The awkward conversation in the hate speech debate is the one about antisemitism. Similar to Brenton Tarrant’s activity on the dark web, antisemitism is usually invisible until it erupts into irrefutable antisemitic violence.
“New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Sunday that New York state authorities will be investigating the brutal attack on a Jewish man in Flatbush on Friday as a hate crime.
The 41-year-old victim was attacked from behind and robbed while walking to morning synagogue services at around 5:45 a.m. Friday. Two men assaulted him, punching him in the face several times before taking off with his bag and prayer shawl.”
“The Flatbush Shomrim Safety Patrol posted a video of the attack, along with photos of pools of blood left on the street afterwards.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he was “outraged” by the attack and called it “sickening beyond compare.”
“Hate has no place here and we will not tolerate it,” he pledged.
Cuomo added, “I am directing the New York State Police Hate Crimes Task Force to offer assistance in the ongoing investigation into this attack.”
“To the Jewish Community of New York, I know this is exhausting,” he said. “No one should have to worry about being attacked for their religious beliefs, ever. We stand with you and we will not stop fighting until the plague that is hate has been eradicated. Love will win here.”
algemeiner.com
Where was New York’s love towards the New York Jews who have been enduring violent assaults on New York streets whenever the Middle East conflict ramps up?
“On Thursday, as Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire that ended their 11-day conflict, Jews in New York City experienced a string of assaults and attacks connected to the fighting half a world away.”
Times of Israel 22 May 2021
Jews also became social media punching bags for people angry about Covid-19 outbreaks.
“As the virus enveloped the world, a set of coronavirus-related antisemitic memes rapidly took shape. Some online trolls asserted that, just like the Black Death in the 14th Century, COVID-19 was a Jewish creation, while others urged that the disease — dubbed the “Holocough” — be used to kill Jews en masse.”
“Another innovation during this period was the phenomenon of “Zoom bombing.” As social distancing measures compelled Jewish institutions to move real-world events onto online platforms like Zoom, dozens of virtual meetings were hijacked by antisemitic rabble-rousers, pushing what one German research institute described as an “overlap of Nazi-glorifying and anti-Israel content” to a bewildered and often distressed audience.
In tandem with those outrages, established social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter were flooded with antisemitic posts.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), between May 7 and May 14 alone this year, more than 17,000 posts on Twitter used some variation of the phrase “Hitler was right.”
Social media did not ban antisemitism but let thousands of social media incidents pass unchallenged.
New Zealand has its own history of antisemitism. The one and only NZ conviction for antisemitism occurred in 1977 when a pamphlet justifying the murder of six million Jews was dropped into Auckland letterboxes.
“Holocaust survivor Bob Narev, 84, remembers it quite clearly.
In 1977, 30 years after he moved to New Zealand from Switzerland, Narev was living on the fringes of Remuera with his wife, Freida, also a Holocaust survivor.”
“Kiwi Jews have experienced a spectrum of hate crime, including the 1990 attack in Auckland when four children at a Jewish school were stabbed by a woman screaming anti-Semitic slogans.”
Stuff
Complaints were made to the race relations conciliator’s office and the police were called in to investigate, resulting in a conviction under section 25 of the Race Relations Act 1971, the intent to incite ill-will against Jews on the grounds of their ethnic origins.
Justice was provided for the victims without the need for a hate speech law.
This week an Iraqi born professor at Bridgeport University in Connecticut produced the results of a survey on the content of khutbahs, the weekly sermons delivered in mosques by imams.
“Whatever generalizations are made about imams in the Arab world, many in the US want to believe that Islam is a religion of peace, and that imams in America embody that perspective in their comments about Jews and Israel,” he told the audience attending a Tuesday panel on anti-Zionism.
Al-Azdee himself subscribed to that belief until quite recently, when his research indicated that the opposite might be true.
He saw that worshipers attending US mosques were regularly exposed to the sorts of hostile, antisemitic messages about Jews and the Jewish state one might encounter at some mosques in the Middle East.”
Antisemitism is deeply rooted.
“There are links to major antisemitic traditions,” Al-Azdee said. “Nazi propaganda shaped Arab antisemitism, and in my data analysis you can see the pattern of alignment between Nazi and Muslim antisemitism. The khutbahs are about Jews, but Jews represented as ‘Der ewige Jude‘ — ‘The Eternal Jew,’” the German title of a 1940 propaganda film backed by Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, which purported to unveil a global Jewish conspiracy against Germany.
The range of antisemitic themes pushed by the imams examined by Al-Azdee also conformed to the various Nazi obsessions about Jews, from possessing unaccountable economic power to corrupting the morals of society. As Sayyid Qutb venomously put it, “from such creatures who kill and massacre and defame prophets, one can only expect the spilling of human blood and of dirty means that will further their machinations and evil.”
While we continue to ignore antisemitism in the hate speech debate, it has the potential to divide NZ Jews and Muslims.
“Following the 15 March shooting, the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh raised over $900,000 for Christchurch Muslims.
The act of generosity was inspired after Muslims rallied around the Jewish community when an armed shooter opened fire in a Synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people in October last year.
At a lunch time ceremony, the New Zealand Jewish Council president, handed over a cheque to the Christchurch Foundation, to establish the Abrahamic fund.
For members of the Muslim and Jewish faith, today’s ceremony was much more than just a transferral of money from one faith to another.
It was an opportunity to explore the other’s religion, as Jewish and Muslim leaders were taken on a tour of each religion’s respective places of worship.”
RNZ
You can’t stop people hating each other, but you can demonstrate tolerance, common sense and forgiveness which has the power to heal divisions. This is something that a hate speech law cannot ever claim to achieve.
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