The weekly bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers and the Anti-Defamation League is now back to Tuesdays.
The Anti-Defamation League says it received bomb threats at four of its offices Tuesday, the same day more Jewish Community Centers across the country were also targeted in a new round of threats.
The JCC Association of North America also released a statement, saying “several JCCs have received either emailed or phoned-in bomb threats overnight and this morning.”
#UPDATE: Posnack #JCC placed on lockdown after school evacuated over #BombThreat. https://t.co/1jGXtEUiIx https://t.co/sQ0DqQSMuH
— CBS4 Miami (@CBSMiami) March 7, 2017
This lovely fellow was arrested over the weekend for vandalizing a synagogue.* He’d also, apparently, upset quite a few people at a church with a primarily Hispanic congregation earlier in the year.
Synagogue hate crime suspect an educated, suburban accountanthttps://t.co/R50uZGMJzo
— Jacob Wittich (@JacobWittich) March 6, 2017
Another Sikh-American was targeted and shot last Friday because he was mistaken for being Muslim.
Kent police are searching for a gunman they say opened fire in the East Hill neighborhood.
Officers say the victim, a 39-year-old Sikh man, was in his driveway working on his car Friday around 8 p.m. when another man approached him and began yelling, “Go back to your own country.”
Police say the victim was shot in the arm. Authorities expect the man will make a full recovery.
The shooting suspect is a white male about 6 feet tall. Police say the man has a stocky build and was seen in dark clothing and a mask covering the lower half of his face.
Detectives are investigating. The FBI is also involved in investigation the possible hate crime.
Also last Friday another Indian-American, Harnish Patel, was shot dead in Lancaster, SC.
Breaking: Lancaster Co. Coroner says 43-year-old Harnish Patel was found shot and killed in his yard on Craig Manor Rd last night.
— Greg Suskin (@GSuskinWSOC9) March 3, 2017
Patel was the owner of a Speedee Mart and was targeted on his way home. It is unclear from the reporting at this time if this was a robbery-homicide or if Mr. Patel was targeted because of his ethnicity.
Patel was the owner of the Speedee Mart on Pageland Highway.
Police said that he closed his store and left in his Toyota minivan at 11:24 p.m. Thursday.
Investigators believe he drove from the store directly home, where he was confronted by his killer when he got out of the vehicle.
Authorities have not made any arrests but are urging people to come forward.
“We ask anyone with information he or she thinks might be related to this incident in any way to please contact us,” said Sheriff Barry Faile. “If you saw anything at the store, in the area of Craig Manor Road, or anywhere in between, let us know. Even if you think it is not important, it could be the lead that solves this case.”
Anyone with information about this or any other case should call the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office at (803) 283-3388 or email Crimestoppers.
Mr. Patel is survived by a wife and young child.
And it is important to remember, despite the fact that the anti-Semitic incidents, and, of course, those involving physical attacks, injuries, murders, and significant property damage, get a lot of press and coverage, we definitely need to keep in mind that every day in the US is today in anti-Muslim domestic terrorism and stochastic violence.
Most Americans don’t actually know any Muslims — at least, not personally.
More than 6 in 10 have seldom or never had a conversation with a Muslim, according to a study conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute. Most Americans also say they know little (57%) or nothing at all (26%) about Islam.Those numbers have barely budged in 30 years, even after 9/11, two American-led wars in Muslim-majority countries, local and national outreach campaigns by Muslim mosques and organizations, dozens of terrorist attacks worldwide, high-profile congressional hearings and copious media coverage of Islam. All of which suggests that Americans are not just widely ignorant about Islam and Muslims, they are also oddly incurious.Muslims have been shot and killed, execution-style, in their living rooms and outside of their mosques. They have been fatally stabbed on their way home. They have been beaten in their stores, in their schools and on the streets. They have been kicked off airplanes, egged outside Walmart, scorched with hot coffee in a park, shot in cabs and punched while pushing their children in strollers. Their clothes have been set on fire and their children have been bullied. Men have come to their door and told them that they would burn down their house if they did not move away. They have been fired for wearing hijabs and for praying. They have seen their cemeteries vandalized and their Quran desecrated. A Muslim congressman has received death threats, and business owners have posted signs advertising “Muslim-free zones.“Heavily armed men have protested outside mosques in Texas and Arizona, arguing that it’s their patriotic duty to protect the country from Islam.People have covered the doors of a mosque with feces and torn pages of the Quran, left a severed pig’s head outside a mosque, firebombed mosques, urinated on mosques, spray-painted the Star of David and satanic symbols on mosques, carved swastikas and crude drawings of penises into signs at mosques, set fire to mosques, threatened to blow up mosques and kill “you Muslim f****,” fired rounds from high-powered rifles into mosques, wrapped bacon around the door handles of mosques, left hoax bombs and fake grenades at mosques, threatened to decapitate congregants at mosques, sent suspicious substances to mosques, written notes saying, “We hate you,”“We will burn all of you” and “Leave our country” to mosques, rammed a tractor-trailer into a mosque, thrown bricks and stones through the windows of mosques, pelted Muslims with rocks as they left mosques and stood outside mosques shouting, “How many of you Muslims are terrorists?”American Muslims have been told that a mosque, unlike churches and synagogues, cannot serve as an election polling station. Dozens of communities have fought to keep Muslims from building mosques in their neighborhoods, sometimes threatening violence.From 2001 to 2015, there were 2,545 anti-Islamic incidents targeting 3,052 Muslims, according to the FBI. Last year, anti-Muslim hate times surged 67%, reaching a level of violence not seen since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and many Muslims believe hate crimes are underreported by victims and not pursued vigorously by police and prosecutors. This year, the FBI has begun counting anti-Arab incidents as well.
Here’s the link to the FBI’s 2015 Hate Crime Statistics information, which also captures the increase in anti-Muslim hate groups and actions. The 2016 has not yet been finalized.
In February I wrote that this is:
…an ongoing, coordinated campaign of terrorism. The point is to make the children attending these schools be afraid to go to school. It is to make their parents afraid to send them. And to make the teachers, administrators, and other staff afraid to go to work. It is intended to coerce all of these people, as well as members of the wider Jewish American community and the communities of other religious and ethnic minorities in the US. It is also intended to coerce and intimidate the neighbors, commercial or residential, of these institutions to demand they relocate in order to minimize the threat to themselves.
It is important to add that the campaigns of violence directed against Muslim-Americans, including the attempts to prevent them from opening new mosques or cemeteries or expanding existing ones is particularly dangerous. It is dangerous because the perpetrators can’t tell the difference between Americans of Arab, Iranian, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indonesian, Sinhalese/Sri Lankan, or Tamil (of Indian or Sri Lankan origin) descent, and other Americans of color and just assume they are all Muslims. This results in attacks on Americans who are Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or any other religion they may identify with. The anti-Muslim animus among non Muslim-Americans is particularly dangerous because those who have it are not only ignorant about Islam and Muslims, they’re ignorant about Americans who are of North African, Horn of African, Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and Southeast Asian descent. The ignorance of the attackers increases the potential target populations. And these actions – both the physically violent and the non-physically violent – contribute to the ever present, ongoing, low level campaign of domestic terrorism and stochastic violence against the members of these communities.
And here too, as is the case with the attacks on the Jewish Community Centers and synagogues and Jewish-American organizations, the intention is to intimidate and coerce the victimized population to either change their behavior or leave. It is also intended to intimidate and coerce the larger American citizenry to take action against the victims. To push them to demonstrate against them because they are perceived as a threat or because by being targets they increase the likelihood of an attack. To rezone areas so mosques, community centers, and cemeteries cannot be built – again because they are a threat or because by existing they increase the threat profile within the community. To make Muslim Americans, and those mistaken for them, feel unwelcome in their homes, businesses, places of work, and places of recreation. To collapse the public into the private – destroying the Grey Zone, the civil space of American life – and then deny the victims and potential victims even the private portions of their lives as refuge. So that they feel unsafe in public and unsafe at home. To deny them any safe havens or respite.**
And while this is a good start, it does not go far enough.
Update: Sen. Paul (R-KY) has now signed on, bringing it to 98 senators. https://t.co/psZapqLnD7
— Elana Schor (@eschor) March 7, 2017
Senators decry 'accelerating' anti-Semitic threats in bipartisan plea https://t.co/syh6Hm08Do
— POLITICO (@politico) March 7, 2017
This needs to be broadened to include anti-Muslim, anti-Sikh, anti-Indian American, anti-Arab American, anti-Pakistani American, anti-Hispanic American, anti-African American, anti-LGBTQ American, and any other at risk demographic. And they have to put the power of the public purse where their mouths are. They have to introduce and pass legislation that prohibits DHS from turning its Task Force on Violent Extremism into a Task Force on Countering Islamic Extremism or Radical Islamic Extremism. And to fix its problems and expand its scope, not narrow them in the pursuit of an ideologically incorrect agenda.
As always, we leave the last word to 18 U.S. Code § 2331, highlighting the relevant part:
(5) the term “domestic terrorism” means activities that—
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;(B) appear to be intended—(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.(Added Pub. L. 102–572, title X, § 1003(a)(3), Oct. 29, 1992, 106 Stat. 4521; amended Pub. L. 107–56, title VIII, § 802(a), Oct. 26, 2001, 115 Stat. 376.)
Today, Last Friday, and Every Day in Domestic Terrorism and Stochastic ViolencePost + Comments (183)