Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
A fellow Jew’s arrest over bomb threats roils many
NEW YORK — Jewish groups had pointed to scores of bomb threats against their communities as the most dramatic example of what they considered a surge in anti-Semitism. Some blamed a far-right emboldened by President Donald Trump.
Now, that picture has been complicated by the arrest of an Israeli Jewish hacker who authorities say is responsible for the harassment.
Israeli police said the motive behind the threats was unclear. An attorney for the 19-year-old man, who was arrested Thursday, said her client had a “very serious medical condition” that might have affected his behavior.
Earlier this month, U.S. law enforcement had arrested a former journalist in St. Louis, Juan Thompson, on charges he threatened Jewish organizations as part of a bizarre campaign to harass his former girlfriend.
But Israeli police say the Jewish teen is the primary suspect in the more than 150 bomb threats in North America since early January.
Previously, Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, which fights antiSemitism and monitors extremism, had partly blamed Trump for creating an atmosphere that fueled the bomb threats and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, among other recent harassment.
“His well-documented reluctance to address rising anti-Semitism helped to create an environment in which extremists felt emboldened,” Greenblatt wrote last month.
On Feb. 28, in a meeting with state attorneys general, Trump had suggested the phoned-in bomb threats may have been designed to make “others look bad,” according to Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
The remark raised concerns that Trump was downplaying bigotry. That same night, Trump opened his address to Congress with a strong condemnation of the threats and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, which occurred in suburban St. Louis, Philadelphia and elsewhere.
In a phone interview Thursday from Washington, where Greenblatt was discussing anti-Semitism with members of Congress, he said, “It’s not the identity of the culprit that’s the issue,” but the outcome of threats themselves, which terrified Jews and disrupted Jewish life.
He said anti-Semitism remained a serious concern, pointing to other recent incidents around the country. Swastikas were drawn throughout a New York City subway car with messages such as “Jews belong in the oven.”
In South Carolina, a white supremacist with felony convictions was charged with plotting an attack on a synagogue that officials said was inspired by the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. A Seattle synagogue was vandalized with a spray-painted message, “The Holocaust is fake history.”
Steven Goldstein, executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, a civil rights and social justice group based in New York, said the arrest in Israel doesn’t change Trump’s record of being insufficiently forceful in condemning prejudice and bigotry in general.
The center had repeatedly pointed to the bomb threats as evidence of “a national emergency of antiSemitism” and accused Trump of failing to recognize the “real evidence” behind the problem.
“Nobody has said that Donald Trump himself has spray-painted swastikas or tipped over gravestones or that he picked up the phone and made bomb threats,” Goldstein said. “What we were condemning was the silence. Organizations had to shame Donald Trump into responding.”
The White House has not commented on Thursday’s arrest.
Melissa Plotkin, director of community engagement and diversity at the York Jewish Community Center in Pennsylvania, which was the target of a bomb threat last month, said it was “troubling” to find out the suspect was Jewish.