SoCal leaders call on feds to do more to stop anti-Semitism after wave of December attacks on Jews

Jewish leaders in Los Angeles on Monday called on the FBI and President Donald Trump to do more to prevent terrorist violence and hate crimes in the U.S. after a series of anti-Semitic attacks, some deadly, across the country in December.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center at the Museum of Tolerance on L.A.’s Westside, said he wanted to see the FBI create a task force dedicated “24/7” to rooting out anti-Semitism and studying what’s behind the recent rise in attacks on Jews.

“I do not recall a time in American history more serious than this moment … the FBI has the resources to do this job,” Hier said. “We need to combat this cancer before it gets worse.”

Numerous anti-Semitic attacks and incidents have been recorded throughout the U.S., most in New York state, over the last month.

On Saturday, the seventh night of Hanukkah, a machete-wielding man barged into a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York, stabbing five people. A suspect was arrested hours later and now faces federal hate crimes charges.

That attack followed a deadly rampage in Jersey City, New Jersey at a cemetery and a kosher grocery store on Dec. 10. A man and a woman shot a police detective at a cemetery, then stormed a nearby kosher grocery store, shooting three shoppers.

All four victims died. The two suspects were killed in a shootout with police at the market.

Those attacks came at the same time as numerous reported hate incidents committed against Jews in the New York City area, from punches and kicks to Orthodox Jews reporting having things thrown at them.

In April, a 19-year-old carrying an AR-15 stormed a synagogue in Poway near San Diego. He shot four people, killing one woman, and injuring the synagogue’s rabbi.

Rabbi Peter Levi, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League of Orange County and Long Beach, said he couldn’t remember another time when so many anti-Semitic attacks happened in such a short span. That’s led to intense anxiety in the Jewish community.

“This is an unparalleled level of violence,” he said. “(American Jews) are aware that something is going on in our county and our world right now that is unacceptable.”

The attacks come as local hate crimes hit five-year highs in 2018 across Southern California, local officials said. In L.A. County, 521 hate crimes were recorded in 2018, a 2.6 percent rise. In Orange County, there were 67 hate crimes, an 11 percent increase.

On Sunday after the Monsey stabbings, Trump called anti-Semitism a “scourge” that must be eradicated.

In July, the U.S. Department of Justice had convened a summit on combating anti-Semitism, which the agency called “an important priority.”

“I am deeply concerned about the rise in hate crimes and political violence that we have seen over the past decade. And this trend has included a marked increase in reported instances of anti-Semitic hate crimes,” Attorney General William Barr said at the time.

The president in the past has been criticized for failing to address the white supremacist movement in the U.S. After the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — in which a white supremacist drove a car into a crowd of counter protesters, killing one — Trump was blasted for saying there were “fine people on all sides.”

Anti-Semitic attacks surged after the Charlottesville rally, and numerous attacks on Jews in the last few years have been tied to white supremacist groups.

The suspected Poway synagogue shooter posted an anti-Semitic screed on the online message board 8chan before he went on his rampage, according to the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.

Samuel Woodward, the man accused of killing of 19-year-old Blaze Bertstein at a park near his Lake Forest home, was reportedly a member of the Atomwaffen Division, a militant Neo-Nazi group.

The Orange County district attorney’s office said it found homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic content on Woodward’s social media accounts.

The suspect in the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue last year was found to have posted anti-Semitic writings on a social media network friendly to Neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

FBI critics have said the agency for years ignored the growing threat of domestic terrorism. In the 1990s, federal agencies targeted white supremacist networks associated with terrorists like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. But the FBI changed course after the September 11 attacks, refocusing on international Islamic terror groups.

When the White House released its National Strategy for Counterterrorism in October last year, officials included domestic terrorism in the report.

The document does not mention white supremacy as a motivation for the groups the FBI targeted. Still, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before a congressional panel in July that most domestic terror investigations begun in 2018 were related to white supremacist groups.

In its 2018 report on murder and extremism in the U.S., the ADL said every extremist killing in the country that year was linked to right-wing groups.

Local Jewish leaders noted, however, that anti-Semitism is not limited to the white supremacist movement. On Monday, Hier noted that both the Monsey stabbing and the Jersey City shooting allegedly were committed by African Americans.

The FBI raided the Harlem offices of a Black Hebrew Israelite group after the Jersey City shooting. Investigators said they found social media posts attributed to the two suspects expressing interest in the group, which believes black, Hispanic and Native American people are the true descendants of the 12 Tribes of Israel, but have no actual connection to Judaism.

Leaders of the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ said the suspects had no relationship to their group.

Levi said the rash of anti-Semitic attacks is a bigger problem than can be attributed to any one hate group. The source is societal, and even global, he said.

“There are multiple causes all coming together,” he said. “We have a coarseness of discourse in this country, in our politics, online, on the cable networks, through social media… Certain extremist ideologies can use contemporary platforms to circulate and amplify their hateful ideology.”

Regardless of the source of the hatred, Hier said he’s worried. He blamed no one in particular for the rising trend of violence against Jews, pointing instead to the heated political climate in the U.S. that’s breeding hate.

“Nazi Germany started innocently. They didn’t start by killing 50,000 people in a day,” he said. “They started by beating up a few people on the corner.”

He recounted a letter he received over the weekend from a Jewish man in New York City who described being harassed and chased for blocks by a man shouting anti-Semitic slurs.

Hier said the man wrote he was on a packed subway car when his abuser began targeting him, questioning him about his yarmulke. He fled, but the other man followed him. The victim eventually sat on the sidewalk and wept.

“If you don’t nip this in the bud,” Hier said, “it will get worse.”