The violence in Poway
The shocking shooting at the Chabad synagogue comes at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise.
Fit was possible to look at anti-Semitic incidents — the swastikas painted on walls, the vile anti-Jewish rhetoric found on social media, the street attacks — as aberrational, as strange anachronistic bumps on a generally straight path forward for Jews in society. But the incidents won’t stop coming.
Maybe you can shrug off the high school students in Newport Beach who arranged beer cups in the shape of a swastika; you can call it the behavior of children who don’t understand history or the weight of symbols. But just a couple of days later, anti-Semitic fliers adorned with swastikas appeared on the same students’ campus. It’s hard not to wonder, at some point, what’s aberrational and what’s normal.
In October, 11 people were murdered at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, in what was the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. Six months later — last Saturday — a 19-year-old allegedly opened fire on Jews gathered at the Chabad of Poway synagogue near San Diego. One person died and three were injured, and the casualties would undoubtedly have been far worse had the gunman’s rifle not jammed.
Then on Monday, police arrested a Reseda man in a separate case, alleging that he planned to detonate bombs in retaliation for
the New Zealand mosque attacks in March. Police said the man considered attacking Jews, among other targets.
It is becoming dismayingly clear that anti-Semitism is on the rise both here and in Europe. In France, anti-Jewish offenses rose a reported 74% last year. In Germany, violent anti-Semitic attacks surged by more than 60%. In the U.S., the Anti-Defamation League said this week that it has been tracking anti-Semitic incidents for the last four decades — and that 2018 had the third-highest number, down slightly from last year but up dramatically from 2016 and 2015
Of course, such vicious, violent attacks are not just perpetrated against Jews. The world has recently endured bombings of Christian churches in Sri Lanka that killed hundreds of worshipers. Those were purportedly in retaliation for the earlier assault on mosques in New Zealand that killed dozens of Muslims. In April, three historically black churches were burned in suspicious fires in a single south Louisiana parish.
The common thread is the sickness of intolerance, and of hatred often brewed in racism. It has manifested itself throughout history. Here we have seen it in the embrace of slavery, the years of segregation and Jim Crow and in our immigration laws. Some of the first people barred from entering the country were Chinese immigrants.
So how does the world address this? How can we remove such a malignancy from the global soul? Not easily, and unfortunately not completely, but the enemy of darkness is light. It is up to the rest of us to work to ensure that the rise in anti-Semitism and racist violence is a temporary aberration.