Violence, antisemitism and politics

As we enter the critical phase of what most likely will be the most consequential national election campaigns of most of our lifetimes, the dual threats of extreme violence and antisemitic hate are also never far away.

I’m going to suggest here that these issues are actually linked in important ways we shouldn’t ignore. Please bear with me.

Let’s start in Brooklyn, a very important place in the American Jewish past, present, and future.

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Last month, a federal grand jury in Brooklyn indicted an individual known as “Commander Butcher” for soliciting hate crimes and a “mass casualty attack.” The U.S. Attorney’s press release says that one Michail Chkhikvishvili, alleged to be a leader of the “Maniac Murder Cult,” approached an undercover agent he considered to be a fellow neo-Nazi extremist to recruit him for a variety of murderous crimes in New York City, such as bombings and arsons “for the purpose of harming racial minorities, Jewish individuals and others.”

Commander Butcher distributed a manifesto called “Hater’s Handbook.” One scheme involved handing out candy laced with poison to racial minorities and Jewish children in Brooklyn. Steps for extracting ricin from castor beans were spelled out. The conspirator boasted that the attacks intended would be a “bigger action than Breivik,” referring to Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right extremist who killed 77 people in a mass shooting at a summer camp and a related bombing in Norway a dozen years ago.

The news of the Brooklyn indictment didn’t get the attention I believe it deserved. More to the point, the report by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism released a few months earlier, “Murder & Extremism in the United States in 2023,” didn’t get the necessary attention either.

The ADL found that “all the extremist-related murders in 2023 (the second year in a row) were committed by right-wing extremist of various kinds, with 15 of the 17 killings involving perpetrators or accomplices with white supremacist connections.” In the last decade, right-wing extremists were responsible for the great majority of the 442 identified extremist-related killings in our country.

Some of these extreme violent hate crimes are now all too familiar to us and involved attacks directly targeting Jewish Americans, such as the 2018 Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue massacre. In other cases, like that of the shooter who murdered 10 African Americans at a Buffalo supermarket two years ago, you have to look at the killer’s manifesto about protecting the “future of the white race” to see the anti-Jewish animus heavily involved. In both the Parkland, Florida, school shooting in 2018 and the Jacksonville, Florida, attack at a Dollar General store last September, the perpetrators had swastikas emblazoned on their weapons.

While the ADL’s report cites one 2023 killing involving a member of the neo-fascist Proud Boys and another in 2021 attributed to a QAnon sympathizer, a second recent report on hate and extremism, this by the Southern Poverty Law Center, gives further context on the movements animating right-wing violence and the hate that is its breeding ground. It maps 595 local and national hate groups, which include 166 white nationalist outfits, and another 834 antigovernment operations. (Twenty-one such groups are in New Jersey, 63 are in New York, and 77 are in Pennsylvania.)

Let’s consider the political implications. Former President Donald Trump infamously said of the 2018 neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, where one woman was killed, that there were “very fine people on both sides.” He had an opportunity to redeem himself and disassociate from the violent far right in his 2020 election debate with Joe Biden, but instead called on his allies in the Proud Boys to stand back and “stand by.” What “stand by” meant in practice became clear on January 6, 2021, when the same Proud Boys acted as shock troops in the assault on the U.S. Capitol that tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to President Biden.

One would like to think that perhaps, as Trump runs for the presidency again, he has at long last learned some appropriate lesson from his multiple toxic associations with the violent and antisemitic far-right movement and is actually trying to become the “uniter” he claimed to be during the recent Republican convention. But the people he continues to surround himself tell a different story. Consider just a few of the most well-known ones.

Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, has voiced various versions of the racist and antisemitic “Great Replacement” fantasy, which attempts to con people into thinking that immigration by non-white people is a “conspiracy” against white Americans directed by nefarious powerful forces frequently identified as Jews.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) repeats the ancient slander that “the Jews killed Jesus” and has spewed the outlandish conspiracy tale of “Rothschild” Jewish space lasers starting forest fires.

Elon Musk has recently used his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to push support for the neo-Nazi-tinged German political party Alternative fur Deutschland, and he joined in the attacks against George Soros, whom he likened to a comic book’s evil genius.

It would be a mistake to end this discussion of violence, antisemitism, and politics without mentioning another related elephant in the room — gun violence. As the ADL report noted, firearms are the weapon of choice in the great majority of extremist-perpetrated killings.

Trump’s acceptance of his party’s nomination for president only five days after the attempt on his life by an apparently deranged young person wielding an AR-15 assault rifle was high drama indeed.

When Ronald Reagan was severely wounded by an assassin’s bullet in 1981, his press secretary, James Brady, was paralyzed in that shooting. Brady’s wife Sarah rallied to the situation by becoming active in the movement to stem gun violence a few years later. Eventually, the Brady Act, which required background checks on most gun purchases, became law, with then ex-President Reagan’s support.

It would have been great — and actually unifying — to see Trump take a few minutes, in his long convention speech, away from his frequent denunciations of his political opponents and what he likes to refer to as our “invasion” by immigrants to say that he would at long last add his voice to the many calls for commonsense regulations on such dangerous assault weapons. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

The intensely serious subjects are murderous violence linked to toxic antisemitic elements, rampant gun crimes, and extremist hate coming from the top of the Trump political ecosystem. Yet there have been suggestions that Donald Trump has somehow suddenly morphed into a uniter. That’s just unserious.

Which leads me back to Brooklyn. If you are ready to believe that Donald Trump has changed, I can get you a bargain on the historic, elegant bridge that goes there.

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair is recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.