The recent spike in attacks on Jews in the greater New York City area follows a pattern that does not fit with the media portrayal of violence against Jews being solely a ‘white nationalist’ problem. All or almost all of the attacks were perpetrated by non-whites, including the deadly shooting in Jersey City, street attacks in Brooklyn, and the machete attack in Monsey.While this seems to come out of nowhere, in fact there has been a highly organized and aggressive campaign to stoke and exploit pre-existing racial tensions against Jews as part of anti-Israel activist tactics. The effort goes back decades to Louis Farrakhan, who serves as an inspiration for “intersectional” activists like Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour, formerly of the Women’s March.But more than anything in recent years, anti-Zionist groups, including anti-Zionist purportedly Jewish groups, have sought to turn Blacks against Jews for the purpose of demonizing Israel by blaming Israel and American Jewish groups for domestic police violence and other policing problems.Leading the way has been the anti-Zionist non-Jewish group calling itself “Jewish Voice for Peace” (JVP), which launched the “Deadly Exchange” campaign in 2017 falsely tying anti-terrorism training of U.S. police chiefs during short visits to Israel with police violence in the U.S. That “Deadly Exchange” campaign now has spread more broadly to the anti-Israel community, where various groups led by JVP seek to disrupt and terminate U.S.-Israel police exchanges.As detailed below, the recent deadly shooting of Jews in Jersey City was by a Black supremacist group which espoused conspiracy theories eerily similar to the Deadly Exchange propaganda. While not all of the recent attacks can be tied to such conspiracy theories, what cannot be denied is that JVP and the other anti-Zionist groups promoting Deadly Exchange are playing a deadly game by promoting false claims of American and Israeli Jewish responsibility for police shootings.The claims that Jews are responsible for the spilling of minority blood in U.S. cities is reminiscent of ancient blood libels which incited pogroms against Jews. The anti-Zionist activists’ hoped-for uprising against Israel and Jews may be playing out in ways they didn’t intend, but that doesn’t justify the continuation of the Deadly Exchange incitement.
Racializing the Israel-Palestinian dispute has long been a goal of “intersectional” activists, who place Jews in the “White” category when assigning identities for victimhood status. Anti-Israel activists, seizing on that approach, have tried to hijack domestic shootings by police and turn them into anti-Israel movements.A prime example of this hijacking approach was the 2014 Ferguson riots after the shooting of Michael Brown. Anti-Israel activists played an active role in stoking violence in Ferguson, as we documented in Intifada Missouri – Anti-Israel activists may push Ferguson over the edge and Anti-Israel activist still stoking fires in #Ferguson.
Rather, there has been a multi-year effort by left-wing and Islamist anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and openly anti-Semitic activists to hijack racial tensions in the United States and redirect that anger towards Israel.That effort has been on overdrive since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and is accomplished through a combination of false and misleading statements regarding the militarization of domestic U.S. police departments and U.S. police training in Israel.The intellectual rubric is “intersectionality,” by which anti-Israel activists try to forge links with minority (particularly black) activists by holding out Israel as the key link to oppression around the globe.Sometimes the results are truly twisted, such as at Columbia University, How student activists turned anti-rape group into an anti-Israel group.We demonstrated how, in Ferguson, anti-Israel activists embedded themselves in the protest crowds and ran their own protests fomenting violence, Intifada Missouri – Anti-Israel activists may push Ferguson over the edge:
As much tension as there is, an underreported story is the active role of “pro-Palestinian” activists who have exploited the Ferguson riots and tension this summer and fall to push their anti-Israel agenda. That anti-Israeli agenda, which involves encouraging confrontation with police in solidarity with Palestinians, is helping provide the accelerant to an already volatile situation.
Deadly Exchange took the tactic of hijacking police shootings and turning them against Israel to a new and much more organized level. No longer was blaming the Jews for U.S. police shootings an anecdotal tactic, it became the prime focus of the anti-Israel movement.
We have written extensively about Deadly Exchange, a campaign launched in 2017 by JVP, including in the following posts:In one of our analyses of the program, Professor Miriam Elman explained the premise behind and methodology of Deadly Exchange:
Launched several years ago by JVP, “Deadly Exchange” falsely blames Israel and its American-Jewish supporters for fueling police brutality and discriminatory policing practices against minority communities in America, and militarizing the approach to crime and public protests.At its root, the campaign traffics in tropes and canards about Jewish power in order to accuse Israel and US-based Jewish organizations, like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), for conspiring to harm and oppress American black and brown people.
Indeed, as part of the campaign, JVP asserts the complicity of U.S. Jewish groups in “deliberately conspiring to harm innocent Americans”:
five of the leading organizations of American Jewish life—the Anti-Defamation league (ADL), The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), and Taglit Birthright Israel—are deliberately conspiring to harm innocent Americans by helping to organize and fund training programs between U.S. and Israeli law enforcement officials.According to JVP, these Jewish groups are supporting a series of “deadly exchanges” where American and Israeli security officials and experts “trade tips” and “share worst practices” that “extend discriminatory and repressive policing in both countries” that include fatal police shootings of African-Americans and the “extrajudicial killings” of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria/the West Bank.
Since its launch, the Deadly Exchange campaign has been taken up by a variety of anti-Israel groups (including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the anti-Zionist blog Mondoweiss, and American Muslims for Palestine). Such groups undoubtedly hope to use the campaign’s purported concern for the welfare of Black- and Hispanic-American communities as a way to sever those communities’ previously robust relationship with American Jews.
Afraid of the power of traditional Black and Hispanic Christian identification with Israel, Deadly Exchange advocates seek to use the campaign to recruit minority populations to the anti-Israel movement instead.
With the support and collaboration of such anti-Israel organizations, JVP’s Deadly Exchange campaign has directly engendered public expressions of naked anti-Semitism.
For example, in several posts, we covered how, on April 16, 2018, Durham, North Carolina became the first American city to align a municipal public policy with JVP’s agenda when the Durham City Council imposed a ban on police exchanges with only one country in the world: the Jewish nation of Israel. Durham did this, as the urging of JVP, even though Durham police had no current or planned polices exchanges.
At that April 16 city council meeting, a member of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Isla, spoke in support of the ban, parroting a common Farrakhanist reference to the “synagogue of Satan” and accusing Jews of having an “inordinate amount of control” in city politics.
JVP has made Deadly Exchange a focus for 2020, ensuring that rhetoric blaming Israel and American Jews for police violence will continue to reverberate on campuses and city councils.
As the dust settled after the deadly December 10th shooting at a New Jersey kosher supermarket, local police revealed that deceased suspects, David Anderson and Francine Graham, had both been affiliated with an anti-Semitic cult-like church called the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ (ICGJC)—a sect of the supremacist Black Hebrew Israelite (BHI) movement.
Investigations of the shooting spree have shown that, like many Black Hebrew Israelite members, Anderson and Graham adhered to radical anti-government, anti-police, racist, and anti-Jewish Black Nationalist ideologies—and that these hateful ideas probably motivated their murderous rampage.
NBC News explained:
Multiple years of social media posts connected to Anderson, however, indicate that he appeared to subscribe to a variety of anti-Semitic worldviews and also advocated for violence against police officers. Two law enforcement officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, told NBC News that a Facebook account with the username “Dawada Maqabath” likely belonged to Anderson. That account was first active in 2016 and is filled with photos believed to be Anderson, identified by facial tattoos, and images of album covers from his music recordings.
The username Dawada Maqabath appears across various other social sites and forums, with posts celebrating violence against police and spreading conspiracy theories about Jewish people.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) presented evidence supporting NBC’s reporting. In an analysis of his online footprint, the ADL noted that social media profiles connected with Anderson also assumed the name “Baryon Bloodborne” and that a Twitter account with the name Bayron used the handle “@akaNapoleonhill”.
[A screenshot from the ADLs analysis of social media accounts that seem to belong to David Anderson.]
[Tweets from the Baryon Bloodborne Twitter account. In these tweets, he appears to be promoting a song referring to the Michael Brown shooting case. Screenshot from Twitter, December 2019.]
In August, a user going by the Maqabath username on a video aggregation website posted a comment under a video from radio station Hot97 about Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man who was shot and killed by Baton Rouge police officers in 2016. The comment alluded to a well-known conspiracy theory alleging that Jewish people control the government and that police were carrying out an “agenda” as part of an ongoing war.
Similarly, the ADL documented Anderson’s alias Maqabath’s mentions of the same “synagogue of satan” claim also used by the Nation of Islam—the reference to Revelation 2:9 (which reads, “I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan”); his claims of the satanic synagogue’s supposed conspiracy to incite a Black identity crisis; and his transliterated Hebrew-language insults (which, though Anderson somewhat butchered the grammar, is clearly meant to mean, “You are not a Jew. No, you are born of incest. You’re a Gentile”).
There’s more. NBC pointed out that Anderson invoked the police shooting of Michael Brown:
On the music hosting platform SoundCloud, Anderson’s profile photo was a wanted poster of Darren Wilson, the white police officer who in 2014 shot and killed Michael Brown, an 18-year-old unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri.
His Baryon Bloodborne Twitter profile showed the same image as it promoted a song about Brown.
The text digitally overlayed on Wilson’s face in Bloodborne’s graphic reads:
PROCEED WITH CAUTIONPossible Klan or secret police fraternity member after what may have been his initiation
We do not know if the Black Hebrew Israelite shooters Anderson and Graham directly subscribed to the Deadly Exchange propaganda.
What we do know is that the themes they struck of Jewish control of the police with reference to several high-profile domestic shootings, eerily echoed the rhetoric of Deadly Exchange. When anti-Zionists activists like JVP push these themes, they are playing a potentially deadly game.
The Deadly Exchange demonization of supposed Jewish control of the police also seeks to exploit decades-old antisemitic themes pushed by the Black Panthers, and Louis Farrakhan and his followers.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the leaders of the Black Panther Party—frequently described as “initially focused on police violence in black communities”—publicly castigated Israel, Zionism, and conflated the Jewish self-determination movement with American “imperialism”.
A 1970 JTA news bulletin included the American Jewish Committee’s condemnation of Black Panther Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver’s 1969 reported statement that “Zionists, wherever they may be are our enemies. We totally support the armed struggle of the Palestinian people against the watchdogs of imperialism.”
At an August 1970 press conference, Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton reportedly claimed,
Israel was created by Western imperialism and maintained by Western fire power. The Jewish people have a right to exist as long as they solely exist to down the reactionary expansionist Israeli government… I think that the United States has proved that [Zionism is “promoting nationalism”] because it used nationalism to rape the world and dominate everyone else. In other words [the United States] went from nationalism to the natural conclusion, and that is empire or imperialism. So the Jewish people must be very careful not to be an agent of imperialism.
And, in a 1971 New York Times Letter-to-the editor defending the Black Panther Party by Richard Frumess, for a group called Youth Against War and Fascism, Frumess wrote
Anyone who looks at the issue objectively understands why it is that the black people solidarize themselves with the struggle of the Palestintians [sic]. The same U.S. Government that seeks to crush the liberation movement of the Palestinians, openly seeks to destroy the Black Panther party and every militant organization of black people. The same guns that shoot down black people in the streets of Los Angeles, New York and Augusta, shoot down Arabs in Jordan, Syria and the Gaza Strip. And the same bayonets that hold off black people from the control of their own communities, hold off the Palestinian people from reclaiming their homeland.
Now, as Professor Miriam Elman explained in a June 2019 piece in Fathom magazine, Black Panther Party anti-Zionism has been recycled by contemporary anti-Semites:
Last February more than two dozen offensive posters were discovered plastered to the glass windows of the Granoff Family Hillel Center at Tufts University in Massachusetts. (Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life is a Jewish campus organisation represented at over 550 US colleges and universities.) The flyers reproduced 1960s anti-imperialist cartoons of pigs dressed up in military fatigues and police uniforms. But they also gave this Black Panther Party propaganda a new twist. Included on the posters was an all-caps text that called for a ‘Free Palestine’ and to ‘destroy Israeli apartheid forces and Amerikkkan pigs which fund it.’…No one yet knows who is responsible for the disgusting posters. But it can’t be much of a coincidence that they appeared at the same time that a repugnant campaign known as Deadly Exchange, which links Israel to white supremacy and alleged US police brutality, is well underway nation-wide.
The Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan Bleed into Left-Wing Anti-Zionism
For years, Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam has worked to promote virulent strains of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism alike.
For example, during the early months of Jesse Jackson’s failed bid to win the 1984 presidential election, Louis Farrakhan himself frequently introduced Jackson at campaign rallies. And though Jackson severed ties with Farrakhan that very year over Farrakhan’s outbursts—wherein he charged that Israel’s creation was ”an outlaw act”, that Israel’s supporters are ”criminals in the sight of Almighty God’, and that Judaism is a ”gutter religion”—Jackson himself also came under fire for his remarks about Jews. A 1986 L.A. Times article recalled:
This time he had poked fun at Jews by calling them “Hymie” and New York City “Hymie-town,” and what he’d said had been quoted and condemned in the Washington Post. At first he had denied the remarks; then, turning street fighter, he had tried to put Jews on the defensive, accusing them of making him the target of a Jewish conspiracy to ruin his campaign.
More recently, as demonstrated by its representative shown in the Durham, NC video above, the Nation of Islam has continued to spread the “fake Jews” canard also favored by the Black Hebrew Israelite group, ICGJC. A 2018 report by Moment Magazine quoted Nation of Islam leader Farrakhan:
“You are not real Jews, those of you that are not real Jews,” Farrakhan said in a 1996 speech. “You are the synagogue of Satan, and you have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell.”…according to the SPLC, he has argued “that the ‘true’ Jews were black North Africans.” In 2010, Farrakhan gave a lecture titled “Who Are the Real Children of Israel?” Citing the biblical prophecy that Abraham’s children would be lost in a strange land, Farrakhan suggested that this actually describes black Americans: “Could it be that we are the people of promise?” he asked, according to a newspaper account of the speech. “Could it be that we are the people that should be expecting the visitation of God?”
Like that of the Black Hebrew Israelites and the Black Panther Party, Farrakhanist rhetoric seems to have made its way into far left, intersectional social justice circles. The most notable recent example, perhaps, is that of former Women’s March leaders Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, who were exposed for maintaining relationships with Farrakhan himself and refusing to condemn his virulent hatred for Jews.
We reported on the controversy in January 2019:
As the Women’s March bleeds supporters over the support of anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, leaders Bob Bland and Tamika Mallory appeared on The View. Instead of condemning Farrakhan’s hatred of Jews, Mallory doubled down:“I think it’s important to put my attendance, my presence at Savior’s Day — which is the highest holy day for the Nation of Islam — in proper context,” Mallory replied. “As a leader, as a black leader in a country that is still dealing with some very serious unresolved issues as it relates to the black experience in this country, I go into a lot of difficult spaces.”…“I didn’t call him the greatest of all time because of his rhetoric, I called him the greatest of all time for what he’s done in black communities,” she replied, as The View‘s audience applauded.
That was not good enough for Meghan McCain as she recalled some of Farrakhan’s famous anti-Semitic rhetoric: “I’m not anti-Semite, I’m anti-termite” and “It’s the wicked Jews, the false Jews, that are promoting lesbianism.” McCain also mentioned the Tablet investigation that finally put in the face of everyone the anti-Semitic feelings of the Women’s March leaders, especially Mallory…Never forget this passage from the Tablet investigation (emphasis mine):At the end of January, according to multiple sources, there was an official debriefing at Mallory’s apartment. In attendance were Mallory, Evvie Harmon, Breanne Butler, Vanessa Wruble, Cassady Fendlay, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour. They should have been basking in the afterglow of their massive success, but—according to Harmon—the air was thick with conflict. “We sat in that room for hours,” Harmon told Tablet recently. “Tamika told us that the problem was that there were five white women in the room and only three women of color, and that she didn’t trust white women. Especially white women from the South. At that point, I kind of tuned out because I was so used to hearing this type of talk from Tamika. But then I noticed the energy in the room changed. I suddenly realized that Tamika and Carmen were facing Vanessa, who was sitting on a couch, and berating her—but it wasn’t about her being white. It was about her being Jewish. ‘Your people this, your people that.’ I was raised in the South and the language that was used is language that I’m very used to hearing in rural South Carolina. Just instead of against black people, against Jewish people. They even said to her ‘your people hold all the wealth.’ You could hear a pin drop. It was awful.”Reached by Tablet, Wruble declined to comment on the incident. Multiple other sources confirm that soon after, Wruble was no longer affiliated with the Women’s March Inc.—as the nascent group was starting to be known.
Meanwhile, the Jewish Voice for Peace organizational partner (and an enthusiastic endorser of the Deadly Exchange campaign) American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) has spread the same “fake Jew” myth; multiple AMP officials have publicly repeated the previously debunked anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that modern Jews are not really Jews, but ethnic Russians, descended from “Khazars.” Accordingly, Jewish Voice for Peace itself has expressed enthusiastic approval of events where other anti-Israel self-identified human rights activists parrot the claim.
JVP almost certainly knows what it it doing by trying to tap into a decades-old vein of antisemitism in the black community. It is a cynical tactic that elevates stoking hatred for Israel above all else.
In New York, attacks on Jews by Blacks and Hispanics have surged, and not just in the past week. In a July 2019 piece in Tablet, journalist Armin Rosen described how:
The increase in the number of physical assaults against Orthodox Jews in New York City is a matter of empirical fact. Anti-Semitic hate crimes against persons, which describes nearly everything involving physical contact, jumped from 17 in 2017 to 33 in 2018, with the number for the first half of 2019 standing at 19, according to the NYPD’s hate crime unit. Jews are the most frequent targets of hate crimes in New York City, and have been for some time (although this number is somewhat skewed by the fact that swastikas, which are by far the city’s most common hate incident, are automatically categorized as an anti-Jewish hate crime)….Indeed, these seemingly random incidents—just the first few days of May saw an unprovoked attack in Lefferts Park in which a woman tried to pull off her victim’s sheitel, two violent assaults on Hasidic men in Williamsburg, and a possible attempted vehicular attack in the same neighborhood—is part of a typhoon of violence that in other contexts might call for a Justice Department Civil Rights Division investigation. The fact that the victims are most often outwardly identifiable, i.e., religious rather than secularized Jews, and the perpetrators who have been recorded on CCTV cameras are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, inverts the perpetrator-victim dynamics with which most national Jewish organizations and their supporters are comfortable.
The New York Post reported on attacks in Brooklyn:
Sometimes, nothing was said but there was a punch or slap out of nowhere. Other times, the assailant shouted a hateful slur that left no question of motive: “F- -k you, Jews!”There have been eight attacks in the city so far this week, all during Hanukkah, that are being investigated as anti-Semitic hate crimes, police said on Friday — a spree of harassment and misdemeanor assaults that the NYPD chief of detectives called “alarming.”All but one of the attacks happened in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn, including the most recent one, when a man barrelled into the Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters on the Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights just before 7 a.m. Friday.The man shouted that he was going to shoot the place up, then ran out toward the Utica Avenue subway station, police and witnesses say.
The NY Post continued:
The [most recent] spate of hate began at East 41st Street in Manhattan Monday morning, hours after the first night of Hanukkah.Steven Jorge, 28, of Miami allegedly shouted, “F- -k you, Jew bastard!” as he punched and kicked a 65-year-old Jewish man who was wearing a yarmulke.That night, in Williamsburg, two Jewish boys were attacked by two teens who punched the younger boy in the stomach.Early Tuesday, a group of people hurled anti-Semitic slurs at a 25-year-old Jewish man outside 332 Kingston Ave. in Crown Heights.Later Tuesday, a 56-year-old Jewish man was punched from behind by a group of people on Union Street in Crown Heights.Early Wednesday, a 40-year-old Jewish man was punched in the chin by a stranger.On Thursday afternoon, Ayana Logan, 42, identified as homeless by police, allegedly approached a 34-year-old woman and her 3-year-old son on Avenue U in Gravesend yelling, “You f- -king Jew, the end is coming for you!” and hit the mom with her bag.Early Friday at Eastern Parkway and Kingston Avenue, Tiffany Harris, 30, of Flatbush allegedly slapped three women in the face and barked, “F- -k you, Jews!” The victims, ages 22, 26 and 31, were not seriously injured.
On Friday, New York City mayor Bill De Blasio said that the NYPD would be increasing its presence in areas of the city with large Jewish populations.
And of course, last night in Monsey, NY, about an hour north of New York City, Five People Stabbed During Hanukkah Celebration, Suspect Arrested. While the investigation into the perpetrator Grafton Thomas continues, the prosecutors have indicated he “has no ties to the home he entered and the individuals he attacked inside.”
AP reports on the attack:
The stabbings happened around 10 p.m. Saturday at the home of Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg, located next door to his Congregation Netzach Yisroel synagogue. The large house on Forshay Road remained cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape Sunday.
“The guy came in wielding a big knife, sword, machete — I don’t know what it was,” said Josef Gluck, who hit the assailant with a coffee table during the attack.
“He took it out of his holder, started swinging,” Gluck said.
Levy Kraus, 15, said he was outside the rabbi’s home when he saw a tall man enter with an object.
“He had something in his hand. It looked like an umbrella. It was covered,” Kraus said.
Later, he said he saw the man rushing out of the house and screaming at someone, “I’ll get you.”
Rabbi Motti Seligson, the media director of the Chabad Lubavitch movement, said witnesses told him that people fled the house and went to the synagogue where they locked themselves in. Rabbi Rottenberg led the service at the synagogue later, he said.
Weidel said a witness saw the suspect fleeing in a car and alerted police to the license plate number. Police entered that information into a database and used plate reader technology to track the vehicle to Manhattan, where Thomas was arrested.
Jewish Voice for Peace and its anti-Zionist allies may have thought they hit on a useful tactic in blaming Jews for policing in minority communities as a way to turn minority public opinion against Israel. But it’s a dangerous and potentially deadly game. It is a modern blood libel with the potential to incite antisemitism at a minimum, and violence in those who buy-into the conspiracy theories and have other axes to grind.
In this time when violence against Jews is spiking in the communities targeted by the Deadly Exchange campaign, it is time for people of conscience to speak out against the Deadly Exchange incitement.
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Samantha Mandeles, Senior Researcher and Outreach Director at the Legal Insurrection Foundation, contributed to this post.
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