The Patriot Post® · Anti-Semites and Their Progressive Enablers

In New York, anti-Semitism has returned with a vengeance — abetted by the state’s new “bail reform” legislation.

Last week alone, eight anti-Semitic attacks were initially reported in New York City. All but one occurred in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Those attacks were followed by one in Monsey, where a man walked into a rabbi’s home during a Hanukkah celebration and attacked five people with a machete, critically injuring two. (He has been charged with a federal hate crime.) And late Tuesday, reports surfaced of yet another savage assault against an Orthodox Jewish man by a group of seven black teenagers, and an incident where two men flashed a knife and yelled “Hey Jew boy” at a 17-year-old teen.

Unsurprisingly, Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio blamed President Donald Trump and the hate “emanating from Washington.” Democrat New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo blamed the incidents on a “pattern of hate in this nation” that “starts at the top.”

That would be the same Mayor de Blasio who has championed anti-police rhetoric to the point where officers are being assaulted in broad daylight, and the same Gov. Cuomo who once asserted that “extreme” conservatives “have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.”

Predictably, both men are staunch supporters of the bail-reform law that kicked in on New Year’s Day, but demonstrated its “effectiveness” prior to its official start date, precipitating the no-bail release of most of the suspects involved in the initial eight attacks. Why were they released before the law took effect? “The de Blasio administration has made it clear that we all need to get into compliance with bail reform now,” a law-enforcement source explained.

The law also engendered the resignation of NYC police commissioner James O'Neill, who warned the legislation would release thousands of dangerous inmates.

O'Neill wasn’t exaggerating. “Courts are in the process of case-by-case reviews that by New Year’s Day will release at least 3,800 people from county jails across the state,” the New York Post reported in mid-December. “Some officials estimate that a quarter to a third of their jail populations will be back on the street. The city’s looking at about 900 releases, with an estimated 170 defendants sprung on Staten Island alone.”

One of the early “springees” was Tiffany Harris. She was released without bail, despite admitting she slapped and cursed at three Orthodox women in Brooklyn, and despite having another open harassment and assault case on the court docket since November. Harris also received a no jail sentence for committing felony criminal mischief in Manhattan.

How did her release work out? One day later, she was re-arrested for punching another woman in the face.

Harris is the tip of a highly inconvenient iceberg. Despite leftist assertions that every attack is due to the “Anti-Semite-in Chief” in the Oval Office, Tablet columnist Armin Rosen reveals that “the perpetrators who have been recorded on CCTV cameras are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic,” a reality that “inverts the perpetrator-victim dynamics with which most national Jewish organizations and their supporters are comfortable,” he adds.

Comfortable? Ideologically compromised is more like it. In a devastating account published in The Lid, columnist Jeff Dunetz chronicles Democrats’ increasing acceptance of anti-Semitism, abetted by leftists who are not anti-Semitic but “cowardly refuse to expose and/or fight the Antisemitism rampant in their ranks.”

He cites several collaborators, including Barack Obama, who “allied himself with Al Sharpton who was a leader of the anti-Semitic pogrom in Crown Heights and incited the anti-Semitic firebombing of Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem.” He notes that rabid anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan was supported by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and that Israel hater and anti-Semite Linda Sarsour has shared platforms with “Jerrold Nadler, Nydia Velasquez, Brad Sherman, Mike Quigley, Al Green, Robin Kelly, Jamie Raskin, Donald McEachin, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

He reminds us of the Democrat Party’s cowardly refusal to condemn Ilhan “It’s All About the Benjamins Baby” Omar for that slur and another tweet where she asserted that “Israel has hypnotized the world.” He notes that Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has two anti-Semites on his staff, the aforementioned Linda Sarsour and James Zogby, a man who has referred to Israelis as “Nazis,” and sitting members of Congress as “Israel Firsters.”

What about our “anti-Semitic” president? Trump “recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital” (in stark contrast to the chorus of boos that idea received at the Democrats 2012 National Convention), supported the “Taylor Force Act to withhold U.S. taxpayer dollars from the Palestinian Authority until they stop rewarding terrorists with blood money,” pulled America out of the disastrous Iran deal, and “became the first president in US history to issue an official definition of Antisemitism” and “an executive order to fight the hatred of Jews.”

Trump signed that order to counter the increasing acceptance of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activity on college campuses. It instructed each agency tasked with enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to embrace the definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

A welcome development? Not for the Washington Post. “It is important to take measures to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism on campus, but not at the price of classifying Jews as a nationality,” the paper asserts. “This contradicts the feelings of most American Jews and opens up a dangerous discussion that really never existed in this country. In the end, in the name of protecting Jews from anti-Semitism, such a maneuver might lay the groundwork for a much more serious anti-Semitic threat.”

More serious than what? According to FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, Jews and Jewish institutions remain the biggest target of religion-based hate crimes, accounting for 59% of the overall total.

And again, what’s going on in New York cannot be ignored. “Nobody wants to talk about it, but something is going on between the black and Jewish communities in the New York City area that needs to be addressed,” warns columnist David Marcus.

Why won’t it be? “The problem for all the silent elected officials is that the perpetrators of these violent crimes don’t fit neatly into their political-enemies list,” columnist Karol Marcowicz explained last May, following a series of previous attacks. “They aren’t MAGA-hat-wearing white supremacists.”

Indeed. Thus, Jewish Americans can expect the Left to continue embracing its moral meltdown, driven by an all-consuming hatred of President Trump.

Will it get worse? “From the streets of Chicago to the city council of Seattle, and in the pages of academic journals ranging from the Cardozo Law Review to the Harvard Law Review and of mainstream publications from the Boston Review to Rolling Stone, advocates and activists are building a case not just to reform policing — viewed as an oppressive, violent, and racist institution — but to do away with it altogether,” columnist Christopher F. Rufo reports.

What could possibly go wrong? Tragically, Jews are statistically the most likely group of Americans to find out.