocation of Romania’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as had been announced by Dragnea and the government. The report sparked heated political debate in Romania, and neither the president’s office nor Germany’s government have so far officially denied its accuracy. Laufer has lambasted his rejection as an act of antisemitism, and has announced he will file a complaint with the country’s anti-discrimination agency. He said this was not the first time Iohannis had ‘sabotaged Jews.’”

Laufer emigrated with his family from Israel to Romania when he was 14-years-old. He holds dual Israeli-Romanian citizenship.

Iohannis blocked Laufer from assuming responsibility for the regional development position in the current government.

Writing in the Jewish Chronicle, Petru Clej said Laufer “also attacked Mr. Iohannis for his links to the German Democratic Forum of Romania, which Mr. Laufer said was a successor to the German Nazi Party in Romania, vowing to file a complaint against the President with Romania’s National Council for Combating Discrimination (CNCD).”

Clej further reported that Laufer “would also ask the American Jewish Committee to withdraw the Light unto the Nations medal awarded to the Romanian President in June 2017.”

Iohannis flatly rejected  the allegations of antisemitism, stating they are “ridiculous and baseless.”

According to the Jewish Chronicle, the office of President Iohannis said “References to antisemitism and Nazism represent a dangerous action which can generate antisemitic and discriminatory manifestations and can incite hatred.” Iohannis has not laid out the reasons for preventing Laufer from serving in the government. The Deutsche Welle reported, “One Romanian journalist reputed to have close ties to the government said Laufer’s rejection could only be explained by international intervention in the president’s affairs.”

https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Former-Jewish-minister-accuses-Romanian-president-of-sabotaging-Jews-572499
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Rob Martínez is a proud New Mexican, proud of his culture and proud of a genealogy that mingles indigenous ancestry and descent from the Spanish soldiers and settlers who arrived in the area in the late 15th century.

Martínez is also profoundly disturbed by Donald Trump’s tirades against Latin American immigrants and the social tensions they have stirred up.

“When President Trump speaks so badly of Mexican and of Hispanic people, it obviously makes me really sick,” says Martínez, who is New Mexico’s deputy state historian.

“Round here, they say he’s only talking about criminals and illegal immigrants. But I say, ‘No. He’s talking about all of us. He’s got something against Mexico … and against all Latin American people.’”

Martínez is one of a growing number of US Hispanic people looking towards their family’s European past as a possible means of safeguarding their future.

He recently began the process of trying to obtain Spanish citizenship under a law that offers it to the descendants of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from the country in 1492, forced to convert to Catholicism or burned at the stake.

 “I’m very proud of my past and my culture,” says Martínez. “And that’s why I want to see whether I can become a Spanish citizen. I have Catholic, Jewish and Moorish roots there.”

A poll last month found that 49% of US Latinos believe their situation has worsened over the past year – up from 32% in the weeks following Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016.

Applications received by the Jewish Federation of New Mexico, which has been certifying applicants’ Sephardic heritage, suggest Martínez is not alone in seeking an insurance policy in the form of Spanish citizenship.

The “bam!” moment, according to Sara Koplik, the federation’s director of community outreach, came two years ago. And its timing was more than a coincidence.

Although the Spanish citizenship law had come into force the previous October, the gesture of redress was, initially at least, scarcely taken up in New Mexico, whose original Spanish settlers included a large number of conversos – forced converts – who had fled the inquisitions in both Spain and Mexico. The first two or three dozen requests came from Hispanic Catholic families with extensive genealogies, or people with professional connections to Spain.

Application numbers remained low throughout summer and early autumn 2016, but all that changed with Trump’s triumph.

“With the election in November 2016 it was ‘bam!’ and our numbers started to go up significantly,” says Koplik. “Before the election, we issued maybe 20 or 30 certificates. But we have now issued 1,500 – from multiple countries.”

Koplik, a historian, is careful to point out that her team has received applications from more than 50 countries. Most however, come from just three: the US, Mexico and Venezuela.

“It’s a big jump and of course some of it had nothing to do with the United States – it has to do with Venezuela and violence in Mexico – but for Americans, they see this as an insurance policy just in case, against hatred,” she says.

“We know Jewish history, and unfortunately Latinos who have Jewish heritage also have that history of putting things in hiding, being secretive, protecting yourself to survive. In both of these cultures, there’s this instinct to just have a plan B, just something a little extra just in case. And this fits very well into those ideas of, ‘Oh well, if things don’t go well in the US … If racism increases, OK, then there might be another way forward.’”

Not all the US applicants, however, are motivated by fear.

For Ricardo Villarreal, a business professor who grew up in Texas, it is a matter of making sense of the Jewish customs that suffused his mother’s ostensibly Catholic upbringing, and honouring his ancestors.

“The opportunity came up and I just thought, ‘Holy smoke!’ You have to do it for the extent to which my family left Spain and how I’m still descended from them,” he says. “I almost think you have to do it for them.”

 Spain is calling us; I really believe there is a connection with our ancestors and they want us to go back
Georgina
The citizenship offer stirred something similarly atavistic in Georgina Garza and her siblings, who are descended from conversos, and whose family has lived around the Rio Grande valley for 500 years.

“Spain is calling us; I really believe there is a connection with our ancestors and they want us to go back,” says Georgina, a dyslexia therapist, bilingual teacher and rehabilitation therapist.

Her brother Juan says: “We’re not like the Sephardic Jews who were expelled and went to north Africa or the Middle East or Europe, because they could carry on practising their religion. It was different for us. But this new law is helping us connect with our past and we’re discovering – or rediscovering – things that have been lost for 500 years.”

Rob Martínez, who has studied and worked in Spain, also feels a deep affinity with the country.

“I’d be delighted to have that identity because we still have a very strong Hispanic culture even if our Spanish isn’t quite as refined as the Spanish in Mexico or Spain,” he says. “We’ve been Americans for almost two centuries, but we’re still speaking Spanish.”

But for Martínez, whose father was a celebrated New Mexican mariachi, composer of ballads and civil rights campaigner, the social realities of Trump’s America remain a powerful spur.

“I want to stay here and fight against this cabrón. But if things go bad, I’ll be able to go to Spain.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/26/us-hispanics-descended-from-sephardic-jews-seek-spanish-citizenship
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The current measles outbreak in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in the New York area is leading to threats, recriminations and lawsuits, and is also highlighting the lack of consensus among senior rabbis on the vaccination issue.

However, it is also leading to new approaches from medical experts trying to reach those who, in the face of nearly 130 suspected cases of the highly contagious disease, remain determined not to vaccinate their children.

There are now 113 confirmed cases of measles in ultra-Orthodox (or Haredi) communities around New York City and Lakewood, New Jersey, with another 16 suspected and under investigation by public health authorities. Two measles-infected babies have been hospitalized in intensive care units. And while it is mostly infants who have been infected, some teenagers and a handful of adults have also fallen ill.

In this June 25, 2014 photo, members of the Mennonite community in Richland County arrive for the Measles, Mumps, & Rubella (MMR) clinic in Shiloh, Ohio. Health officials said Ohio’s current outbreak of measles consists of more than 360 cases and is the biggest in the U.S. since 1994. The outbreak started after Amish travelers to the Philippines contracted measles this year and returned home to rural Knox County Ohio. (AP Photo/Tom E. Puskar)
Isolated communities could be at greater risk: in 2014 a measles outbreak hit Ohio after Amish travelers to the Philippines contracted measles and returned home to rural Knox County OhioAP
Why has the anti-vaxxer perspective taken hold in pockets of the Haredi community? The answer, say longtime observers, has to do with long-held suspicions of government agencies, including health departments, prizing cultural isolation, reliance on their own communities for things like emergency services, and placing their trust in God to protect them.

U.S. public health authorities say the current outbreak started when Haredi families visited Israel last Sukkot and brought the illness back to their communities. An 18-month-old infant in Jerusalem’s Haredi Mea She’arim neighborhood has died and nearly 1,500 potential cases have been reported. Non-vaccination rates are high in Israeli areas with large Hasidic populations, including the city of Safed and the town of Kfar Chabad.

Haredi immunization rates have dipped in recent years as a result of anti-immunization views taking root in the community. Now, as the number of infected Haredim grows, some within the religious Jewish community are initiating new efforts to reach Haredi anti-vaxxers.

Growing backlash

Tensions within the community are running high.

A Crown Heights couple, Sholom and Esther Laine, is suing Yeshiva Oholei Torah – a Lubavitch boys’ school – for not allowing their unvaccinated son to start kindergarten. In the suit, Esther Laine says the school is infringing on her constitutionally protected religious right to claim exemption from the requirement of most schools, including Oholei Torah, that all students be immunized. Several attempts to contact the Laines were unsuccessful.

“The battle is getting very fierce,” says a Haredi mother, speaking to Haaretz from her home in Lakewood. “People are getting threats if they question vaccinations,” says the mother of three, who asked that her name not be published for fear of being pressured or intimidated by neighbors.

The ultra-Orthodox towns Monsey and New Square are part of Rockland County, about an hour north of New York City. There are currently 75 confirmed cases of measles and six more suspected.

In New York City, there are now 24 confirmed measles cases – all in the Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Borough Park – says Dr. Jane Zucker at the Department of Health. “This outbreak would not have occurred had the children been vaccinated,” she says.

Although measles was officially declared eradicated in the United States in 2000, this is not the first outbreak of the disease in the ultra-Orthodox community. In 2013, there was a significant uptick in measles in Williamsburg and Borough Park, with 58 cases reported. There was also another minor outbreak in New York City earlier this year, which resulted in a miscarriage, pneumonia and hospitalizations, according to The New York Daily News.

Now there is a growing backlash: Those known to be non-vaccinators are being ostracized by fellow Haredim, say members of the community. “People frown upon neighbors who aren’t vaccinating; there is animus toward them,” says Alexander Rapaport, a Hasidic Jew who lives in Borough Park and is founder and director of Masbia, a kosher soup kitchen and food pantry. “You hear there’s someone in that building that doesn’t vaccinate, and now the whole building is having tsuris with them,” he says, using the Yiddish word for trouble.

Ultra-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers

Unvaccinated measles carriers convey a significant risk to others who aren’t immunized – either because they are too young or have compromised immune systems. One person sick with measles can spread it to as many as 18 others, public health authorities warn. Children typically get two doses of the MMR vaccine: one between 12 and 15 months; and another between 4 and 6 years. A child who has gotten both shots is believed to be 97 percent protected from the disease, say health experts. Now, health department authorities are urging vaccinations for children as young as 6 months, and to hasten the second dose so as many people as possible are fully protected.

Rabbis beyond the New York area are now taking steps to prevent the measles from reaching their communities. Last week, the heads of the two main Orthodox rabbinical courts in Chicago issued a letter stating that “nobody has a right to endanger others by not vaccinating their children.” An unvaccinated person exposing other people to measles during an outbreak puts the non-immunized person in the category of someone who actively poses a threat to life, they wrote, using the term rodef (lethal pursuer) – which is a serious violation of Torah law.

The rabbis urged all schools, playgroups and shuls to ban any unvaccinated child, writing, “This is nothing less than a matter of pikuach nefesh,” referring to the religious law in which preservation of human life overrides virtually all other religious considerations.

Furthermore, prominent Israeli Haredi rabbis recently issued a strongly worded decree that those who refuse to vaccinate “are causing bloodshed,” according to the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Kikar Hashabbat. Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch, head of Jerusalem’s stringent Edah HaChareidis rabbinical court, issued an order that every father “must ensure that his son and daughter are immunized immediately.”

However, other influential Haredi rabbis view the issue differently.

Well-known Jewish legal expert Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky and his wife, Temi, are often cited for their anti-immunization stance, which was expressed in a 2014 Baltimore Jewish Times article: “Vaccines are a hoax. It is just big business,” Rabbi Kamenetsky was quoted as saying.

The rabbi’s status means his views carry weight beyond his own immediate circle. He is also a member of Agudath Israel of America’s Council of Torah Sages, which, along with the Haredi advocacy organization in general, “will not be taking a position on vaccinations or the measles outbreak,” says spokeswoman Leah Zagelbaum.

Another member of the Council of Torah Sages, Lakewood’s Rabbi Malkiel Kotler, endorses the Lakewood Vaccine Coalition, which was created last March with the aim of advocating on behalf of those who do not want to immunize their children. The coalition’s website, in the meantime, has disappeared and its phone number is out of service. An email elicited no response.

An anonymous group called PEACH (Parents Teaching and Advocating for our Children’s Health) has circulated an anti-immunization booklet throughout the religious community in the New York area and beyond. In it, an anonymous author claims that “hundreds of thousands of children’s lives have been ruined within hours of vaccines.” The idea that measles is a serious illness is “a fabrication,” it adds.

There is no identifying information about PEACH in the booklet and, with no online presence or listed phone numbers, the group is untraceable.

Changing things from the bottom up

This anonymous spreading of misinformation is frustrating to those who want to see Haredi children fully protected from communicable diseases.

Blima Marcus is an oncology nurse and president of the Orthodox Jewish Nurses Association. The OJNA is now trying to reach out to religious parents in a personal, informal way and has established an email address for those who want information.

In just the first few days, “we’ve been contacted by a few people seeking reassurance or clarification on specific vaccines,” Marcus tells Haaretz. The OJNA is planning to hold living-room gatherings soon. These will involve “no physicians, no agendas, no judgment: just frum [religious] nurses coming to listen, talk, answer questions and educate,” she says, adding, “We have 30 nurses from around the states who already volunteered their time to do this in their communities.”

Dr. Zackary Sholem Berger, an associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, has written in Yiddish publications about medical issues in the Orthodox community. He just held a session at a Borough Park health clinic with the goal of hearing the concerns of Haredi doctors, nurses and other medical professionals.

“To see any sector of my community not vaccinate is horrifying,” says Berger. However, “If you wag your finger at anti-vaccine people, it doesn’t work.” Persuading them “has to come from the bottom up,” adds Berger, who has a doctorate in epidemiology.

Anti-vaccine views have seemingly become entrenched in some parts of Haredi communities because of aspects of ultra-Orthodox culture.

There is a general distrust of government authorities that is likely rooted in the Jewish legal prohibition against one Jew turning another into the police, say knowledgeable observers. Hasidic communities were established in Eastern Europe at a time when government authorities themselves persecuted Jews – or at the very least, turned a blind eye to those who did. Historical memory in general is prized in Haredi communities and passed down from one generation to the next, almost like cherished silver Shabbat candlesticks.

Dangerous influence

There is also an insularity in Haredi communities – particularly among women, who frequently lack access to the internet – that is viewed as a negative and dangerous influence. As a result, WhatsApp and similar phone-based chat groups are popular among Haredi women, says the OJNA’s Marcus.

Participants in one WhatsApp group Marcus belongs to said they don’t trust studies because they are funded by pharmaceutical companies, she says. Furthermore, they don’t trust the Food and Drug Administration, which must approve all medications, because they believe “the FDA is in the pocket of pharmaceutical companies,” Marcus adds.

Haredi communities are also accustomed to relying on themselves rather than the outside world for many things, notes Borough Park’s Rapaport. “They have an off-the-grid mentality, so they don’t call 911” in case of emergency, but call the Orthodox volunteer ambulance corps Hatzalah instead. And instead of calling the police, they contact the volunteer patrol Shomrim – which arrives faster anyway, he says. “It’s a mind-set which allows something like anti-vaccination to spread,” says Rapaport.

What’s more, he adds, there is a fondness for “old world wisdom” – like when people say: My bubbie [grandmother] and aunt had measles, and they lived to be 90.

But Marcus cautions that a lot of people talk about the past “as if it was a healthier or safer time – but 100 years ago many people didn’t live past 8 years old.” In the ultra-Orthodox world, “there’s a lot of misinformation as to how things were different in the past,” she says.

Marcus also notes that alternative medicine is popular among the Haredi community. “There are large pockets of homeopathy followers in Hasidic Williamsburg, in Monroe and in Lakewood,” she says.

One popular Borough Park chiropractor is distributing pamphlets in his office about the dangers of vaccines. People travel from upstate Rockland County to see him, says Marcus. The chiropractor did not return several messages left for him at his home and office, but the woman answering his office phone acknowledged that they do distribute anti-immunization information.

Finally, for some Haredi Jews, not immunizing their children is a reflection of their ultimate trust in God. “If we believe we are protected by the One above, we really have nothing to worry about,” the Lakewood mother tells Haaretz. “We try to keep restrengthening our absolute belief that nothing in the world can harm us unless it is the will of G-d.”

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-war-breaks-out-in-new-york-s-ultra-orthodox-community-over-measles-outbreak-1.6675883
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Last November, Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ) released Understanding Antisemitism. The bizarre tract had as much in common with the reality of anti-Semitism as Marxism does with economics.

JFREJ, a radical leftist group, claimed that “white Christians” in Europe had “invented anti-Semitism”. That would have come as news to Pharaoh, Haman and Mohammed: in JFREJ’s parlance, “people of color” who had innovated and spread anti-Semitic ideas, while seeking to exterminate the Jews.

“Antisemitism was something European Christians created and brought to the Middle East within the last 150 years,” JFREJ insisted. There was no such thing as Muslim anti-Semitism, the leftist group, which collaborates with Linda Sarsour, a Farrakhan supporter who had urged dehumanizing Jews, insisted.

Black and Muslim anti-Semitism are occasionally justified as a response to white Jewish oppression. But mostly their existence is denied. Racial anti-Semitism, JFREJ insisted, only existed as white supremacy.

JFREJ’s tract whitewashing black and Muslim anti-Semitism was partly funded by Jenny Levison.

This November, Levison’s black leftist foster son, James Polite, was arrested for setting 7 fires in Hasidic Jewish schools and synagogues in Brooklyn. He also scribbled, “Kill All Jews” inside a lefty congregation.

Polite’s anti-Semitic vandalism broke up an appearance by Ilana Glazer, an obnoxiously unfunny leftist comedian, to rally turnout before the election. Polite scrawling, “Jew Better Be Ready” and “Insert Oven Here” got far more attention than the actual fires he set in more conservative religious institutions.

It was the fire he set in a Yeshiva school coat closet early in the morning that finally got him caught.

Glazer went on Democracy Now, notorious for defending the anti-Semitic Hamas terrorists who murder Jews, to whine that, “we lived through a safe, you know, physically benign version of a white supremacist act.”

Except the surveillance footage had made it clear that the vandal was a black man. But there was no room for acknowledging the reality of black anti-Semitism on the Left.

Last year, Juan Thompson, a former writer for the anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist site, The Intercept, was arrested for sending bomb threats to a number of Jewish targets, including the ADL. Like Polite, there were efforts to paint Juan as suffering from mental illness. JFREJ went even further, declaring, “We reject attempts to explain away anti-Semitism by laying the blame on Black men.”

Its guide to distorting anti-Semitism had insisted that, “singling out Black people and other People of Color as especially anti-Jewish is racist.”

If “white Christians” invented anti-Semitism, white American Christians appear to be terrible at it. The ADL’s own surveys show black anti-Semitism as being 2 to 3 times higher than average. A statistical analysis in the Washington Post suggested that the majority of Americans who hold deeply entrenched anti-Semitic views are minorities.

Higher rates of anti-Semitic attitudes are bound to lead to higher rates of anti-Semitic hate crimes within the black community. And in the aftermath of the Pittsburgh mass shooting, all the anti-Semitic incidents in New York City appeared to be perpetrated by black men.

Two days before James Polite disproved the myths about black anti-Semitism that his foster mother had helped spread, swastikas were spray painted on houses in Brooklyn Heights. Surveillance footage showed that two black men were responsible. The two, Jarrick Wiltshire and Daul Moultrie, turned themselves in.

Closing out the week, six black teens hurled a pipe through the window of the Volkan synagogue in Brooklyn during Sabbath prayers. Prior to that they had allegedly accosted a girl in the area.

In 1 week: 9 attacks on Jewish institutions, 7 fires, 1 broken window and 9 black male perpetrators.

And little interest by the national media which was too busy claiming that the essence of anti-Semitism was saying anything negative about a career collaborator with anti-Semites, George Soros.

These anti-Semitic attacks probably had nothing to do with Pittsburgh. They are instead typical of the everyday, ordinary anti-Semitism that Jews living in urban neighborhoods regularly experience.

This October, a Jewish man in Brooklyn was beaten so severely with a stick that it broke. In April, in that same neighborhood, a Jewish man suffered a cracked rib in an anti-Semitic assault by a black man screaming, “I hate Jews.” Both incidents were only notable because they were caught on camera.

Yeshiva Beth Hillel of Williamsburg, where Polite set his final fire, had previously come under attack from lefty activists with Yaffed whose smears of Jewish schools are unquestioningly recirculated by the media, (without ever reporting on who is behind the group) than it has reporting on the school arson.

The Volkan synagogue, which was attacked on the Sabbath, and Yeshiva Beth Hillel, are less than a mile apart. And yet these two attacks on Jewish institutions so close together in time and space were never assembled into a pattern by the mainstream media. Because it didn’t like what the pattern would show.

A week later, the mainstream media which broadcast Polite’s magic marker scrawls to the world, hasn’t even bothered to report the names of all the Jewish institutions where the black leftist started his fires.

A recent New York Times piece noted, “there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews — 142 in all — as there have against blacks.” It also addressed the bias and disinterest in these crimes, much of which target the city’s working class religious Jewish population in urban areas.

“When a ḥasidic man or woman is attacked by anyone in New York City, mainstream progressive advocacy groups do not typically send out emails calling for concern and fellowship and candlelight vigils in Union Square, as they often do when individuals are harmed in New York because of their race or ethnicity or how they identify in terms of sex or sexual orientation,” it noted.

But it awkwardly elided the issue of who is behind the violence. The attackers have “varied backgrounds” and their identity “presents complexities” for liberals.

There’s only so much ideological heresy that can be tolerated in the pages of the New York Times.

The media assumes that swastikas and Holocaust imagery are the work of white supremacists. But, as James Polite, Jarrick Wiltshire and Daul Moultrie remind us, that isn’t at all the case.

Black nationalists often believe that there is much to admire about Hitler and the Nazis. They identify with Nazi racial supremacism and the calls for the mass murder of the Jews.

Louis Farrakhan had said, “The Jews don’t like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that’s a good name. Hitler was a very great man.”

The Nation of Islam had an extensive history of collaborating with the KKK and the American Nazi Party.

Stokely Carmichael had dubbed “the greatest white man”. And he had declared, “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist we must take a lesson from Hitler”.

“What the Negro needs is a Hitler,” Marcus Garvey had said admiringly.

“I got the extermination blues, jewboys / I got the Hitler syndrome figured,” Amiri Baraka, the black nationalist poet, had hatefully scribbled.

This black nationalist rhetoric easily translates into swastikas and Hitler sloganeering by street thugs.

During the pogrom in Crown Heights, black marchers shouted, “Heil Hitler”. At the funeral at which Al Sharpton delivered an anti-Semitic eulogy, a banner read, “Hitler did not do the job.”

Last year, three black men scrawled a swastika on the door of the Sutton Place Synagogue in Manhattan. No media accounts mentioned the race of the suspects. While synagogue clergy later announced that two arrests were made, the media never bothered following up with a story on their identities.

Also last year there was outrage when an Arizona family’s menorah was twisted into a swastika. The police arrested Clive Jamar Wilson, a black man whose father, like James Polite, had attended Brandeis.

Conflating anti-Semitism with white supremacism, as the Left does, is misleading. And even when it comes to neo-Nazi signage and slogans, the perpetrators are just as likely to be black Nazis.

The Left claims that it wants to fight Nazis. But it quickly changes its mind when the Nazis are black.

Insisting on fighting Nazis only when they’re white isn’t opposition to either Nazism or anti-Semitism. It’s an endorsement of both as long as they are being practiced by the racial supremacists of the Left.

https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/117380/black-supremacists-terrorize-new-york-jews-opinion/
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In a fiery public letter on Monday, the former chief of New York City’s Department of Investigation warned that the mayor’s decision to fire him last week could be an effort to quash an ongoing investigation into mayoral interference in the city’s yeshiva probe.

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Friday fired Department of Investigation chief Mark Peters, who serves as a sort of internal watchdog over city agencies. It was the first time in memory that a mayor had fired his DOI chief. Peters, in a letter distributed on Monday morning, said that his firing would have a “chilling effect” on the department, and could impede ongoing investigations.

“The context of the Mayor’s interactions over the past several years with DOI, combined with certain ongoing investigations about which the Mayor and his senior staff are very much aware, must cast doubt upon the Mayor’s true motives,” Peters wrote. “Moreover, concerns recently raised by City Hall staff about certain ongoing investigations suggest a desire to prevent DOI’s independence going forward.”

Later in his letter, Peters specifically cited an ongoing investigation into mayoral interference in the city’s probe of secular education at Hasidic yeshivas in Brooklyn. The city’s Department of Education has been widely criticized for the conduct of its yeshiva probe, which has dragged on for years and uncovered little. The New York Times revealed in October that the DOI was looking into mayoral interference in the yeshiva probe.

“Finally, there is the impact the Mayor’s decision to remove me may have on several ongoing investigations that could implicate the Mayor and/or senior appointees in certain agencies,” Peters wrote. “This includes previously reported investigations into Mayoral interference in yeshiva matters.”

In his letter, Peters offered to testify in more detail about ongoing investigations in a closed City Council hearing.

https://forward.com/fast-forward/414467/yeshiva-probe-in-jeopardy-says-city-investigator-fired-by-mayor/
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A swastika and an upside-down cross were painted on a decorative post in front of a Jewish center in Miami Beach, Florida.

A security guard at the West Avenue Jewish Center discovered the vandalism early Wednesday morning, the local ABC affiliate News 10 reported.

An upside-down cross is sometimes a symbol of satanism or the occult.

The center houses a Jewish day school for boys, a rabbinical college and an Orthodox synagogue — Congregation Beth Medrash Levi Yitzchok Lubavitch. The official name of the building, which is several stories tall, is the Haim and Gila Wiener Florida Lubavitch Headquarters.

Miami Beach police spokesman Ernesto Rodriguez told the Miami Herald that detectives are reviewing surveillance video with the staff to gather more information.

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A councilman in upstate New York apologized for a text that juxtaposed Orthodox Jews with “normal” ones.

Peter Bradley, a member of the Clarkstown Town Council in Rockland County, apologized on November 12 and again the following day at a council meeting for the statements he made on November 2, less than a week after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in which 11 worshipers were killed.

On Facebook, Bradley criticized New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for visiting with Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community leaders.

“Normal Jews and non-Jews alike were grieving at the JCC while they were meeting ‘the guy with the checkbook,’” wrote Bradley, who has been accused of using negative rhetoric about Jewish residents.

Before Tuesday’s Town Council meeting, demonstrators gathered outside Town Hall to protest his remark, the Rockland/Westchester Journal News reported.

“I do admit, the dialogue, the structure, the tone, has to be transitioned,” Bradley said during the meeting. He also said he has planned meetings with activists “just to get a grip on the complicated things… in Rockland.”

During a November 8 interview on Channel 12 News, Bradley said that when he spoke of “normal” Jews, he meant “mainstream” or Reform Jews outside Ramapo, which also has a growing Orthodox community.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-york-state-councilman-sorry-for-suggesting-orthodox-jews-arent-normal/
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