Throughout history, my Jewish brothers and sisters have put up with way too much garbage, on scales from massive and genocidal to small and local. What happened few days ago at the Colleyville synagogue ended about the best it could, with the terrorist exterminated and the hostages safely rescued. And yet, it continued a disturbing trend of attacks on synagogues, stores and other Jewish gatherings and individuals right here in America.
Hasidic Jews in New York metro routinely have been attacked on the street by local gangs and solo actors. As with Christians in many of the same areas, Jews in the Middle East, China, north Africa, and elsewhere, fear for their lives daily. Not to mention, a slew of physically nonviolent, but verbally abusive anti-Semitism online, from the far left and far right, Islamists, and even a few well-known politicians.
All that, and the vastly differing treatment by mainstream media of assorted anti-Semitic acts, depending on the sociopolitical nature of who committed them, saddens and angers me, as a Christian who worships a Jew born a bit over 2,000 years ago.
Now we’re supposed to believe that an Islamist terrorist, demanding the release of another from prison, and who went deliberately and specifically into a synagogue having service on the Jewish sabbath (and not any one of thousands of Christian churches or dozens of mosques in the Metroplex), “was not specifically related to the Jewish community” as stated with unjustifiable certitude by FBI special agent Matthew DeSarno.
Say what? How stupid does he think we are? Before the dead terrorist’s body was fully cooled, he somehow had telepathic insight into the brain of Malik Faisal Akram? If he did, I suspect he would have said quite the opposite. [In fact, since then, the FBI director stared at the obvious, “In the last phone call he made to his family, Malik Akram spewed venom against Jews, cursing Jews and America,” and now is singing the right tune.] That the FBI appeared caught off-guard by this, or at a minimum, shamefully clueless and denialist at first, ought to raise alarms in us all, all across this land.
None of this should be happening in America, which has the world’s largest (Israel-eligible) Jewish population…yes, more even than Israel itself. Be the attackers white Neo-Nazis, so-called Black Hebrew Israelites, Islamic terrorists, street gangs of any ethnicity, or anybody else in particular, the actions are just as sinful and heinous.
I can’t stop the crimes, but as a small token of my solidarity with my Jewish friends in these crazy times, I replace one blue star with another for awhile, and symbology aside, will call out the evil for what it is.
Here’s an essay on these topics by Jewish writer Bari Weiss that is well worth reading. What the corporate, coastal big-city media have omitted and downplayed is at least as important as what the same media have stated on these events.
