Notes on Anti-Semitism
Threats Rise as White Nationalism Mostly Thrive
The arrest of an 18-year-old Sayreville man today in connection with threats made to New Jersey synagogues appears to be an isolated case of hate. The accused, Omar Alkattoul, has been charged with a single count of transmitting a threat in interstate and foreign commerce, according to NJ.com — which is just a fancy way of saying he posted a threat to social media.
U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger announced the arrests today. He described the threat as a “manifesto containing a threat to attack a synagogue based on his hatred of Jews.”
Alkattoul, according to the portion of his post quoted by Sellinger in his press release, planned to target synagogues because the 18-year-old believed that “Jews promote the biggest hatred against Muslimeen even in the west,” and that “The Jews are in fact a very powerful group in the west” for whom “western countries today shill.” Alkattoul views his hatred as justified because of what he believes is an international Jewish conspiracy justified by “Their Torah.”
Jewish leaders in North Jersey told The Record that there is an atmosphere of hate and that the uncertainty of the last decade and a half — bank failures, immigration, the pandemic, inflation — has been exacerbated by the country’s fractured politics.
"Our country is at serious odds with itself," said Alvin Rosenfeld, an antisemitism scholar at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. "Everyone is tense, and social and political life are more strained. That's breeding grounds for hatred of all kinds. There's a tribal animosity between various groups. When the economy goes down, antisemitism often goes up because people look for a scapegoat. Traditionally, it's been the Jews whom people blame."
Jew hatred is as old as history itself, and mostly lives on the fringes — until it doesn’t. It depends for its oxygen on dueling perceptions of Jews (as dirty contaminants and as elite puppet masters) that play into a deeper-seated debate that “draws on widely shared, but contested, conceptions of nationhood,” writes Bart Bonikowski. These conceptions have, in different era, led to persecution of and discrimination against various out groups — freed Blacks, Chinese immigrants, Jews, but also immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Each of these groups at one time or another found themselves defined outside of the parameters of Americanness.
By distinguishing between legitimate members of the nation and those whose claims to nationhood are questionable, radical-right actors are able to tap into viscerally experienced collective identities and activate powerful in-group and out-group dynamics. (111)
Group loyalties are weaponized and those who get to claim for themselves the mantle of “legitimate Americans” are told they are victims, are losing in the economic or social race, and that a vaguely defined set of elites who often are described in starkly anti-Semitic terms (when they are not directly identified as rich Jews) have “ostensibly abandoned the ‘true’ members of the nation,” and instead are aiding the interlopers. Because of this, the sy “must be removed from political power and replaced with the people’s legitimate representative.” The “real people’s” representative — and the “real people” know who they are.
Alkattoul is Muslim. Some will use this to explain away the threats or to make the claim that something called “political Islam” remains the single greatest threat to Jews and the rest of the country and world. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the ex-Muslim who is now a right-wing extremist, did just this in January when a Muslim British national took hostages in a Texas synagogue.
Hirsi Ali, writing for the conservative website The UnHerd, structures her argument around well-worn conservative tropes about Islamists and political Islam, while dismissing the threat posed by White Nationalists. “America’s political elite” (read the Democrats) have been bent on “hamstringing their country,” she writes, sounding very much like Donald Trump or the usual suspects on Fox News.
Instead of directing our talent and resources towards justified threats, our agencies prefer to chase “domestic terrorists”, including those supposedly hiding out in school board meetings, and “white supremacists”, claiming that they represent “the most lethal threat to the homeland today”.
This claim, of course, comes directly from agency staffers in the Department of Homeland Security. The agency’s partisan leadership and Republicans in Congress "shied away from addressing the problem and didn’t want to refer to killings by right-wing extremists as domestic terrorism.”
Alkattoul appears to have been radicalized on-line, re-interpreting Islam to fit his pathologies. Alkattoul’s distorted version of Islam, however, is less important than his specific grievances, which he holds in common with the White Nationalists who have been a growing part of the contemporary Republican base. There is Donald Trump, of course, who regularly tells Jews that Israel is their country, and engages in backhanded praise for Jewish lawyers and accountants that would make Archie Bunker proud. Tucker Carlson has the highest rated cable news show on television, and regularly pushes “replacement theory,” a conspiracy that claims that liberals (led by Jewish moneyman George Soros) are using immigration from the South to alter the nation’s demographics and create a permanent White minority and permanent Democratic majority. Douglas Mastriano, the GOP’s nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, “promotes Christian power,” and attacked his Jewish opponent for “attending and sending his children to what he called a 'privileged, exclusive, elite' school — it is a Jewish day school — saying that it evinced Mr. Shapiro’s ‘disdain for people like us.’” Then there is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who just won her second two-year term in Congress. Greene has argued that “'Zionist supremacists' are secretly masterminding Muslim immigration to Europe in a scheme to outbreed white people,” and argued that the Rothschilds used space lasers to burn thousands of acres of forest in California so that they could build high-speed rail and expand their Jewish fortune.
Some might argue that these are not mainstream voices, that they are outliers. That’s nonsense. Greene is entering her second term in Congress. Mastriano was the nominee of the party in one of the most populace states in the nation. Carlson is the biggest star on a network that is often described as the Republican Pravda.
As for Trump, he was president and likely will seek — and win — the party’s nomination in 2024. It is his voice that speaks most loudly among Republicans and Republican candidates are judged by their fealty to him (see Lynn Cheney and Lisa Murkowski).
Even if Trump doesn’t run, his shadow cannot be ignored by his party. Someone equally objectionable like Ron DeSantis — same politics, only smarter — likely will take his place. DeSantis has used state governmental power to silence and further marginalize Blacks and the LGBTQ+ community. He has remained shockingly silent on the issue of White Nationalism and White Nationalist violence and has, according to the columnist Will Bunch, demonstrated an “alarming manifestation of a now barely hidden fascism.”
The synagogue threat — and the Ye and Irving controversies — occurred within this larger context, after assaults at multiple synagogues around the country over the last few years, including the assassination of 11 Jews in Pittsburgh by a man who spouted great replacement arguments. Hate crimes are up, after a short drop off early during the pandemic, and more and more public officials have no qualms about using anti-Semitic rhetoric, especially on the Right.