Investigate threats

President Donald Trump opened his address to Congress last week with these words:

“Recent threats targeting Jewish Community Centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms.” All of us must do just that. But the president has a greater obligation: He should order the Department of Justice to initiate a civil rights investigation into the wave of bomb threats and other violence and threats since he took office. And he should create an interagency task force to fight hate crimes, chaired by his attorney general. These actions, in addition to the FBI’s probe, would show resolve by bringing the full force of the federal government into the cause of combating hate. Anything less is just talk. Action by the president is all the more important after yet another round of threats emailed to Jewish Community Centers, including the JCC in Whitefish Bay, on Monday night. The Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center was closed for about two hours Tuesday morning so authorities could sweep the building to ensure it was safe for people to use. It reopened about 9 a.m.

More than 100 bomb threats have been reported at more than 90 Jewish Community Centers since the first of the year, including three at the JCC in Whitefish Bay, which also was evacuated Feb. 20 and Jan. 31. A bipartisan group of Wisconsin lawmakers visited there last week as a show of solidarity.

The ugliness has left a terrible mark on the community.

“I also happen to be Jewish, and the mother of kids who started at this facility when they were 6 months old,” Julie Siegel, the Whitefish Bay village president, told the Journal Sentinel. “So I feel this. When the first bomb threat was called in, I just was sick to my stomach. And listening to the parents, it never goes away. As a parent of Jewish children out in the world, I worry for them every single day.”

The FBI on Friday arrested a man in St. Louis in connection with some of the bomb threats. Juan Thompson, 31, is accused of making at least eight threats to Jewish facilities in New York and other areas of the country. There is no known connection between Thompson and the threats to the JCC in Whitefish Bay.

This one arrest does not mean the problem is solved. As the Jerusalem Post reported last week, anti-Semitic acts have nearly doubled in early 2017 compared with the prior year, according to statistics compiled by the New York Police Department, and violence has been directed at other groups since Trump’s inaugural.

Srinivas Kuchibhotla, 32, died in February after he was shot while having a beer with a friend from work in Olathe, Kansas. Witnesses say the shooter yelled, “Get out of my country.”

Last week in Kent, Washington, a Sikh man was shot in his own driveway in a case authorities now are investigating as a possible hate crime.

“Our recent audit of anti-Semitic incidents from last year showed a threefold rise in the last five years” Elana Kahn, of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, said in an email. “The first two months of this year have brought increased reports of anti-Semitic incidents. We connect that to a general rise in extremism and normalization of intolerance of all ‘others.’ We are deeply concerned about recent attacks on mosques.”

“To us, this is a call to action,” Kahn continued. “Do not let these few people who peddle in hate to isolate the Jewish community and other minority communities.”

Trump has not done enough, especially considering that his own vitriolic campaign for president helped unleash this contemptible behavior. The president should order Attorney General Jeff Sessions to begin a civil right investigation and order all other government departments to cooperate.

There has long been an ugly strain of hate buried deep within the American body politic. Usually dormant, that strain now is active, and the government must do all it can to fight it. This is not the America we want to be.