Stabbing the city

As London reels from a knife plunged into the beating heart of its democracy, New York City struggles to process an equally horrifying dagger to its values. James Jackson, confessed murderer of Timothy Caughman, traveled by bus from Baltimore to New York “for the purpose of killing black men.”

Having nursed racist hatred for more than a decade, he wanted, in a disgusting perversion of the impulse that attracts so many strivers here, to make a statement in the media capital of the world.

And so Jackson saw Caughman on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk and plunged a two-foot sword — a weapon as medieval as his mind — into his chest and back.

Caughman, born and raised in Jamaica, Queens, was the son of a pastor and a home health aide. A concert promoter who, to make a living, gathered cans and bottles for recycling.

Who loved collecting autographs. Who on Election Day tweeted that he was “standing on line waiting to vote,” because “I love America.”

But Jackson, expressing a hatred some call unAmerican that is, in fact, shamefully consistent with a real strain of our history, was not content to take one innocent man’s life because he was sickened by the color of his skin.

He has confessed to seeing the first killing, police say, as practice for mass murder of more black men in Times Square.

This is more than a stain on the city. It is American carnage, and, no one should hesitate to say, terrorism: violence against civilians motivated by twisted political ideology.

It is not lost on the people of the city that a man who made his fortune here, who sits now in the White House, has twice tweeted condolences to London in the wake of its hate-fueled murders but remains silent about his own city’s suffering.

As though the presence of one terrifying threat must obscure the persistence of another.

No. We mourn both. We raise our guard against both. We stand together, in memory of Timothy Caughman and with protective pride in the beautifully diverse metropolis he called home.