Hannah E. Meyers Why Won’t Cities Like New York Punish Anti-Semitic Rioters? Spineless institutions must fight back against criminals who target Jews.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/anti-semitic-hate-riot-new-york-borough-park
Seared into the minds of Jewish Americans are the innocent faces and bright red hair of the youngest Hamas hostages, Ariel and Kfir Bibas. The brothers, four and nine-months old, respectively, were kidnapped along with their mother, Shiri, by masked gunmen on October 7, 2023. Their father, Yarden, was also taken hostage but was released last week. Imagining Yarden’s anguish as he awaited news of his family’s fate only deepened the anxiety of millions who, like me, prayed for their safe return.
This week, the Israeli government confirmed that the boys were murdered while in captivity. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, a group of “protesters,” their faces wrapped in keffiyeh scarves to mimic Hamas militants, descended on New York’s predominantly Jewish Borough Park neighborhood to scream at Jews. “How many kids did you kill today?,” they chanted—with no sense of irony.
This outrage—culminating in a brawl that police had to break up—reflects the growing normalization of masked rioters invading predominantly Jewish spaces to intimidate residents. Like Biblical villains, these agitators thirst for power. Like Hamas, they don’t care if they hurt the innocent, so long as they hurt Jews. The pro-Hamas mob pushed past police barricades and officers and approached nearby Jews, where fighting ensued.
It’s time for American cities and institutions to stand up to this targeted misbehavior. Simply complaining about “hate” won’t solve the problem. New York and other cities need to show some spine.
New York’s weak reforms have restricted the criminal-justice system’s ability to curb such bad behavior. In Manhattan, for instance, prosecutors dismissed twice as many disorderly conduct cases last year as they did the year before—and five times as many as the year before that. That’s thousands of instances of criminal conduct, using the same trappings and language of the Borough Park rioters, invading public spaces without consequences.
It’s unclear how many of Wednesday’s protesters crossed the line from vile-but-protected speech to actual lawbreaking. But the lack of consequences for real infractions over the past year and a half—from blocking bridges to vandalizing businesses—has encouraged an atmosphere of barely contained menace.
Our universities have similarly tolerated this kind of illegal conduct. Columbia University, for example, has consistently failed to punish anti-Semitic misbehavior. An anti-Zionist tent city took over university property; rioters seized a campus building and imprisoned maintenance workers; and a chief university executive’s home was vandalized. Did the university ensure that all involved faced academic or criminal penalties? No: Columbia simply blocked the public from entering the campus.
The university has refused to impose any substantive measures, such as a campus masking ban, that would reassert institutional authority. Instead, Columbia now posts security guards outside Jewish and Israel-related classes, sending a clear message to campus Jews that they are not otherwise safe. No wonder that, even after nearly a year of Columbia banning public entry to the campus, students masked behind keffiyehs “stormed an Israeli history class and targeted Jewish students with anti-Semitic flyers,” per the Washington Free Beacon.
The Jews have never been saved by appealing to the better nature of pitchfork-wielding Cossacks—and no society can thrive in the long run by enabling such behavior. The mindset that drives someone to shriek “Zionists go to hell” and start punching Jews in Borough Park is destructive to all, regardless of race or creed.
It is time for American institutions and policymakers to enforce public conduct laws rigorously, prosecute those who violate them, and unmask lawbreakers through constitutional anti-masking laws. The innocent faces of the Bibas brothers should remind us that it is the wicked who hide their faces to intimidate others. And criminals who target people for being Jewish must be stopped—with force, if necessary.
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