{Originally posted to the Daily Wire website}
On Wednesday, The New York Times ran a story about rising anti-Semitism in the city. That story noted some points that seem to have gone by the wayside for years. The article reveals that Jews are by far the most targeted group in New York:
Contrary to what are surely the prevailing assumptions, anti-Semitic incidents have constituted half of all hate crimes in New York this year, according to the Police Department. To put that figure in context, there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews — 142 in all — as there have against blacks. Hate crimes against Jews have outnumbered hate crimes targeted at transgender people by a factor of 20.
The story also reveals that hate crimes against Jews in New York City aren’t coming from white supremacists, but from people driven by other motives:
During the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group, Mark Molinari, commanding officer of the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, told me.
Those motives range from racial hatred to religious hatred. But the Times story reveals far more than that. The Times admits that the Left has routinely ignored anti-Semitism in the city thanks to its inability to formulate a narrative blaming the Right. The Times explains:
If anti-Semitism bypasses consideration as a serious problem in New York, it is to some extent because it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy.
Now, why wouldn’t you cover a spate of anti-Semitism coming from a variety of different groups? Only for political reasons, as the Times then admits:
In fact, it is the varied backgrounds of people who commit hate crimes in the city that make combating and talking about anti-Semitism in New York much harder….bias stemming from longstanding ethnic tensions in the city presents complexities that many liberals have chosen simply to ignore….When a Hasidic 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 gender or sexual orientation.
In other words, Jews don’t fit the intersectional classification necessary in order to receive narrative attention from either the mainstream media or from progressive groups. Orthodox Jews, who are often the targets of anti-Semitic attacks, aren’t seen as victims; their victimizers, who aren’t conservatives and who can’t be linked with conservatives, aren’t seen as victimizers. There’s a reason Al Sharpton, who helped initiate a riot against Orthodox Jews in Crown Heights in 1991, has a show on MSNBC where he opines about President Trump’s linkages to white supremacist anti-Semitism. Certain types of anti-Semitism are worthy of note. Others aren’t. And those on the Left often decide which is which with simple reference to a preferred narrative in which Jews are part of the white privileged class, unless they are victimized by white supremacists.
But anti-Semitism runs the gamut, and certainly isn’t restricted to white supremacists — nor is anti-Semitism relegated to convenient narratives about President Trump’s rhetorical foibles. In fact, anti-Semitism can spring from racial hatred from minorities, from progressives who hate Israel, from radical Muslims. But those stories simply don’t interest the media, as even the Times now admits.