Do Not Look Away From Evil The first step to stopping Anti-Asian hate is to see it clearly. Bari Weiss
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/do-not-look-away-from-evil
EXCERPT:
“But maybe there is another evil, beyond the monstrousness of the the attackers and the cruelty of the bystanders. And that is the evil of lying about — or purposefully misdiagnosing — the problem to fit The Narrative.
As Zaid Jilani explained last week, the official media story about these anti-Asian hate crimes is that they are instances of white supremacy. “If you thumb through news articles from the past few days or read over statements from leading politicians, you’d imagine that the Ku Klux Klan is responsible for the spree of robberies, assaults and murders of Asian-Americans across the nation. The phrase ‘white supremacy’ is used repeatedly,” he wrote. “This narrative is pervasive, but it bears no relationship to the evidence before us. Not only are none of the high-profile attackers over the past few months white supremacists, many of them aren’t even white.”
Should a person’s life matter more to us if they are attacked by someone of one race, rather than another? Because that is exactly the calculus we are seeing.
Asian-Americans are being attacked and the media and the political class are contorting themselves to find a way to blame white supremacy or the legacy of Trumpism. Why? Because when the perpetrator is a neo-Nazi it is a moral gimme. When the person carrying out the hate crime comes from a group that’s also a target of hate crimes condemnation becomes much more difficult.
This dynamic deserves more attention.
For years now, this has been the case with antisemitic hate crimes. When it came to the massacre at Tree of Life, carried out in October 2018 by a white supremacist who hated Jews for loving immigrants, the response was clear and unified. The massacre at the Chabad of Poway, California, in that same year also —rightly — earned the attention of the national press and lawmakers. It, too, was carried out by a white supremacist.
I had Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who survived the attack, write this op-ed in the Times two days after he was shot. In it he warned: “Over the years people I know have been harassed and assaulted by thugs in the neighborhood where I grew up, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in incidents that typically go unreported by the press.”
Indeed, when I tell people I’m from Pittsburgh they flash with recognition and sympathy. But I highly doubt one would elicit the same response if you told a group of strangers you were from Jersey City, where a kosher grocery was shot up in 2019 by attackers linked to the hate group known as the Black Hebrew Israelites. Or if you told them you were from Monsey, New York, where, that same year, a machete-wielding fanatic stormed a Hanukkah gathering at a rabbi’s home. Or if you said you were from Crown Heights or Borough Park, where street crimes against Orthodox Jews have become a regular feature of life.
The value of a victim should not be dependent on the identity of their victimizer. This is why any totalizing ideology, from right or left, that claims people are either pure or impure, real Americans or pretenders, saints or sinners, all good or all bad, collectively innocent or collectively guilty depending on the circumstances of their birth, is so dangerous.
It blinds us to the truth. It erases our common humanity. And it must be rejected.
One more thing:
Tablet just published this important essay about antisemitism among the well-educated. A new survey shows that the old understanding — that ignorance breeds antisemitism — may not be true. “Those political causes making use of anti-Semitism are increasingly favored by the well-educated in this country,” write the authors. Read the whole essay.
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