#palestinians have been physically assaulted by police officers

[mithliya]

Are you aware that there have been molotov attacks against synagogues in Berlin after the Hamas attacks? And Jewish parents have been afraid to send their children to school fearing for their safety? Maybe think for a moment why the German police is extra cautious about pro Hamas rallies?

???? i am talking about pro-palestine protests not pro-hamas rallies. i’m speaking of protests in which countless jewish, even israeli jewish, people went to support. protecting jewish ppl from antisemitic attacks makes total sense, banning protests for palestinian liberation and against the genocide of palestinians, banning even basic sentiments supporting palestinians while saying absolutely nothing against jewish ppl doesn’t! stop being intellectually dishonest! there has been an increase in attacks against palestinians too and thousands of palestinians have been killed in the past week, yet pro-israel rallies (ones where people have openly called for genocide) aren’t being barred by any governments in the west. what happened to freedom of speech? does it not extend to speaking against middle eastern people being mass-murdered now?

[kosher-salt]

Just saw a post that was basically "Hey off of the internet people usually aren't so crazy antisemitic and most of my day to day interactions as a visible Jew are normal, everything is gonna be ok" and I'm making a new post to not derail, but...

I'm super glad, obviously, that this is the case for many of you. But I do think we should be ringing the alarm bells. Because while you enjoy your grocery trips and post office in relative peace (as you ought to), here is a VERY incomplete list of things I have dealt with in the last 11 months.

-assaulted on my way to class, followed, spit on repeatedly (magen David necklace)

-professor took me outside of class and told me I needed to denounce my Judaism (I mentioned in passing my dad's family in an anthropology class)

-same professor refused to accept my final paper for reasons that did not match up with paper, email full of dogwhistles

-same professor told everyone to attend the protests and "teach those zionists to know their place" she is a Black Latina young professor. Yep.

-another professor straight up refused to accept any assignments that mentioned Jewishness (they were assignments about our families). Gave a student who submitted nothing except a picture of a Palestinian flag full marks. Failed me. I am an all As student, btw. Forced to drop.

-the chair of the anthropology department threw my complaints wabout said professors away without due process. His social media is full of blood libel.

-had to miss my finals as I could not physically get to them due to the protests

-followed and harassed in stores

-synagogue was vandalized multiple times

-called a kike while things were thrown at me

-protestors stood outside of my apartment patio with final solution signs

-new apartment, away from campus: friends of roommates harassed me constantly, to the point I could not use common spaces. Roommates told me that's his right because it's his "political view." He didn't even live there.

-new roommate moved in, less than 48 hours before she attempts to stab me, after learning I eat kosher style. "...kosher? kosher?! FUCK YOU" stab stab, etc. Bitch that was my good knife.

-the other roommates tell me to gtfo of the home I'm renting, keeping my rent ("you people can afford to lose money") and destroy a good portion of my belongings while cursing to me random nonsense about Israel. The police took 25 minutes to get there. We live in the middle of the city.

-fun fact: I had never mentioned my political stance to these people and it's not on my face-out social media (very bare bones profiles)

-been disbelieved by everyone I told this to including the police, my school, the leasing company, and my now ex best friend of 7 years

-cursed at in a store when I asked if there was a kosher section

-told nobody likes Jews because we bring down the vibe and have a victim complex. My knuckles are healing just fine after that, btw, thank you for asking! She is not.

I don't know how to request the 7th off from my school without basically incriminating myself with a threat of violence. There is no world where I just sit there when a classmate says "happy October 7th."

Hope this helps.

[eretzyisrael]

by Jack Elbaum

Videos from recent pro-Hamas protests and encampments on university campuses show demonstrators attacking and threatening Jewish and pro-Israel individuals, as well as making explicit calls for violence.

On some campuses, administrators have decided to call in police forces to remove the encampments. Others have been more hesitant to do so or have been refused help by the city.

The encampments have reportedly made some Jewish students feel unsafe on campus. The Algemeiner documented an extensive list of pro-Hamas and antisemitic statements made at the Columbia University encampment shortly after it was set up. However, some observers have argued those statements are not representative of the movement as a whole.

Meanwhile, many voices have argued for the removal of the encampments on the grounds that members of them have attacked and threatened pro-Israel or Jewish students. But others don’t believe any physical threats or attacks have taken place. Journalist Glenn Greenwald, for example, called the idea of such attacks “a massive hoax that they’ve been perpetrating for months.”

Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the recent physical attacks and explicit calls for violence on campuses that suggest such fears are not simply a “hoax,” although debate will likely continue over how representative these incidents are of the larger anti-Israel movement.

At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a girl from a nearby school was kicked in the head and knocked unconscious. She had to go to the emergency room. 

A video shows anti-Israel protesters detaining a pro-Israel student at UCLA. When he tried to escape, they chased him down, with at least one person exclaiming “get him,” and surrounded him again — making it impossible for him to leave. 

Footage shows a woman following around a man — who was not engaging with her — and attempting to tase him.

A student journalist at Yale University was poked in the eye with a Palestinian flag by a protester. She had to be brought to the hospital.

At The George Washington University (GW), students acted out a “people’s tribunal,” where they charged the president of the university, Ellen Granberg, along with other members of the administration with various crimes. “Guillotine, Guillotine, Guillotine, Guillotine,” members of the encampment chanted.

A leader of the “people’s tribunal” said, “Bracey, Bracey [referring to school provost Christopher Bracey], we see you. You assault students too. Off to the motherf—king gallows with you.” She also said, “As you already know where I am sending her [to the guillotine], her and her f—kass bob.”

Also at GW, when pro-Israel activist and Israel Defense Forces reservist Rudy Rochman came to campus, he was surrounded and people chanted, in Arabic, “God winning, Allah will take your life,” according to his video of the incident.

At DePaul University, an anti-Israel demonstrator displayed “10 fingers, followed by seven fingers [referencing Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7], and then the throat-slitting gesture in front of Jewish students.”

A visibly Jewish person filming an encampment at City University of New York was surrounded by a group and assaulted. When his kippah fell off, a member of the mob  threatened, “Pick up the f—king hat, I’ll f—k you up.”

A group of anti-Israel protesters stole a man’s Star of David headscarf and beat him near the Met Gala in New York on Monday.

At Emory University, a protester threw a sign at the head of a police officer while a group was trying to push the officers back against a door.

Protesters were roaming around UCLA looking for Jews to harass and confront. “Where the Jews at, my n—a,” one exclaimed.

Demonstrators at Columbia University took over a building violently and held janitors there against their will. 

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Jonah Fried

MONTREAL – B’nai Brith Canada is greatly disturbed by the prospect of a “Youth Summer Program” planned by participants in the illegal anti-Israel encampment on McGill University’s property.

Flyers promoting the “revolutionary summer program,” which organizers are framing as their answer to a “transnational student callout to #Revolt4Rafah,” feature images of keffiyeh-clad fighters brandishing submachine guns. Activities would be held from June 17 to July 12, 2024, on the lower field of McGill’s downtown campus, which has been unlawfully occupied by a coalition of radical anti-Israel groups since April 27.

“This is appalling,” said Henry Topas, Quebec Regional Director for B’nai Brith Canada. “Look at how they have moved the goalposts. First, they started holding demonstrations every week, despite their tendency to spout violent and antisemitic slogans. Then, they illegally occupied the campus, bullied Jewish students, harassed McGill administrators at their homes, and broke into university buildings.

“Now, we have a ‘summer camp’ openly being advertised with images of masked men holding weapons. Is McGill going to allow its campus to be used to brainwash youths into thinking that terrorism is acceptable?”

The announcement of the planned summer program comes only days after McGill offered amnesty to all students involved in the encampment and offered to accept some of the protesters’ “demands” – even as the university continues to seek a court order authorizing police to remove the illegal occupants.

In a social-media post, the McGill chapter of Students in Solidarity with Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) promised to “redefine McGill’s ‘elite’ instutional [sic] legacy by transformining [sic] its space into one of revolutionary education.”

SPHR says in its literature that “physical activity” as well as “revolutionary lessons” will be included in the so-called “program.”

The signup sheet:

The sheet lists options such as classes on “Islamic Resistance,” “pan-Arabism,” and the so-called “Axis of Resistance” – an apparent reference to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s network of proxies dedicated to destroying Israel and the United States.

The launch of this alarming “youth program” follows a violent incident on June 6, when a group of radicals broke into and vandalized the James McGill administration building, occupying it for two hours. This marked the most extreme escalation on campus since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. Police in riot gear used necessary force to disperse the crowd and access the building, which protesters had barricaded with construction fencing and other materials.

At least 15 people were ultimately arrested in connection with the clashes, some for throwing rocks at police officers.

“The situation at McGill is well out of control and has been for some time,” said Richard Robertson, B’nai Brith Canada’s Director of Research and Advocacy. “We call on McGill and the local authorities to ensure that the university’s property is not used as a forum to incite violence against Israel and Jews.

“The plan for this so-called program further disproves the myth that these illegal encampments are about democracy and peaceful protest. They are, in fact, a hypocritical assault on Canadian values and Western norms as a whole.”

[beardedmrbean]

New York City crime stats show hate crimes in the Big Apple are on pace to rise for the fourth consecutive year, driven by a spike in antisemitic incidents.

There were 276 hate crime complaints in the city through May 31, the most recent data available. That's up from 210 in 2023. Virtually the entire increase can be seen in anti-Jewish incidents, which rose from 97 to 164 in the same period.

The rise in antisemitic incidents coincided with anti-Israel demonstrations on the city's major college campuses, including Columbia and New York universities.

"That's no coincidence," said Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. 

NYC PALESTINIAN MAN SENTENCED IN BRUTAL ANTISEMITIC BEATING BEFORE JUDGE EJECTS ANGRY SUPPORTERS FROM COURT

Antisemitic incidents have always been the most common hate crimes in New York, he said, and the recent spike comes as no surprise given the surge in campus demonstrations and widespread news coverage.

"What we've seen on college campuses has carried over into the street, so to speak," he said. "People see this, they get bombarded with these images from TV and social media and then act upon it."

Giacalone faulted university leaders for failing to address students' complaints of antisemitism early on in the anti-Israel protests that broke out on their campuses earlier this year.

"Not only did they not act, but they're also protecting their professors that have been teaching this stuff for decades," he said. "It's finally come to fruition, and it plays right into the conservative hand about how colleges have brainwashed America's youth in order to hate the country and a lot of things about it."

At Columbia, faculty reportedly assisted student agitators by physically blocking critics from a makeshift encampment on school grounds and by forming a human chain around their keffiyeh-clad pupils. The encampment finally ended after school leaders asked the NYPD to clear out a group that barricaded the university's Hamilton Hall building.

Anti-Asian hate crimes, which became a visible problem last year for New York's large Asian-American community, fell by half through May 31, 2024, compared to the prior year.

Citywide crime statistics fell slightly by 2.4% overall in May, led by a 21.1% decline in homicides. However, rapes, robberies, shootings and felony assaults all increased. Police attributed a significant portion of those bumps to crooks on motorized scooters who have been plaguing the city with snatch-and-grab robberies for months.

The robberies continue to present a growing threat, Giacalone said, with patterns involving scooters, defined by the city as two or more crimes sharing similarities, having quadrupled so far this year. 

The crimes continue to occur even after the Manhattan District Attorney's Office cracked down on a robbery ring linked to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua earlier this year. 

"It’s a whack-a-mole situation, and if they're not being held on bail, if they're not being detained for [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], then all you're doing is releasing them back out, and they even think it’s a joke, too," Giacalone said. 

Transit crime decreased by 10.6% after city and state leaders increased patrols on the subway system, revived random bag checks and called in the National Guard for assistance.

The crimes continue to occur even after the Manhattan District Attorney's Office cracked down on a robbery ring linked to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua earlier this year. 

"It’s a whack-a-mole situation, and if they're not being held on bail, if they're not being detained for [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], then all you're doing is releasing them back out, and they even think it’s a joke, too," Giacalone said. 

Transit crime decreased by 10.6% after city and state leaders increased patrols on the subway system, revived random bag checks and called in the National Guard for assistance.

"The men and women of the NYPD continue to turn the tide on overall crime in neighborhoods throughout New York City, as well as below ground in our vast subway system, by remaining nimble and strategically deploying our resources," NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban said in a statement. 

"We vow to stay in front of crime trends by directly addressing community concerns, disrupting emerging patterns and dismantling criminal networks where they operate. New Yorkers expect and deserve nothing less."

[catdotjpeg]

British police arrested a dozen University of Oxford students and scuffled with some during a pro-Palestinian sit-in at the university premises. The Oxford Action for Palestine group (OA4P) said university authorities called in police after students began their protest at administration offices, as has been happening on campuses in the UK, US and elsewhere during Israel’s devastating war on Gaza. Footage posted on social media by OA4P showed altercations between officers and students sitting in the road blockading a police van it said held detainees. “Let them go,” demonstrators chanted. Protesters have called for the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel. “It is evident the administration would rather arrest, silence, and physically assault its own students than confront its enabling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” the group said. Student Kendall Gardner accused police of “extreme violence and hostility”.

-- "‘Extreme violence and hostility’ as UK police target Oxford student protesters" by Nils Adler and Stephen Quillen for Al Jazeera, 23 May 2024 17:30 GMT

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Abigail Shrier

Published: May 3, 2024

Frat parties with offensive themes are swiftly punished. But publicly contemplate murdering Zionists? That’s a different story.

A police officer who pulls over speeding black motorists—and only black motorists—isn’t protecting “law and order.” He’s engaging in invidious discrimination. So too the university administrators who suddenly discover they are free speech absolutists only when student protesters call for the death of their Jewish classmates.

In January, a junior at Columbia University, Khymani James, told a disciplinary committee at the school that Zionists “don’t deserve to live.” “Be grateful that I’m just not going out and murdering Zionists,” he instructed them. Then, James headed back to campus, scot-free. (If he hadn’t also posted a recording of the meeting to his social media site, discovered four months later, there might never have been any repercussions at all.)

It was the sort of stunt a star quarterback for the football team could have gotten away with a generation or two ago, when college coaches might have been eager to sweep sexual assault allegations under the rug. Or the son of a major donor to the university. James apparently enjoys a level of privilege every bit as sacrosanct: as a leader of the pro-Palestinian encampment at an Ivy League school, he could threaten Jewish students at his pleasure, university codes of conduct be damned.

If there was ever doubt whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates Columbia’s code of conduct, on April 23, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) asked four Columbia University professors and administrators this explicitly. Every one of them said: “Yes, it does.” As for the encampments, they violate Columbia’s Rules of University Conduct, disruptive behavior standards, university policy regarding “tenting,” disciplinary rules against “vandalism/damage to property,” unauthorized “access/egress” rules as well as Columbia’s policy against harassment, according to a Notice to Encampment circulated by the university.

In the last two weeks, self-proclaimed pro-Palestinian protesters have set up encampments at dozens of American universities. Heedless of university restrictions against intimidation and harassment, they demonstrate where, when, and how they like. They cry “Go back to Poland,” “baby killers,” and “globalize the Intifada” at Jewish students. They wave the flags of designated terrorist groups, like Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and hold up signs that beckon “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” with an arrow pointing at Jewish counterprotesters. (Al-Qassam is the wing of Hamas that carried out the October 7 massacre.)

On campuses that have—for a decade or more—repeated ad nauseam that priority one was the creation of a “safe, inclusive, supportive, and fair” community, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators wave Hezbollah flags, wear Hamas headbands, and conceal their faces with masks. They ignore all time, place, and manner restrictions on student demonstrations set by their schools, and refuse all demands from the universities to take down their tents or to move their protests elsewhere. And at Columbia, until April 30, when protesters took over Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and the NYPD was at last called in, they almost got away with it. 

At UCLA, protesters blocked students from entering the library during the midterms, asking those who wished to enter: “Are you a Zionist?” After a Jewish girl was reportedly beaten unconscious by pro-Palestinian protesters, pro-Israel counterprotesters at UCLA arrived in masks and hoodies, shooting off fireworks, firing tear gas, and throwing objects at the pro-Hamas protesters and attempting to physically destroy the encampments. Only then did UCLA call in the police to remove the encampments.

Instead of immediately suspending the pro-Hamas protesters for breaking university rules, for weeks, university administrations instead chose to “negotiate” with the rule-breakers. At Columbia, the administration offered to review its policy on “socially responsible investing” (read: divesting from the world’s only Jewish state), and offered to “make investments in health and education in Gaza.” At Brown, the administration promised protesters that they would put divestment from Israel on the agenda. At Northwestern, the administration meekly tossed rewards, including the promise to establish a full-ride scholarship for Palestinian students and guaranteed faculty jobs for Palestinian academics. 

At Columbia, protesters rejected the offers, knowing they had the upper hand. When police arrived to break up the encampments, Columbia faculty in orange vests linked arms to form a human wall against the police, shielding the rule-breakers.

[ Faculty of Columbia University link arms to protect students inside threatened with suspension if they refused to voluntarily dismantle the pro-Palestine encampment on campus by 2 pm on April 29, 2024. ]

The lengths administrators have gone to placate, encourage, and embolden the pro-Hamas protesters in the past weeks provide a signal reminder that there are at least two sets of rules governing elite universities today: one for the favored, protected class; the other for everyone else. And in case anyone has any doubt which category Jewish students fall into, the unwillingness of universities to enforce their own codes of conduct against pro-Hamas protesters in the months since October 7 should disabuse them.

Consider how racist speech (or even racially insensitive speech) has been received on virtually any major American campus for decades. 

In 2017, an anonymous jerk put flyers up around American University’s campus. The flyers displayed a Confederate flag, a stem of raw cotton, and read “Huzzah for Dixie” and the like.

American University immediately launched into emergency response mode, treating the flyers as a criminal threat. It published CCTV video and solicited help from the public in identifying the man who posted the flyers. An all points bulletin called “CRIME ALERT” went out for the man’s arrest. The New York Times covered the incident; the words “free speech” do not appear once in the article. Instead, it approvingly noted that in a previous incident—when bananas were found hanging from nooses around campus—the FBI had been called to investigate. 

Nor could I find any evidence of any free speech organization rushing to defend the man who posted the flyers—nor the racist provocateurs in any of dozens of similar incidents. No prominent “free speech absolutists” appear to have considered the expressive value of “Huzzah for Dixie” worth defending. Nor did pundits claim that inviting law enforcement to investigate such acts of hate—i.e., “calling the police on your own students”—was in any sense inappropriate or disproportionate. In almost every single case—at schools like Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Michigan State, University of Florida, Duke, and American University—where a symbolic noose was discovered on a campus, it was treated as a criminal threat, never as speech. 

After the Huzzah for Dixie flyers were found, the president of American University quickly issued a statement: “I ask you to join me in standing together and show that we will not be intimidated. AU will respond strongly to attempts designed to harm and create fear,” she wrote. “When one of us is attacked, all of us are attacked.”

Today, in the face of months of bloodthirsty cries aimed at Jewish students (“globalize the Intifada”), university presidents line up to assure the protesters of their right to free speech. 

In the abstract, if “Huzzah for Dixie” is worth the full mobilization of university resources and law enforcement, then waving the flag of a terrorist group, or writing “burn you filthy zio” to a student chat, or telling Jewish students to “go back to Poland” where millions of Jews were murdered in gas chambers, or pulling down the American flag over a statue of John Harvard and replacing it with the Palestinian flag, or painting “Ziosgetfuckt” on UPenn’s statue of Ben Franklin, or calling Jews “Hitler’s children”—all insults hurled at Jews on campus—are at least as menacing. 

But in practice, the two types of incidents—rather, the two targets of the incidents—are treated entirely differently. Punishment is meted out swiftly and mercilessly, and with no consideration for free speech principles, any time Confederate flag flyers are posted, any time students hold culturally insensitive themed frat parties, any time colleges uncover student use of the N-word while in high school (or even a word in Mandarin that sounds like the N-word), or even when students or faculty make the familiar conservative argument that affirmative action sets black students up to fail. Rinse and repeat and repeat.

Speech on college campuses has been stultifyingly narrow—and very far from free—for decades. That pro-Hamas students cheer freely for “intifada” doesn’t make it any freer now. The fact that certain students are allowed to call for the death of their Jewish classmates does not herald a new era of free expression. It only underscores that some bigotries enjoy the official sanction of these schools, and are accepted, tolerated, and rewarded with special dispensations and, indeed, goodies.

Use of the N-word on campus or misgendering a classmate will no doubt be met with as swift punitive consequences as they have been for decades, as have a vast and more minute array of “microaggressions.” I invite anyone who doubts this to parade through any of our elite campuses with insulting cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. 

After weeks of violent, destructive protest, which left campuses trashed and buildings damaged and graffitied, administrators have at last begun to enforce their own rules and call in the police. Perhaps they felt they had no choice: commencement ceremonies loom and lawsuits, recently filed by Jewish students, are on the way. 

But watch the marble carefully as university administrators spin the cups. When a favored group is attacked, they discover a “community safety” concern with remarkable alacrity. When it’s a disfavored group, suddenly the cup reveals “free expression.” The game is fixed, and the administrators show their hands. “Community safety,” or was it “free speech”? Surprise! They don’t believe in either. 

[ailtrahq]

A war in modern times does not only include physical assault and attack but also cyber attack. As Palestinians continued their attack on Israel, the Palestinian militant group – Hamas was found to hold cryptocurrency accounts in Israel. Hamas Crypto Accounts FrozenAccording to a press release from the Israeli police, cryptocurrency accounts related to the Palestinian militant organization Hamas have been frozen, local media source Calcalist said on Tuesday.Hamas’s weekend multifaceted assault on Israel has devolved into all-out war, and Israel’s defense minister has ordered a total lockdown of the Palestinian territory of Gaza.The article claims that the Lahav 433 unit of the Israel Police’s cyber unit collaborated with the defense ministry, the nation’s intelligence services, and the cryptocurrency exchange Binance to target the aforementioned accounts. It also stated that any seized money would go to the Israeli national treasury.Efforts From Binance The cooperation between the defense ministry, intelligence agencies, the Lahav 433 cyber section of the Israel Police, and the cryptocurrency exchange Binance exemplifies a thorough strategy for combating cybercrime. By focusing on these accounts, they hope to stop illegal activity while ensuring that any money they collect goes into the Israeli national treasury, enhancing the nation’s financial security. The U.S. Commodities Futures and Trading Commission (CFTC) sued Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao in March, alleging that company officers were aware of “HAMAS transactions” on the platform.Since 2021, over 190 Binance accounts with claimed ties to terrorist organizations have been seized by Israeli police. Binance previously collaborated with Israeli authorities to shut down “a terrorism financing operation linked to Iran’s Quds Force and Hezbollah,” according to the company’s June statement.A special team from Binance has been working nonstop and in real-time over the past few days to help continue efforts to stop the financing of terrorism. The spokesman for Binance assured the public through a recent email sent to Coindesk that the company is dedicated to protecting the safety and security of the blockchain ecosystem and the larger global community through its proactive work.Binance Proving Itself These 190 Binance accounts were seized as part of a bigger initiative by Israeli authorities to stop the financing of terrorism. The cooperation between Binance and the Israeli government illustrates their dedication to stopping illegal activity and upholding the integrity of their platform. Amidst its ongoing tussle with the U.S. regulatory body, it is quite evident that Binance is actively collaborating with law enforcement agencies and regulatory bodies to identify and prevent any illicit activities on its platform. They emphasized the importance of maintaining a robust and trustworthy cryptocurrency market for all users worldwide. !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function()n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments); if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)(window,document,'script', ' fbq('init', '887971145773722'); fbq('track', 'PageView');

[jewish-privilege]

The note jammed onto a windshield in Sweden in March last year was designed to terrify. WE ARE WATCHING YOU, YOU JEWISH SWINE, read the message to a retired professor, written on paper with the logo of the Nordic Resistance Movement, a Swedish neo-Nazi organization.

In the bucolic university town of Lund, with its cobblestone streets and medieval buildings, the threat seemed jarringly out of place. More notes followed. “I was really scared,” says the professor, a small woman of 70, who is too fearful about a further attack to reveal her name in print.

Finally in October, an attacker broke into the professor’s home before dawn and set it alight. By a stroke of luck, the professor was not there. But her living and dining rooms were reduced to ash. So too were the writings of her late mother, detailing her internment in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. “For the first time in my life I have needed therapy,” she says, over tea in a sunlit café in Lund. “I have not known what to do with my life.”

The professor was targeted because she is Jewish, and in that she is not alone. Anti-Semitism is flourishing worldwide. Attacks on Jews doubled in the U.S. from 2017 to 2018, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in New York City. That included the shooting in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue last October, which killed 11 worshippers.

But the trend is especially pronounced in Europe, the continent where 75 years ago hatred of Jews led to their attempted extermination. The numbers speak plainly in country after country. For each of the past three years, the U.K. has reported the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents ever recorded. In France, with the world’s third biggest Jewish population, government records showed a 74% spike in anti-Semitic acts between 2017 and 2018. And in Germany, anti-Semitic incidents rose more than 19% last year. The findings prompted Germany’s first anti-Semitism commissioner to caution Jews in May about the dangers of wearing kippahs, the traditional skullcaps, in public.

Unsurprisingly, many Jews in Europe feel under assault. In an E.U. poll of European Jews across the Continent, published in January, a full 89% of those surveyed said anti-Semitism had significantly increased over five years. After polling 16,395 Jews in 12 E.U. countries, in a separate survey, the E.U.’s Fundamental Rights Agency concluded that Europe’s Jews were subjected to “a sustained stream of abuse.” With the decade drawing to a close, 38% of those surveyed said they were thinking about emigrating “because they no longer feel safe as Jews,” says the E.U. report.

European officials were stunned at the findings, but perhaps they ought not to have been. A complex web of factors have combined to create this moment in time for one of Europe’s oldest communities. Anti-Semitism has found oxygen among white supremacists on the far right and Israel bashers on the far left. Millions of new immigrants are settling in Europe, many from Muslim countries deeply hostile to Israel and sometimes also Jews. Exacerbated by the Internet’s ability to spread hatred, anti-Jewish feeling is surging in way that experts fear could result in a conflagration, if governments and communities fail effectively to tackle its causes.

...Not waiting for their leaders, communities across Europe have begun to take action themselves. Raised learning about Nazism, many fear what might happen if anti-Semitism is left unchallenged. In recent years, teachers, imams, rabbis and local activists have launched countless initiatives to break stereotypes, educate youth and forge links across religions. In several interviews with TIME, those fighting anti-Semitism caution that it is likely to take many years for their efforts to succeed. Still, they have begun. In Paris, Delphine Horvilleur, a rabbi and author of a recent book on anti-Semitism, says a young Muslim worshipper approached her in her synagogue after she presided over a joint Muslim-Jewish prayer service.

“He told me, ‘I grew up in a family where anti-Semitism was the music in the background,’” she says. Now, she says, “We have to ask ourselves, How can we make sure they have the ability to lower the volume?”

The horrors of World War II shamed the world into acknowledging the evils of anti-Semitism. But exposure did not cure it. Instead, say experts, the hatred simmered for years. “There was a consensus that anti-Semitism should not be voiced openly after World War II,” says Günther Jikeli, a specialist in European anti-Semitism at Indiana University, who is German. “This has gone away with time.”

The growth of the Internet provided new platforms for conspiracy theorists to circulate racist fantasies more broadly. After the financial crisis of 2008, for example, the ADL warned that anti-Semites were spreading lies on message boards that Jews were somehow to blame for the crash. One rumor went that Lehman Brothers, the vaunted U.S. investment bank founded by Jewish immigrants from Europe, had transferred $400 billion to Israeli banks prior to its collapse.

A decade on, those who monitor anti-Semitism believe each attack or conspiracy theory posted online, no matter how small, sets off others. As social media has become an ever greater and yet more unregulated part of our lives, hatred has proliferated. “It used to be that anti-Semitism peaked during times of conflict in the Middle East,” says Katharina von Schnurbein, the European Commission’s first-ever coordinator for combatting anti-Semitism. “Now the incidents remain at their highest level ever recorded.”

...Tensions sporadically erupt in violence. In Sarcelles, a French commune where Jews and Arab immigrants have lived alongside each other for decades, violence erupted during a pro-Palestinian march in 2014. Jewish businesses came under attack by demonstrators, many of them Muslim. Five years on, the Jewish residents of Sarcelles live with armed French soldiers on permanent patrol on their streets, in a measure of the government’s concern about further race riots. “We live with a sense of anxiety,” says René Taïeb, a Jewish community leader, sitting in a kosher café in Sarcelles. “We have a bag packed, ready to go, in the closet.”

But Europe’s most hardcore anti-Semites are arguably on the far right, and they are slowly joining the mainstream, as Europe’s political loyalties have fractured and polarized. In Hungary, the far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s campaign against Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros is regarded as thinly veiled anti-Semitism. And here in Sweden, ostensibly the most liberal country in Europe, a group of far-right extremists has achieved something close to political legitimacy.

...On the opposite end of the political spectrum, anti-Semitism has also flared up. During months of the so-called Yellow Vest protests in France, a handful of demonstrators in the crowd resurrected the stereotype of Jews controlling the levers of power. In February, a group of protesters accosted renowned French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut on a Paris street, screaming, “You are going to hell!” and “Go back to Tel Aviv!”

The problem is not always so overt, however. In the U.K., the opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has faced fury among some members over his alleged tolerance for anti-Semitism, especially regarding criticism of the Israeli government. The veteran leftist has said the party’s problem stems from a “small number of members and supporters,” and has pledged to stamp it out. But his defense has rung hollow to some. “The party is institutionally anti-Semitic,” says Luciana Berger, a Jewish member of Parliament who quit Labour this year over the issue. Under Corbyn, she tells TIME, “there is more of a permission for it to happen now.”

...Many Jews in Europe say it is not the major incidents but the minor ones that prove how widespread this problem is. They describe anti-Semitism as having seeped into quotidian life, in some ways complicating the effort to tackle the problem. “Unless it is very serious and you are physically attacked, there is a tendency not to call the police,” says Fredrik Sieradzki, spokesman for the Jewish community in Malmo, on Sweden’s southern border with Denmark.

...The more insidious effect is not at all visible: the choice by many Jews to remain discreet about their religious background. In numerous interviews, European Jews tell TIME that they avoid wearing a Star of David, and if they do, they tuck it under their shirts. Many also forgo affixing the traditional miniature prayer scrolls, called mezuzahs, to their doorposts, as many American Jews do, choosing instead to hang them inside. “Parents say to their kids, ‘Don’t tell your friends you are Jewish.’ Jewish teachers are afraid to tell kids they are Jewish,” says Shneur Kesselman, the Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi of Malmo, who moved from his native Detroit in 2004.

Kesselman recently installed bulletproof glass on his office window in Malmo’s synagogue, which dates from 1903. He says Jews have steadily adapted to low-level hostility. “We feel so long as our names are not on a list, we are O.K.,” he says. “There is a danger that we are accepting much too much.”

...Taïeb, the community leader in Sarcelles, says the best form of resistance might be to remind anti-Semites who Jews really are — their neighbors, and fellow citizens. He recalls watching the protest in 2014 spiral into violence and deciding to gather about 100 men to surround the synagogue. Instead of chanting Jewish prayers, as one might have expected, they decided instead to sing “La Marseillaise,” France’s national anthem. “We wanted to make the point that we are French, really French, who happen to be Jewish.”

...Yet, after a long period of feeling paralyzed by fear, the professor says she is finally venturing out. “Every day, I wake up and tell myself to go out and repair myself,” she says. Her home, rebuilt, now has security glass and alarms, far different from before the attack. “My house was wonderful, totally open, with big magnolia trees in the garden. The magnolia trees survived.”

[Read Vivienne Walt’s full piece in Time.]

[antifaintl]

2018: A Timeline of Fascist And Bigoted Extremist Violence

(CONTENT WARNING FOR EXTREME RACIST LANGUAGE, VIOLENCE) 

In keeping with our 2017 list of violence committed by bigots and fascists, we thought it smart to continue this year.  The date of each incident noted and other details will yield the original media source(s) with some web searching.  We will be updating this on the regular, so check back once in a while.  Here’s hoping we have a much smaller and less-lethal list this year! January 1, 2018: Charles William Davis II - a black army veteran and gay man - is waiting for a ride home with his friend when six men start in with homophobic slurs before escalating to a full-on six-on-two assault.  When Davis begins getting the upper hand, one of the men pulls a gun before a passerby scares them off.  Davis suffers a broken nose and several lacerations; his friend spends the first few days of 2018 in an ICU.   January 1, 2018: A shelter for unaccompanied refugee children in Spinetoli, Italy is destroyed by arsonists. January 2, 2018: 19-year-old student Blaze Bernstein is stabbed nearly two dozen times and then buried in a shallow grave in a park outside of Los Angeles.  20-year-old Samuel Woodward, a former classmate, is charged with the murder and makes statements indicating that Bernstein was murdered because of his sexual orientation. It’s later revealed that Woodward is a self-described “national socialist” and member of neo-nazi terrorist organization Atomwaffen Division.

January 3, 2018: Muslim restauranteur Abdul Basheer is randomly targeted by BJP extremists in Karnataka, India, who beat him to death in retaliation for the murder of a BJP activist hours earlier.  Basheer’s murderers admit to membership in a Hindu extremist nationalist group. January 6, 2018: A black farm worker driving his employer’s tractor in South Africa was shot dead by a security guard in an unprovoked shooting described by the province’s agriculture minister as a hate crime.

January 9, 2018: After being vandalized repeatedly with swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti the week before, a grocery store near Paris is set on fire by arsonists, causing extensive damage.     January 10, 2018:  Vicky Guiterrez, an immigrant and transgender woman, is killed when her LA apartment mysteriously is engulfed in flames.  Her friends claim that the attack was hate-motivated.  An autopsy determines that Guiterrez was stabbed to death and police charge Kevyn Ramirez with her murder. January 11, 2018: 31-year-old Aryan Nations gang member Ronnie Lucas Wilson is stopped for speeding in Knoxville, TN and opens fire on the police officer with a shotgun, seriously wounding him, before driving away.  Lucas remains at large until being apprehended two days later. January 11, 2018:  Believing that he is being followed, Alabama resident Lorenzo Freeman pulls into a parking lot where he is confronted by the driver of the other vehicle, who jumps out yelling racial slurs at Freeman, then pulls out a gun and fires at Freeman, killing him.   January 12, 2018: Over 30 armed Casa Pound fascists attack people putting up anti-racist posters in Genova, Italy, stabbing one of them twice in the back.   January 13, 2018: A meeting on Roma culture in a bar in Naples, Italy is disrupted when dozens of members of the racist group Forze Nuova crash the event, smashing up the bar and seriously injuring the woman who had organized the event. January 14, 2018: 44-year-old Manuel Lewis runs up to a table outside of a Tucson’s Starbucks where seven Muslim women are sitting and drinking coffee.  Shouting Islamophobic slurs and curses at them, Lewis knocks two of the women down to the ground, flips their table end-over-over, and smashes one woman’s smartphone.  A bystander stops Lewis from getting away and when police arrive to arrest Lewis, they found that his is carrying multiple knives.   January 19, 2018: 37-year-old neo-nazi Jacob Albert Laskey, who had previously served a prison sentence for throwing swastika-engraved rocks through the windows of a synagogue during services and conspiring to murder a witness, stabs a 41-year-old man in a Creswell trailer park.   January 19, 2018: After enduring years of harassment by Hindu extremists, the body of Christian pastor V. Gideon Periyasamy is found hanging from a rope in his hut in Chennai, India. January 20, 2018: As he was leaving the home of his date, 26-year-old Dashawn Horne is hit in the back of the head twice with an aluminum baseball bat by  an 18-year-old assailant.  As he laid bleeding and unconscious on the ground, the assailant said “this is what happens when you bring black people around here,” then struck him several more times with the baseball bat, then recorded himself yelling “Nigger” at Horne.  

January 21, 2018: Fascists in Thessaloniki, Greece set fire to a historic building occupied by leftists, gutting it.   January 23, 2018: A 25-year-old man makes several attempts to run over an Arab man sweeping the sidewalk in Beitar Illit after speaking with him and discovering he was Arab.  The racist driver later confessed to several other attacks on Palestinians as well as vandalizing Palestinian-owned vehicles. January 24, 2018:  A man approaches a student at Cupertino College yelling homophobic slurs.  He punches the student in the face and then flees. January 25, 2018: A car belonging to an Arab men is torched in Jerusalem, with “Death to the Arabs” and other racist graffiti spray-painted on the wall next to it.   January 26, 2018: After hearing someone calling for help, 58-year-old Thomas Williams leaves his Scottsdale, AZ apartment to investigate.  He is immediately confronted by a Keaton Formica, a 30-year-old neighbor, who begins calling Williams a nigger and stabbing him.  Williams is stabbed three times and manages to escape by rolling underneath a parked truck. January 26, 2018: when her Lyft driver stops to pick up a man outside of a gay bar in Miami Beach, 24-year-old Sherry Shelsey Moody becomes infuriated and begins screaming homophobic slurs at the new passenger, then stabbed him in the face with one of her high-heeled shoes, puncturing his forehead.

January 27, 2018: Two men in the bathroom of a Sacramento bar are physically assaulted by a man yelling homophobic slurs at them before fleeing.  One man is injured so badly that he will likely lose one of his eyes.   January 30, 2018: 59-year-old Jon Holte knocks on the door of a Latino family in Wisconsin and shoves the door in as they open it, forcing one man backwards and injuring him.  Holte then falsely claims to be an ICE agent and undercover deputy sheriff there “because of all the illegals.” He is charged with several hate crimes.

January 31, 2018: Two teenagers randomly ambush and assault an eight-year-old Jewish boy while he is walking to a tutoring class in a Paris suburb. January-February 2018: Members of the “Aryan Circle” and “Aryan Brotherhood of Texas” kidnap a man they suspect ripped them off in a drug deal.  They hold the man for several days, chopping off part of his index finger with a hatchet and trying to bludgeon him unconscious.  They then order an associate to take the man to another location and murder him, but the man escapes.   January-February 2018: 31-year-old Shane Sleeper makes a series of terrorist threats against several gay nightclubs in Chicago as well as the staff working there.  He is charged with several misdemeanors which are later upgraded to a litany of terrorism, hate crime, and stalking charges.  Sleeper was last arrested in 2015 for beating the owner of a gay nightclub in Atlanta. February 1, 2018: Ankit Saxena a 23-year-old Hindu photographer in West Dehli, India, is attacked by relatives of his Muslim girlfriend, who slit his throat, leaving him to bleed to death on the said of the road. February 3, 2018: 28-year-old white supremacist and failed candidate for the anti-immigrant Northern League party Luca Traini goes on a two-hour drive-by shooting  spree, seriously wounding six African migrants. February 4, 2018: Four African migrants in Pavia, Italy are attacked by a group of two dozen neo-nazis.   February 4, 2018: Transgender woman Celine Walker is shot to death in a Jacksonville hotel.     February 4, 2018: The Hungarian Cultural Center in  Uzhhorod, Ukraine is firebombed.  Three weeks later, it is firebombed a second time.  Police arrest  Michal Prokopowicz, 28, along with two other Poles associated with fascist groups throughout Europe.  At trial, Prokopowicz claims to have been acting on instructions from far-right German journalist and former AfD consultant  Manuel Ochsenreiter. February 4, 2018: 32-year-old Izmir Koch asks a crowd of people outside of a Cincinnati restuarant whether any of them are Jewish.  When a man answers in the affirmative, Koch runs up to him and punches him in the head, knocks him to the ground, and begins kicking him, along with some of his friends, fracturing the man’s eye socket.

February 6, 2018: 35-year-old transgender woman Tonya Harvey is shot dead in Buffalo, NY.

February 7, 2018: 36-year-old John Ross Niko is driving his truck through Keizer, Oregon when he spots a Latino man standing on the sidewalk.  Niko jumps out of his truck and approaches the man, saying “why are you standing here? Go back to Mexico!” before punching him in the face.  Niko had previously harassed the victim’s son and attempted to run him over.  When placed under arrest, Niko protested that he had “been attacked by an illegal” who “does not speak English” and admitting to harassing the man’s son.

February 9, 2018: Reigning Mr. Gay Belgium winner Jaimie Deblieck is attacked from behind on the streets of his hometown of Roeselare by assailiants yelling “fucking homo!” as they stomped on him. February 9, 2018: Dalit law student Dilip Saroj is beaten to death by four men armed with clubs, bricks, and chairs after Saroj’s leg brushed against the leg of another man in a crowded restaurant in Allahbad, India.  

February 10, 2018: A 19-year-old Muslim woman is speaking to a nurse in a Michigan hospital emergency room when 57-year-old John Deliz runs up behind her and punches her repeatedly in the head before he is subdued by hospital security.   February 10, 2018: Portland tattoo shop owner Joseph “Dymond” Vinci - who has publicly proclaimed his support of both the extreme right Three Percenter and Patriot Prayer gangs - confronts a homeless man in the parking lot of his business.  Vinci, who had bragged to neighbors about “beating the fuck out of” another homeless man three days prior, beats the man, 38-year-old Richard Hanley, with a metal police baton.  When a stunned Hanley produces a steak knife, Vince drops the baton, draws a pistol, and shoots Hanley dead.  

February 14, 2018: 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz walks into the high school he was expelled from with an assault rifle and murders 17 of his former classmates.  Cruz was known to his former classmates for making frequent anti-semitic, homophobic, and xenophobic comments publicly and over Instagram and had previously threatened to murder antifa.  His former classmates remember him wearing “really extreme” patriotic t-shirts and a MAGA hat and deriding Muslims as terrorists.  He had carved swastikas into several of the spare magazines he was carrying for his AR-15 assault rifle.   February 14, 2018: Declaring that “I hate turban people,” a man puts a gun in the face of Gurjeet Singh, a Sikh man, father and Uber driver.   February 17, 2018: A 70-year old men enters a refugee shelter in Heilbronn, Germany armed with a knife and stabs three refugees, seriously wounding a 17-year-old Afghan refugee.   February 17, 2018: While returning to their car after eating dinner at a Carmel, CA. restaurant, a Muslim family is nearly killed when Robert Budden attempts to run them down in his Porsche, hitting husband & father Amro Radwan.  Budden then gets out of his car, insults Radwan, and then drives into him a second time. February 20, 2018: While waiting for a Nottingham bus, 18-year-old Egyptian  engineering student Mariam Moustafa is set upon by a mob of six girls without any provocation.  Moustafa dies from her injuries three weeks later   February 22, 2018: A Sikh environmentalist waiting outside of British Parliament to speak to a politician is randomly attacked by a passing man, who attempts to pull off his turban while yelling “Muslim go home!” at him. February 23, 2018: An assailant fires several shots into the windows of Las Vegas’ only trans bar, seriously injuring a black trans woman inside.   February 23, 2018: 45-year-old trans woman Phylicia Mitchell is shot in the chest outside of her Clevland, OH. home.  She is found dead on her living room floor. February 25, 2018:  Eight neo-nazis armed with iron bars storm a social center in Piraeus, Greece - injuring five people in the center - three seriously. February 25, 2018: 57-year-old Daniel Owen Kelley approaches a 19-year-old Latino flower vendor in Anaheim and berates him with racial slurs before kicking over his flower bucket and beating him with a metal cane.  Kelley was previously convicted of a hate crime in 2015. February 25, 2018: A 21-year-old university student is dragged out of the Rust bar in Niagara Falls, NY by several employees who use brass knuckles to beat him until a passing police officer intervenes.  The student was targeted for bringing his girlfriend, a black woman, into the bar.  The attack left him with several broken facial bones and a concussion.  Rust is owned by the wife of active white supremacist Todd A. Brio, who frequents the bar.   March 2018 - 23-year-old Mark Conditt - a home-schooled Christian extremist and former member of a bizarre, militia-like organization for Christian extremist teens - builds seven parcel bombs and delivers them to black and Latino neighborhoods, killing two black men and severely injuring a black woman and a Latina woman, as well as three other unidentified victims.  Conditt killed himself by detonating a bomb inside his own vehicle as a SWAT team approached him. Conditt had previously posted online statements against abortion and calling for homosexuality to be made illegal.

March 2, 2018: An teenager in Cardiff, Wales receives a life sentence for plotting a terror attack at a Justin Bieber concert in the name of ISIS/Daesh.  

March 3, 2018: A 27-year-old Louisiana man smashes his truck into a convenience store and robs it at gunpoint, later confessing to police that he targeted the store because the owners were Muslim (the owners are actually Sikhs).   March 3, 2018: The Spanish actor  and polyglot Marius Makon enters a Madrid café where a patron calls him a “black piece of shit” before smashing him in the head twice with a beer bottle, cutting his head open.   March 4, 2018: After MAGA hat-wearing “proud boy” bigots arrived at a left-wing bookstore at the University of California San Diego and threatened to burn the bookstore down, the bookstore was broken into, vandalized, and set on fire. March 5, 2018: 28-year-old Benjamin Morrow dies after blowing himself up in his apartment/armoury/bomb laboratory in Beaver Dam, WI.  Among the debris, police recover several firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition, body armour, masks, and white supremacist literature.  The blast that killed Morrow was so powerful that twenty different fire departments responded and the entire apartment building had to be destroyed.   March 6, 2018: Six members of a suspected neo-nazi terror cell in Attica, Greece are arrested on explosives and arson charges. March 6, 2018: A former US Army interpreter and Afghan refugee has to have his leg amputated after 68-year-old Perry George Nicolopoulos drove his car right at the refugee & his wife and three-year-old son.  Nicolopoulos missed the former interpreter’s family but crushed his leg against another vehicle, then backed up and rammed him a second time.  The interpreter’s leg is later amputated.   March 10, 2018: 21-year-old self-professed white supremacist Shane Fletcher is arrested by police after they discover his plans to commit mass murder by driving a rented van through spectators at a medieval-style football match.  Police also discover plans for making bombs and napalm and had previously told probation officers that he dreamt of carrying out a mass shooting at a mosque.   March 13, 2018: Colorado resident William Ray Garcia begins screaming racial slurs at a black motorist in a vehicle two cars ahead of his because the black motorist looked at him.  Garcia soon he begins pursuing the other vehicle, then rams it in an attempt to force it off the road.  Police charge Garcia with criminal mischief, reckless endangerment, bias-motivated crimes, child abuse, second-degree assault and reckless driving.

March 14, 2018: Afro-Brazilian councilwoman Marielle Franco is assassinated, along with her driver, in Rio de Janeiro as she left an event when gunmen shoot her in the head four times. The 38-year-old  member of the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), spent her political career advocating for women, LGBTQ rights, and police accountability .   March 16, 2018: 56-year-old Richard Gallegos pulls what appears to be a gun and points it at three people in a New Orleans neighbourhood, shouting, “I’m going to kill all you niggers!”  Police later confiscate a BB gun and knife when they arrest him.    

March 16, 2018: An 89-year-old Sikh man steps out of his car in a Calgary grocery store parking lot and is immediately set upon by an unidentified middle-aged white man who shoves him repeatedly until he falls to the ground, knocking the turban off his head and sustaining injuries to his hands and head. March 17, 2018: 52-year-old John Carothers pours lighter fluid over the head of 40-year-old Robert Miller before setting him on fire, killing Miller and burning down part of the Murfreesboro halfway house both were living in.  From jail, Carothers wrote to a white supremacist group admitting to targeting Miller because he was black. March 22, 2018: A group of masked men wielding clubs and tasers storm into a classroom at Montpelier University in France and attack the students occupying it as part of a protest.  The armed thugs - who are later identified as members of the fascist student group G.U.D. + sympathetic faculty - severely injure four people in the attack.  Philippe Pétel, the university’s dean of law, had let the thugs in through a back door and cheered them on as they fractured student’s skulls, later claiming in an interview that the violent attack was necessary and that he was proud of the armed attackers.  He is later compelled to resign. March 22, 2018: A neo-nazi terror group smashes their way into a community space for Afghan refugees in Athens, Greece, destroying computers and equipment before dousing it in petrol and setting it on fire.   March 23, 2018: The body of 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll is discovered in her apartment.  Ms. Knoll had been beaten and stabbed to death and her apartment was set on fire.  Police arrested two men - one of whom was previously convicted for the sexual assault of the daughter of Ms. Knoll’s domestic helper.  Police believe Ms. Knoll was targeted because she was Jewish.  

March 24, 2018: A gay couple on vacation in Mexico are confronted by a man as they walk through a Puerto Vallarta park holding hands.  The man pulls out a gun and shoots one of the men, seriously injuring him. March 26, 2018: 28-year-old trans woman Amia Tyrae Berryman is shot to death in a motel room in Baton Rouge, LA. March 28, 2018:  Sibtulla Rashidi, a sixteen-year-old sone of a Muslim imam in West Bangal, India, is abducted by a mob of Hindu extremists and beaten to death.

March 29, 2018: After being warned by upper-caste villagers to sell his horse because Dalits “are not allowed to ride horses,” 21-year-old Pradeep Rathod is found murdered, his murdered horse beside him, in Gujarat state, India

March 30, 2018: An international student from India waiting for an Ottawa city bus after work is approached by two white men in their 20s who attack him, drag him to the ground, and rip the turban off of his head while yelling racist slurs at him.   March 31, 2018: 21-year-old CJ Salmon viciously attacks a gay man outside of a bar, knocking the man and a woman standing beside him to the ground and punching him repeatedly in the face, after the man spoke to a group of people Salmon was walking with.   April 2, 2018: A Dalit youth is shot to death by Gujjars during escalating ethnic tension in Shobhapur, India April 3, 2018: A Muslim woman on her way to class at a Kansas City community college is confronted by a man who makes an Islamophobic comment, then punches her in the face, sending her tumbling down a flight of stairs.   April 5, 2018: A 25-year-old Muslim woman driving to her Houston home from her nursing job is nearly sideswiped by a truck.  When she gets out to inspect her vehicle, the truck U-turns and two white men jump out and confront her, yelling  “Oh my God, it’s a raghead,” “It’s an fucking raghead,” “sand nigger” and other derogatory terms.  As the woman tries to get back in her vehicle, one of them men pulls out a knife and stabs her. April 5, 2018: A gay man visiting Rome is robbed at knifepoint by four neo-nazis who beat him so severely he is rushed to the nearest hospital by ambulance. April 8, 2018: A gay couple are attacked by four men calling them homophobic slurs after Miami’s gay pride parade. April 8, 2018: Three men attack a gay couple in Washington, D.C. while shouting homophobic slurs at them.  One man was beaten unconscious and both were hospitalized with serious injuries. April 12, 2018: Two arsonists attempt to set a mosque in Nablus, West Bank on fire after spraypainting racist slogans on it in Hebrew.   April 12, 2018: 14-year-old Brennan Walker gets lost making his way to school and knocks on the door of a home to ask for directions.  When the woman who answers the door sees that Walker is black, she calls her husband, who rushes to the door with a gun and shoots at Walker, missing him.  Walker manages to flee without being shot as the woman asks her husband (as recorded by their own security system) “Why did “these people” choose my house?”  Retired Detroit firefighter Jeffrey Ziegler is charged with Assault with Intent to Murder; and Felony Firearms.   April 12, 2018: Police search the home of 19-year-old Jakub Zak, a supporter of the neo-nazi group Patriot Front (which splintered from the organization Charlottesville terrorist James Alex Fields Jr. belonged to), recovering five semi-automatic pistols Zak had illegally acquired, as well as ammunition. April 13, 2018: Several attendees at a party in Delaware turn on a 23-year-old man at the party, making homophobic remarks about him before physically assaulting him, breaking his leg.   April 13, 2018: Three men and two women randomly attack a Hasidic Jewish man walking down the street, beating him bloody. April 14, 2018: A gang of 20 men confront four Polish immigrants walking to catch a bus in Hull, UK after they overhear them speaking Polish.  The mob  throw bottles at the four, then chase the men back down the street until catching one, who they kick and beat with a nail-studded wooden board, hospitalizing him.   April 15, 2018: Shouting “who you eyeballing, nigger?,” 34-year-old Maurice Diggins and 27-year-old Dusty Leo jump out of their pickup truck in a Biddeford, ME 7-11 parking lot and smash a black man in the head, breaking his jaw and knocking him to the ground.  As the man got to his feet and ran away, the men shouted at him “go on, run nigger!” then chased after him in their truck.  Both are charged with aggravated assault and hate crimes. April 16, 2018: Police in Vernon Hills, IL. search the home of 19-year-old Patriot Front supporter Jakub Zak and seize several rifles, handguns, and parts designed to convert firearms into fully-automatic machine guns.   April 16, 2018: Christians leaving a church in Pakistan are fired upon by masked gunmen on motorcycles.  Two are killed and four others injured.  Daesh claims responsibility for the attack. April 17, 2018: 26-year-old Nicholas Rose is arrested by Orange Country police after his own family turns him in for plotting to murder prominent Jewish community members in the area.  Police recover ammunition, a “kill list” of local Jewish leaders as well as a written plan titled “Killing My First Jew” and a variety of anti-Semitic literature.  Police believe that Rose was also planning to commit terrorist acts against local Greek and Russian Orthodox churches because he believe them to be “sympathetic to the Jewish cause.”     April 18, 2018: A 23-year-man racially abuses and physically assaults two racialized women on a street in Manchester, injuring both of them.  He goes on to assault three other people before passerby apprehend and hold him until police arrive. April 20, 2018: A man wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat began verbally abusing a 24-year-old Mexican man on the NYC subway with racial slurs, claiming that he’s “taking American jobs.”  When the Mexican man gets off at the next stop, the abusive man follows him and assaults him on the platform, then pushes him onto the subway tracks before fleeing. April 20, 2018: A neo-nazi gang in Kiev wielding tear gas canisters, knives, and firearms attack an encampment of homeless Roma, injuring several and then setting fire to their camp in what was described as a pogrom. April 21, 2018: 40-year-old Jeremiah Greenwood throws rocks at the parked car of a Colorado couple, then proceeds to knocking their mailbox off their post.  When the couple come outside to investigate the commotion, Greenwood begins yelling racial slurs about their immigration status, pulls a knife, and tried to stab them.  The couple revealed to the arresting officers that Greenwood had targeted them for racial abuse in the past.   April 21, 2018: 40-year-old James Vincent purchases some ice cream at a store in Flatbush, NY.  Then, upon leaving the store, he spots a 52-year-old Jewish man leaving a synagogue.  Vincent yells “you fucking Jew!” at the man, then follows him, yelling anti-Semitic slurs at him until deciding to repeatedly punch the man and strangle him.  Vincent has been charged with hate crimes. April 22, 2018:  29-year-old Travis Jeffrey Reinking - a self-proclaimed “sovereign citizen” and purveyor of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories who hurled racial slurs at shoppers in a Publix supermarket the week prior, walks into a Tennessee Waffle House with an assault rifle, killing three black patrons and one Latino patron. April 22, 2018: A transgender Afghan woman living in Shewa, Pakistan, is attacked by a group of armed men, who beat her before shooting her dead. April 23, 2018: 25-year-old Alek Minassian - an extremist misogynist that had published facebook posts declaring an “incel rebellion” and praising misogynist & mass murderer Elliot Rodger - drives a rented van down the sidewalk of a busy Toronto street, killing ten people and injuring thirteen others.   April 26, 2018: Screaming that his is going to “kill you black bastards,” 49-year-old Christopher Jones points a pistol at two boys, aged ten and sixteen, then chases them down an alley and into their garden in an unprovoked attack.  Jones is sentenced to four years in prison. April 26, 2018: A 28-year-old lieutenant in the German army is arrested after police discover his fingerprints match those on a loaded pistol planted in a public bathroom in a Vienna airport.  The police investigation uncovers the soldier’s plot to falsely claim refugee status in Germany using a fake identity and then commit a series of assassinations and terror attacks, which he hoped would be blamed on refugees. April 28, 2018: When a Hasidic rabbi says good morning to him while passing him on a street in Brooklyn, 40-year-old James Vincent responds with a litany of anti-Semitic slurs and death threats.  Vincent then beats the rabbi to the ground, fracturing his ribs, and strangles him.  Vincent has been previously arrested for hate crimes. April 29, 2018: A gay couple in Sydney are pursued by a man screaming homophobic insults at them.  The man soon attacked the couple, breaking the arm of one of them so severely he required surgery and the insertion of supportive pins. April 29, 2018: Two journalists in Fretterode, Germany are spotted by neo-nazis who chase them down and smash up their car.  The journalists are stabbed and beaten with a large wrench.  Two 24-year-old neo-nazis have been charged with assault and robbery. April 29, 2018: Two Jewish university students are walking home when two other students begin taunting them with shouted comments like “fuck the Jews!”  The pair are pursued by the anti-Semites, who assault them at the door of their home.

May 1, 2018: A 30-year-old Muslim woman is beaten unconscious in front of her four children in a McDonald’s in Liverpool.  Her attacker mocked her accent, told her to “go back to your own country,” and attempted to rip the hijab off of her head before beating her unconscious. May 1, 2018: 80-year-old Fredric Allan Shinerock decided to jump out of his car and criticize the parking of a young black woman at a university parking lot by yelling at her, “You don’t belong (unintelligible)! Go back to South LA! Shut your fucking ugly, nigger mouth. You’re a nigger!”  When the women took strong exception to the racist abuse, Shinerock punched her and attempted to kick her repeatedly.  Shinerock was charged with misdemeanor battery, with the event being investigated by police as a hate crime. May 1, 2018: A 22-year-old Jewish rabbinical student walking home in Brooklyn, NY is assaulted by two men who target him because he was speaking in Hebrew on his cell phone.  Darren Morgan, 20 and Justin George, 19 are charged with a hate crime for the assault.

May 3, 2018: While talking on the phone to his son, a 28-year-old Syrian refugee in Edinburgh is confronted by assailants demanding to know “why are you still here?  Why are you not back in your country?”  before stabbing him six times.  Shabaz Ali, the victim, is left permanently disabled by the attack; his assailant, 18-year-old Sean Gorman, receives a seven-year prison sentence.

May 5, 2018: Sonya King, a 5-foot-tall Muslim woman working as a food delivery driver, drops a meal off at 54-year-old Rick Painter’s home.  Painter proceeds to strangle her with her own niqab.  When Painter does not respond to her pleas and continues choking her, King fights for her life, gouging Painter in the eye and stabbing him with her car keys until she is able to flee.     May 5, 2018: Florida man Dustin Hughes, whose facebook profile picture was an image of him with a confederate flag and the slogan “heritage not hate,” repeatedly phoned a local mosque threatening to blow it up and murder all the worshippers there.  At 4:06pm that day, he also left a voice message, in which he said “You fucking Muslim piece of shit. I planted a bomb in your temple; I’m gonna blow your fucking temple up, you fucking Muslim piece of shit. Where you guys have your sanctuary and worship Allah, I’m gonna blow that motherfucker up. l have a detonator, l’m gonna cause that motherfucker to go off, you guys are all gonna be up in flames after l’m done with you! You guys wanna come here and cause mayhem to America, well, I’m gonna cause mayhem to your religion ‘cause your religion is nothing but lies. Lies, lies, lies from the Devil! Where’s Allah now?”  Hughes has been charged with hate crimes and pleads guilty in June.     May 5, 2018: A 38-year-old gay woman leaving a nightclub in Co. Tyrone, Ireland is confronted by a 17-year-old boy who assaults her then uses a cordless drill to drill a hole in her skull, leaving her gravely injured.   May 6, 2018: A fourteen-year-old boy leaving a Queens yeshiva is approached by a man who calls him “Jew boy” and then punches him in the face.   May 6, 2018: Two men jump out of a car outside of a popular gay nightclub in east London and begin punching and kicking clubgoers.  They run back to their car and return with two bottles full of acid, which they spray indiscriminately on clubgoers, seriously injuring three men in their teens and twenties.

May 7, 2018: Natasha and Shala Fross, two 26-year-old sisters, attack a Latina woman as she stands in front of her Colorado home, discussing home renovations with a neighbor, dragging her by her hair as they shouted racist slurs at her.  The two sisters are charged with a hate crime.

May 10, 2018: A high school student and his mom are driving down the highway when a pickup truck tries to run them off the road, screaming “get out of our country, you niggers!” at them.  The truck succeeds in running them off the road and then the truck’s five passengers jump out and smash the car up with baseball bats, sticks, and (apparently) a frying pan.   May 11, 2018: A 19-year-old woman standing with friends outside a gay club in Dorset, England, tries to avoid an escalating confrontation with a man who accosted them by steering her friends away.  The man, Martin Keith Stephens, responds by grabbing her by the hair and throwing her against a wall after threatening to kill her.  Stephens also told the victim that if he spent “even a day in jail, she would pay for it.” May 12, 2018: 55-year-old Vincent Joseph O'Sullivan is arrested by police in Guerneville, CA after twice stealing the local chamber of commerce’s rainbow flag and then escalating to threatening to detonate a pipe bomb in a town grocery store in a plot to kill and injure many of the LGBTQ+ tourists that flock there for vacation. May 12, 2018: A Sikh man and father of six is shot and killed as he sits in his car.  20-year-old Broderick Malik Jones Roberts is charged with two counts of felony murder. May 13, 2018: A 36-year-old father and Pakistani migrant is set upon by five thugs in Athens, Greece near a police station.  The attackers knock him to the ground, punching him and kicking him in the head. May 13, 2018: 36-year-old trans man Nino Fortson is shot dead in the street in Atlanta, GA. May 14, 2018: A gang of six neo-nazis kidnap 13-year-old Zavion Parker from his school bus stop.  Parker, who is black, is forced into a truck and then taken to an abandoned building where he is beaten and robbed.  HIs assailants use his cell phone to send text messages to his mother threatening to hang him.  He manages to escape and a passerby in a car rescues him and calls police, who continue to investigate. May 14, 2018: A 35-year-old man driving in Virginia is forced to stop when a pickup truck cuts him off and slams on the brakes.  As the driver of the truck yells at him “you don’t belong here!” and “Go back to your own country!” the passenger jumps out, pulls the man out of his vehicle and assaults him.  The man is able to escape and drives away, with the pickup truck in pursuit.  He manages to call police, who identify and arrest 56-year-old Jimmy Lynn Greer and his 25-year-old Dustin David Greer on hate crime charges. May 16, 2018: While enjoying a walk in the French countryside, a Muslim couple and their three children encounter a racist woman shouting racial slurs at them.  The racist woman then fetches her husband, who fires a shotgun at the family but misses them. May 17, 2018: 25-year-old Shai Jevan Lewis walks down a street in Sydney, Australia, randomly punching and kicking Asians he encounters, including multiple women and a 70-year-old man.  Several of his victims sustain facial injuries and Lewis is charged with seven counts of assault and grievous bodily harm.

May 18, 2018: Two Muslim men in Madhya Pradesh, India are attacked by a HIndu mob who accused them of transporting beef.  One man is beaten to death by the mob while the other man is beaten into a coma.

May 19, 2018: A mosque located in a converted apartment in a residential apartment building in Hässelholm, Sweden is broken into and set on fire.  Five families are forced to evacuate their adjoining apartments during the blaze, which completely guts the mosque. May 19, 2018: Yiannis Boutaris, the 75-year-old mayor of Thessaloniki, Greece, is met with an angry mob of Golden Dawn supporters as he tries to attend an event commemorating the mass murder of Greeks in the early 1900s.  Upon his arrival, Boutaris receives jeers about his association with LGBTQ+ and Jewish people, then is pelted with rocks and bottles, knocking him to the ground where he is kicked as he lies on the pavement.  Boutaris is hospitalized for multiple injuries.  

May 19, 2018: A Latino woman buying strawberries at a Turlock, CA. fruit stand is approached by a white man who calls her several racist slurs then punches her in the face. May 20, 2018: A gay couple in Edinburgh, Scotland are brutally beaten outside of a nightclub for holding hands. May 20, 2018: 40-year-old  Mukesh Vaniya, a Dalit ragpicker in  Surendranagar, India, is attacked by the owner of a factory and four associates.  They tie Vaniya to the outside of the factory and film themselves taking turns whipping him to death, leaving his body lying on the ground for his wife to find. May 23, 2018: 43-year-old Vincent Teunissen, an ex-soldier and member of the extremist Islamophobe terror group “Anti Terror Brigade Special Forces,” is arrested after police raid his parent’s home in Lingewaard, Netherlands where he lives and seize evidence of his intention to launch a terrorist attack against Muslims. May 25, 2018: 33-year-old trans woman Roxana Hernández flees violence in Honduras only to be beaten to death while in ICE custody in New Mexico. May 26, 2018: Fascists in Dresden, Germany attack a refugee shelter at 4AM, pelting it with rocks and bottles and attempting to set it on fire while its residents huddled in fear. May 26, 2018: A gay couple in Denver, Colorado are approached by a man yelling homophobic slurs at them.  The man stabs both men repeatedly as they try to flee. May 26, 2018: After participating in a xenophobic rally in Aix-en-Provence, France, five members of the white supremacist Social Bastion group go on to randomly assault two racialized motorists passing by them. May 26, 2018: When two foreign women are confronted by a man screaming racial abuse at them in the streets of Bratislava, Slovakia, their Filipino companion comes to their aid. He is beaten to death by the racist. May 27, 2018: 40-year-old Robert Kelly, an off-duty Colorado cop, approaches a black man on the street and begins abusing him with racial slurs, then punches him several times in the face.  Kelly is later arrested and charged with assault and hate crimes and pleads guilty to disorderly conduct in a plea deal.  

May 29, 2018: After covering a school in Newport, Wales with nazi graffiti two days prior, a 23-year-old man returns to set the building on fire and is arrested.

June 1, 2018: 38-year-old trans woman Antash'a English is murdered in a drive-by shooting in Jacksonville, FL.  

June 2, 2018: Two gay man run for their lives after being set upon by a homophobic mob of around 20 people chasing them after the Salt Lake City Pride festivities.  They flee into a nearby café where the shopkeeper, coming to the aid of the two men, is thrown by the mob back into the door so hard it breaks the hinges and punched multiple times.  The shopkeeper fights back and manages to keep the homophobes out of the café. June 2, 2018: While out collecting scrap metal in an abandoned building, three migrant farm workers are shot at by Antonio Pontoriero in Calabria, Italy, who kills 29-year-old trade unionist Soumaila Sacko.   June 3, 2018: a 39-year-old woman walking to a bus stop in Bolton, UK with her two young daughters and teenaged son encounters a man who hurls racial insults at them.  When her son objects, the man attacks him.  The woman intervenes and is beaten unconscious.  She remains in critical condition in the hospital.   June 3, 2018: 56-year-old Joseph Minor approaches his neighbour in the parking lot of their Daytona, Florida apartment complex, calling him a “nigger,” and telling him that he hates him and that “his days are numbered.”  When his neighbour retreats into his apartment, Minor sets his car on fire.   June 3, 2018: A 25-year-old man walking through Queens, NY is chased by two men yelling homophobic slurs, who knock him down from behind and beat him. June 4, 2018: Two men drive through a Romani encampment in Amfissa, Greece, firing a shotgun through the window of their truck and killing a 13-year-old Romani girl. June 5, 2018: Around 4AM, arsonists set fire to both a mosque and a Sikh temple in Leeds.  Firefighters are able to extinguish both blazes before significant damage occurs. June 5, 2018: A 14-year-old black boy is getting off his school bus in North Brookfield, MA.  Two masked men yelling racist slurs at him drive by in a Jeep and throw a hatchet at him, barely missing his head. June 5, 2018: A mob of at least ten masked neo-nazis break into the  AZ Kim Hubert center in Salzwedel, Germany.  They head immediately to the 2nd floor and attack people sleeping there with axes, clubs, and pepper spray while also trashing the center before making their escape.   June 7, 2018: Former members of the neo-nazi Azov Battalion, armed with axes and sledgehammers, attack a Roma encampment in Kiev, Ukraine, driving the occupants out while livestreaming the whole incident.  Ukraine police watch but fail to intervene. June 9, 2018: Two gay men in  St. Petersburg, Russia for the World Cup are attacked by homophobes, leaving one of them with a broken jaw and serious brain injuries. June 9, 2018: Two gay men in Oakland, CA’s gay district are bludgeoned from behind with an iron bar, then punched, kicked, and dragged by an unknown assailant in two separate, unprovoked attacks.  One of the victims has to undergo reconstructive surgery to repair the damage to his jaw and cheekbone.

June 14, 2018: Three men in a car fire a compressed air pistol at two refugee boys walking on the sidewalk, hitting and injuring one.

June 16, 2018: The only mosque in Edson, Canada is set on fire by an arsonist caught on videotape armed with a jerry can, arriving just hours after worshippers departed. June 17, 2018: Wielding a 10-inch kitchen knife, a 47-year-old woman chases Jewish schoolchildren around a North London neighbourhood screaming “I want to kill all you Jews!”  She is apprehended by volunteers in a local Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood watch program and then arrested by police on hate crime charges.

June 17, 2018: While waiting for some pedestrians to cross the street in Cagliari, Italy, a Dominican youth on a motor scooter is ambushed and chased  by three assailants shouting racist abuse at him, then beating him so badly that he is hospitalized. June 18, 2018: 39-year-old trans woman Diamond Stephens is shot to death in Meridian, MS. June 18, 2018: Two Muslim men are attacked by a Hindu mob incensed over rumours that the two had slaughtered a cow.  One of the men is beaten to death.

June 20, 2018: 10-year-old Anthony Avalos dies after enduring five days of torture by his mother and step-father after telling them that he “liked boys.”  Although his mother told Lancaster, CA. police that he had died after “falling down stairs,” Anthony’s eight-year-old sister revealed that after his step-father picked him up and dropped him on his head “about ten times,” Anthony went to sleep and never woke up.

June 20, 2018: A 20-year-old immigrant from Mali and owner of a successful restaurant is walking home from work in Naples, Italy when a passenger in a passing car fires a shotgun at him, wounding him. June 23, 2018: a mob of right-wing extremists armed with knives and clubs attack a Roma encampment outside of Lviv, Ukraine around midnight, murdering a 24-year-old Roma man and injuring four others, including a ten-year-old boy.   June 23, 2018: Two men lob a bomb at a home in Philadelphia that serves as a safe refuge for transgender people.   June 23, 2018: Racist homophobes in Thessaloniki, Greece, separating a mixed-race gay couple from the rest of the crowd at the town’s Pride parade and throw them both into the sea.  Later that evening, a 17-ear-old Pakistani migrant is beaten by four men in an assault captured on CCTV.     June 24, 2018: Police arrest ten members of an Islamophobic terrorist cell, seize firearms and uncover an explosives factory in a series of raids across France. The majority of arrestees are police officers or members of the French military.   June 24, 2018: A 21-year-old woman of Colombian descent is attacked at a bus stop by a security guard who beat her to the ground and punched her repeatedly in the face while yelling racist abuse at her. June 24, 2018: 24-year-old trans woman Cathalina Christina James is shot to death in a Jacksonville motel.  She is the 3rd trans woman murdered in the Florida city this year. June 24, 2018: 54-year-old transgender woman Keisha Wells is found shot to death in the parking lot of a Cleveland, OH. apartment complex.  She is the second trans woman murdered in Cleveland this year. June 29, 2018: While returning from a visit with his mom in Renfrewshire, Scotland, 21-year-old Blair Wilson is subjected to homophobic verbal abuse by a complete stranger, who then crosses the street to beat him bloody. June 30, 2018: 30-year-old Timmy Kinner stabs nine people at a birthday party for a three-year-old refugee in Boise, Idaho.  The three-year-old dies from her injuries; all other victims were also refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Ethiopia; five others were also children.   June 30, 2018: 25-year-old Joshua Daniel Miller. a member of a “Three percent” militia, shoots 23-year-old Eddie Heahcoe after an argument, killing him.

June 30, 2018: 32-year-old Adam Kraus pulls up beside a car containing an African-American couple waving a handgun and yelling racial slurs at them. Kraus then threatens to murder the driver and hang him from a tree.  Kraus is charged with felony ethnic intimidation, making terroristic threats, and other charges. July 2, 2018: When asked to move to the smoking area of a London pub, two men and a woman berate the pub staff with homophobic verbal abuse before viciously assaulting them, breaking several bones.   July 4, 2018: A 19-year-old Muslim woman walking in Anderlues, Belgium is confronted by two men, who block her path, call her a “filthy Arab,” tear her hijab and her shirt off, knock her to the ground, and carve a cross into her torso. July 4, 2018: 92-year-old Rodolfo Rodriguez is beaten to the ground and smashed in the face with a brick by five assailants in Los Angeles who shouted racial slurs and told him to “go back to his country” while punching and kicking him.  Rodriguez suffers multiple broken bones and contusions from the attack. July 6, 2018: Missouri neo-nazi Ronald Kidwell is charged with a hate crime after admitting to police that he stabbed Meshon Cooper-Williams to death and then stuffed her body into a trash can.

July 7,  2018: A black man walks into the pool room of a Pennsylvania bar where he is confronted and assaulted by eight members of the neo-nazi “Keystone United” gang.

July 8, 2018: A Jewish man is attacked by a mob of ten people in Berlin, who beat him to the ground and continue punching and kicking him until passers-by intervene. July 10, 2018: A 41-year-old Bidjara man and veteran is stabbed to death behind a Moreton Bay, Australia 7-Eleven.  Police have issued an arrest warrant for the neo-nazi alleged to have committed the murder.   July 11, 2018: A 52-year-old First Nations man is hospitalized after being discovered badly injured on Water Street in Thunder Bay, Canada by unknown assailants in what officials are describing as a hate crime.

July 11, 2018: Two Nigerian migrants waiting for a bus outside of a migrant support center are shot by a passenger in a passing car with an air pistol.  Both are injured.   July 12, 2018: Acting on a tip, Miami police arrest 72-year-old  Walter Edward Stolper as he is in the act of burning down the 15-storey, 400-unit condo building he lives in.  Stolper, who had just received an eviction notice, had told a witness he was going to burn down the building “with all the fucking Jews.”  Police recovered dozens of jerry cans filled with gasoline, other arson materials, as well as book extolling nazi ideology and swastikas.   July 12, 2018: A Muslim food vendor in Manhattan is grabbed from behind by an attacker while he was working at his food cart and then dragged him out into the street, where the attacker began hitting him while yelling anti-Muslim slurs.  Hassane Elbaz says the man had been harassing him for several days prior to the attack.   July 13, 2018: Abu Sheikh, a Muslim man is walking home from his mosque in Saksatoon, Canada when a truck swerves on to the sidewalk in an attempt to run him over.  The driver then gets out of the truck and throws bricks at the windows of Sheikh’s home.   July 14, 2018: A 26-year-old Latino man is confronted by two white men outside of a Georgia bar while his is waiting for a ride service.  The men racially abuse him, accuse him of being a member of “the cartel,” and then stab him.   July 15, 2018: A Muslim couple returning to their car from a family picnic in Mississauga, Canada are confronted by two men walking by, who call them terrorists and “fucking Arabs.”  The two men then attack the couple, beating both of them in front of their two young daughters.  39-year-old Muhammed Abu Marzouk suffers a severe brain injury and several facial fractures and undergoes multiple life-saving surgeries.  Janis Corhamzic, 19, and Adem Corhamzic, 27, are being investigated on hate charges.     July 16, 2018: In a Leeds courtroom, 19-year-old Jack Coulson, pleads guilty to terror offenses after being discovered with a pipe bomb and bomb-making manuals.  Coulson, who likes to cosplay as a nazi and is an admitted member of the banned National Action white supremacist terror group,had previously praised the murderer of UK MP Jo Cos as a “hero.”   July 16, 2018: A photojournalist is attacked in the street in Barcelona by a fascist shouting “viva Franco!” at him.  The photojournalist suffers multiple facial injuries and is treated at a primary care facility.

July 17, 2018: A man walks into a quiet bakery in Heilbronn, Germany and fires six shots from a pistol at the cashier, a hijab-wearing Muslim woman before running away in an attack eerily similar to those carried out by the racist NSU terror group.  Fortunately, the pistol appears to have been loaded with blanks.   July 18, 2018: Two Chicago men are charged with a hate crime after punching and stabbing a 19-year-old relative because she was dating a Muslim man.

July 18, 2018: A Roma infant is shot in the back by a compressed air rifle as her mother cradles her in her arms in Rome, Italy.  The infant has to undergo surgery to have the projectile taken out of her back. July 19, 2018: 27-year-old trans woman Sasha Garden is found beaten to death in an apartment in Orlando, FL.  This same day, 30-year-old queer drag performer Jessie Sumlar is stabbed to death in the doorway of their Jacksonville apartment. July 20, 2018: Two AfD supporters assault a trade unionist from behind in  Hanau-Steinheim, strangling him unconscious.  The trade unionist is hospitalized with a traumatic brain injury and other injuries resulting from the assault.  The two attackers are charged with serious assault.

July 20, 2018: Two fifteen-year-old boys in Yorkshire, England known for espousing extremist right-wing ideology receive lengthy prison sentences for their elaborate plot to build explosives, murder an acquaintance’s father, steal shotguns, and execute a mass shooting and bombing at their school. July 20, 2018: Rakbar Khan, a 31-year-old Muslim man in Rajasthan, India, is beaten to death by Hindu extremists.   July 20, 2018: Khetaram Bheel, a 22-year-old Dalit man, is abducted by his landlady’s family, who are Muslim.  Accused of being romantically involved with the landlay’s daughter, Bheel’s abductors shatter every bone in both of his legs and then throw him in to a sewage pond to die.

July 21, 2018: 25-year-old Chad Merrill intervenes when another man begins calling another regular at a York, Pennsylvania bar “nigger” and other racial slurs.  The racist bar patron, 24-year-old James Saylor, responds by pulling a pistol and shooting Merrill in the chest, killing him. July 21, 2018: Two young Polish men getting of a bus in Edinburgh, Scotland are confronted by a racist mob of at least ten people, who attack them, hospitalizing one of the pair with serious injuries to his face, head, and arms.

July 22, 2018: Faisal Hussain goes on a shooting rampage on a popular street in Toronto, Canada, killing two girls and injuring 13 others before dying in a shootout with police.  During the subsequent investigation, police discover illegal high-capacity rifle magazines, cocaine, a copy of Mein Kampf, articles are incel terrorists Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian, and Alex Jones/Infowars DVDs in Hussain’s room in his family’s home.  

July 23, 2018: While attending a community block party, the mayor of Burien, Washington is attacked from behind and beaten to the ground by a man making derogatory comments about the mayor’s Latino ethinicty.   July 23, 2018: 29-year-old Doenton A. Rogers begins making insulting and homophobic remarks to a transgender woman at a Detroit gas station.  Following the woman into the station, Rogers pulls out a gun and shoots her, shooting her in the shoulder after a struggle for the weapon.  He now faces hate crime charges.   July 23, 2018: Bristol police visit the home of 37-year-old Matthew Glynn - known to his coworkers for his racist, homophobic, and rightwing extremist views, which he regularly shared on social media - and discover more than 6kg of explosives contained in 23 different improvised explosive devices, along with bomb-making materials and a collection of over 200 knives.  In December Glynn is sentenced to five years in prison. July 24, 2018: A 61-year-old woman waiting for a bus is stabbed in the face by a man wielding a kitchen knife and screaming anti-semitic slogans. July 25, 2018: A pack of 15-20 neo-nazis armed with knives and clubs attack migrants sleeping in a park in Thessaloniki, Greece, injuring four people, two seriously. July 25, 2018: Hooded fascists from the misogynist Social Patriotes gang attack a march for women’s reproductive rights in Santiago, Chile by throwing animal blood at the marchers and later stabbing four women and a security guard.   July 26, 2018: A man on a bicycle approaches a woman walking in downtown Portland with her friends.  The man makes disparaging remarks about the woman’s sexual orientation, then punches her in the face several times and rides off.  Police charge 38-year-old Timothy Walsh with a hate crime. July 26, 2018: A 19-year-old Senegalese man in Partinico, Italy, is greeted with racist slurs as he stands outside of a bar.  Then he is beaten in the streets by five men who injure him so badly that he is hospitalized for a week.  Two cousins, Gioacchino Bono, 34, and Lorenzo Rigano, 37 are arrested for the assault.

July 26, 2018: Two people run up to a migrant from Guinea in Caserta, Italy and shoot him in the face with a compressed air pistol, injuring him. July 27, 2018: A 33-year-old migrant working on scaffolding in front of the town hall in Vicenza, Italy is shot in the leg by a 40-year-old man firing from a condominium balcony nearby.  The resulting injury is bad enough to require the migrant worker to be hospitalized for a week.  Meanwhile that same day, at a migrant support centre in Caserta, an asylum seeker is shot in the face at close range by a compressed air pistol, with his assailant an an accomplice running off without capture. July 28, 2018: A Senegalese waiter working in a Sicily bar is attacked at his work by a group of seven men in Sicily, who punch and kick him while calling him a “dirty Negro” and demanding he go back to his country.

July 28, 2018: Two foreign citizens driving in Aprilia, Italy are spotted by local residents and chased.  Two local men catch up to them and attack them, beating a 43-year-old Moroccan man to death.

July 28, 2018: A Montréal couple taking down stickers of the racist gang Atlante  Québec are attacked by three members of the gang. July 29, 2018: 35-year-old Sandra Alexander approaches an 18-year-old girl waiting a bus stop in Brampton, Canada and begins to yell racial slurs at her and threaten to light her on fire.  When a Muslim bystander attempts to intervene, Alexander attacks her, attempting to tear off her hijab.  A third woman is also subjected to racial and physical abuse by Alexander before Alexander is arrested at the scene and charged with assault with a weapon, uttering threats, and is being investigated for additional hate crime charges. July 29, 2018: a gang of fascists injured six people in a park in Manresa, Spain after the six hung a Catalonian flag.   July 30, 2018: A group of men in a red Renault Clio attempt to run over a group of racialized youth chatting in a park in Beaune, France.  They fail, but hurl racial abuse and threats at the youth.  Three hours later two men return in a different car, produce a shotgun, and fire into the group, injuring six. July 31, 2018: A Sikh man doing volunteer work putting up election signs for Republican candidates in Modesto, California is attacked by two masked men who beat him while yelling “go back to your country!” and then spray-painted a neo-nazi Celtic cross symbol and “go back to your country!” on his truck.   August 2018: Nasir Naso, a transgender woman in Pehsawar, Pakistan, is kidnapped by her landlord and one other man, who torture her before shooting her to death and dumping her body in a sack.

August 3, 2018: A 32-year-old Senegalese immigrant is shot repeatedly by two assailants on a motor scooter in Napoli, Italy.  He suffers wounds to his leg but survives. August 4, 2018: A dozen masked goons barge into Bookmarks, the UK’s largest socialist bookshop, just before closing and ransack it before fleeing.   August 4, 2018: A 21-year-old Pakistani student studying at the University of Newcastle in Australia is driving to the school library when a group of nine people stop his car and surround it.  A woman reaches through his passenger window to grab his cell phone as a man pulls open his door screaming “go back to your country!  You don’t belong here!”  The student is then beaten by the mob, (at least one of whom uses brass knuckles) and is injured so badly he requires surgery.  

August 4, 2018: 22-year-old Allen Loftis assaults three men he suspects are gay at a nightclub in Springfield, Missouri and is charged with hate crimes after confessing to police that he did it because “he didn’t care for gays.” August 6, 2018: 71-year-old Sahib Singh Natt is out for a morning walk in Menteca, California when two men wearing hoods approach him, kicking him the stomach, knocking him to the ground, then repeatedly kick him in the stomach and head before spitting on him and fleeing the area.   August 6, 2018: Two gay men in Ghent, Belgium are attacked by and bludgeoned by assailants with a metal pipe in an assault being described as homophobic.  Both are hospitalized as a result of the attack.   August 8, 2018: German authorities document over 700 attacks on refugees or refugee shelters in the first half of 2018.  The attacks injure 120 people. August 11, 2018: Police arrest a member of Sweden’s neo-nazi terror gang Nordic Resistance Movement after finding evidence he was plotting to murder two mainstream media journalists.  Police seized a home-made shotgun, ammunition, silencers, and photographs of the journalists’ homes.  Last year, NRM members were convicted of a series of bombings of refugee shelters in Sweden.   August 11, 2018: Toronto police stop a car carrying two men.  Upon searching the car, the police discover stolen firearms, more than a dozen knives, cocaine, methamphetamine, and other illegal drugs, and nazi paraphernalia.

August 13, 2018: A middle school in Oklahoma is shut down after area parents post public threats to mutilate, stab, and murder a 12-year-old transgender student.

August 13, 2018: Dutch police arrest a member of the extremist terror group “Anti Terror Brigade Special Forces” and seize an illegal firearm from him after he goes online to declare his intention of carrying out a terror attack against Muslims.   August 16, 2018: Scottish Defence League member and ardent white supremacist Peter Morgan is convicted of terror offences and sentenced to 12 years in prison after police confiscate bomb-making materials, terrorist training manuals, white supremacist propaganda, and drug paraphernalia found in his Edinburgh apartment   August 18, 2018: Hundreds of xenophobes in Pacaraima, Brazil attack and destroy makeshift camps housing Venezuelan refugees, forcing 1200 refugees to flee for their lives from the rampaging mob.

August 18, 2018: 27-year-old Uber driver Max Lin is assaulted by a passenger in Melbourne, who calls him an “Asian loser,” disparages his English, tells him to “go back to where you fucking came from,” then punches him in the face and steals his phone.  

August 19, 2018: Three men in a pickup truck drive through a campsite at an Oregon country music festival waving a large Confederate flag.  When an 18-year-old black man voices his displeasure, one of the three jumps out of the truck and hits him several times, injuring him badly enough to require hospitalization.     August 19, 2018: A 34-year-old transgender woman leaving a Charleston, SC nightclub is confronted by a man shouting transphobic slurs at her.  The man kicks the trangender woman’s sister in the stomach and then punches the transgender woman in the head, knocking her unconscious.  34-year-old Christopher Lamar Price is charged in the attack.  

August 21, 2018: Sanjay Kumar, a Dalit man in Haryana, India, is murdered by three Muslim men who objected to his marriage to a Muslim relative of theirs.   August 23, 2018: A racist mob attacks an Ahmadi mosque in Faisalabad, Pakistan, burning it to the ground.  In addition, six Ahamdis are shot and injured in the attack. August 26, 2018: A lesbian couple are viciously assaulted by a homophobic mob on a downtown street in Calgary, Canada.   August 26, 2018: 33-year-old neo-nazi JR Wilson steals a bottle of wine from a New Orleans gas station and then immediately starts yelling racial slurs at a black man in the parking lot.  Wilson knocks the man to the ground and then punches and kicks him in the head until he is rendered unconscious.  When police arrive, Wilson brags to them about his swastika tattoo and alludes to planning to attack more black people in the future. August 26, 2018: 32-year-old Christian extremist and misogynist  Timothy Hernandez stabs his girlfriend to death and then beheads her in front of their 3-year-old daughter.  Hernandez confesses to police, saying he murdered 27-year-old Vanessa Cons because “women who did not follow God’s word would be struck down” and that “she would not repent.” August 27, 2018: A mob armed with rocks and iron bars attack Chemnitz, Germany’s only Jewish restaurant.  The owner is injured by a thrown rock as the mob shouts at him to “leave Germany, you Jew!” August 28, 2018: Joshua Castillo approaches a 63-year-old woman as she gets off of a bus in downtown Portland.  Shouting “you fucking dyke, I’m going to kill your ass!” at her, Castillo produces a knife but is arrested by police in the area. August 28, 2018: An arsonist sets fire to a Sikh temple in Leith, Scotland, causing extensive damage.

August 30, 2018: Vontashia Bell, an 18-year-old trans woman in Shreveport, LA., is shot dead in the street. August 30, 2018: 24-year-old trans woman Dejanay Stanton is found shot to death in a Chicago alley. September 1, 2018: A man in Albany, NY is beaten unconscious by another man shouting anti-gay slurs.  One of the victim’s ears is ripped off in the attack.  37-year-old Hubert Dabbs, who has a prior conviction for an armed assault in 2014, is charged with attempted murder and a hate crime.   September 8, 2018: At least ten neo-nazis armed with baseball bats and axe handles storm a leftist bar in Salzwedel, Germany, smashing it up and attacking patrons before fleeing in vehicles.  A 17-year-old by is injured in the attack and police only manage to arrest one suspect. September 8, 2018: A mob shouting “heil Hitler!” and “foreigners out!” attack an ice cream parlor in Wiesloch, Germany, throwing chairs and tables at patrons smashing a bottle over a man’s head. September 1, 2018: A 30-year-old Nigerian immigrant in  Bagheria, Italy is kicked and beaten in front of an ice cream parlor.   September 1, 2018: Two young refugees are chased through the streets of Chemnitz, Germany by seven masked assailants, who catch up to one of them and beat him.

September 2, 2018: A passenger on a bus in Turin, Italy is attacked by two men after coming to the defence of a black passenger the two men had been subjecting to racist taunts. September 3, 2018: A 16-year-old student from Tunisia is beaten to the ground in Raffadali, Italy by an assailant yelling at him to “go back to his country,” sustaining injuries that hospitalize him for five days. September 3, 2018: 45-year-old Dalit leader Sardar Singh Jatav is ambushed by three upper-caste men in Thati, India.  Two of the men pin him to the ground while the third man methodically carves his scalp off of his head, seriously injuring him.  After recovering in the hospital, Jatav reported the crime to police, who initially refused to accept the complaint and as of this writing have failed to arrest the three perpetrators, all of whom Jatav knows and identified by name and address. September 5, 2018: Shantee Tucker, a 30-year-old trans woman, is shot in the back and left to die on the shoulder of a highway in Philadelphia, PA. September 6, 2018: A trans woman in Sahwal, Pakistan is kidnapped by four men who attempt to rape her.  When she resists, they set her on fire and let her burn to death while they record it on video.

September 8, 2018: Londonn Moore, a black trans woman in North Port, Florida, is shot to death and dumped in the street.   September 14, 2018: 60-year-old Robert Ray approaches a 19-year-old woman in a store in Gonzales, Louisiana and tells her to “go back to Mexico.”  When the woman’s mother tells him that “was not a nice thing to say,” Ray pushes her to the floor and then hits the woman’s father with his fist and a boot.   September 15, 2018: A South Asian family flee their home in Kent, England after a gang sets it on fire.  Police investigate the arson as a hate crime.

September 16, 2018: Two gay men wearing t-shirts from a popular gay sports league are approached by four men and a woman on the street in Washington, DC.  The five begin yelling homophobic slurs and assault both men, knocking one unconscious and injuring both men - one badly enough to require intervention at a local ER.  It is the sixth attack in DC so far this year where the victims were attacked by people shouting homophobic slurs at them. September 19, 2018: After arguing with worshippers outside of a North London mosque and making Islamophobic remarks, a group of people get in a car and then drive it through the worshippers, injuring three of them, before speeding off. September 19, 2018: 40-year-old Alexander Carballido forces his way into the Miami home of a gay man, who he forces to strip at gunpoint and threatens him with death, saying that “all gay men should be dead” before robbing him and fleeing.  When police catch up to Carballido the next day, he opens fire on them with an AK-47 and is shot to death in the resulting firefight.

September 19, 2018: After enduring weeks of racist taunts and harassment on a job site in Cape Breton, Canada, 21-year-old construction worker Nhlanhla Dlamini is confronted by one of his harassers, who points a nail gun at him and fires, hitting him in the back as he flees.  Dlamini suffers a collapsed lung from the wound and undergoes emergency surgery, remaining in hospital for four days.

September 20, 2018: Police in Kent, England arrest two 15-year-old boys on suspicion of plotting a right-wing extremist terror attack.   September 23, 2018: An unidentified man approaches two gay men in Brooklyn.  Yelling homophobic slurs at them, he attacks both men, knocking them unconscious and breaking bones.  

September 26, 2018: A 15-year-old student in Pensacola, Florida is attacked by a classmate, who berates him with a slew of homophobic slurs as he punches and kicks him, leaving the student with a broken nose and damage to his eye socket.

September 26, 2018: 55-year-old Joseph Magnuson stops African-American FedEx driver Timothy Warren as Warren is finishing his route with his truck.  Witnesses hear Magnuson screaming at Warren about his driving, calling him a “fucking nigger” several times before throwing a drink at Warren and trying to punch him in the face.  Warren dodges the punch and swings back at Magnuson once, knocking  Magnuson to the pavement where he dies as a result preexisting medical conditions.  Prosecutors, deciding that Warren was clearly acting in self-defense against a racist attack, choose not to press any charges. September 27, 2018: Four white supremacists attack a Democratic Socialists of America meeting at a Louisville bar, pepper-spraying attendees and bar staff alike.  When police arrive, they refuse to intervene or search the attackers, allowing them to go free without charges.  

September 28, 2018: German police arrest six men accused of belonging to the terrorist group “Revolution Chemnitz” on charges related to the armed assaults of foreigners on September 14th and plotting terror attacks.

September 28, 2018: Three neo-nazis confront a journalist in Naumberg, Germany in a grocery store parking lot as he gets into his car.  When the journalists confronts them, he is stabbed in the stomach by the seig-heiling bigots.  

September 28, 2018: A 48-year-old black man is randomly attacked by up to 50 racist football hooligans in Sofia, Bulgaria.  He is kicked to the ground and kicked and beaten unconscious.  At the hospital, he is diagnosed with a concussion, broken jaw, and broken teeth. September 28, 2018: As a gay couple board a public train in Vancouver, a passenger kicks one of them and berates both with homophobic slurs, then punches the other member of the couple in the face before fleeing the train. September 29, 2018: Two men in Berlin stop a passerby and ask if he’s “a Jew.”  When the man responds by asking them why they would want to know that, both men attack him, then flee the scene in a taxi.

September 30, 2018: 25-year-old Vitali Safarov - a Jewish/Yazidi man working for an anti-hate NGO in Tblisi, Georgia - is stabbed to death by three neo-nazis in a café after they began racially abusing him.  

October 2, 2018: An arsonist lights a can of gasoline on fire in the third-floor hallway of a Toronto hotel hosting refugee families.  The hotel had previously been targeted in a video by a self-described “nationalist” social media group “dedicated to exposing the idiocy of the Left.” (sic). October 3, 2018: 31-year-old trans woman Ciara Minaj Carter Frazier is stabbed to death and her body is dumped behind an abandoned building.

October 4, 2018: 48-year-old Boulder man Jeffrey Karol Bonczyk approaches a racialized woman on the street and yells at her to “go back to China.”  When the woman tells Bonczyk that she’s Native, Bonczyk replies by saying “I’m the Viking!  I’m the first one here!  I’m the white one!” before knocking her to the ground and kicking her repeatedly.  Bonczyk was previously convicted for felony assault, criminal mischief, harassment, and other crimes. October 7, 2018: 68-year-old Taylor Reginald Rosario da Costa is speaking with his brother and his cousin in a bar in Salvador, Brazil about the elections.  Their conversation is interrupted by 36-year-old fascist supporter Paulo Sérgio Ferreira de Santana, who interrupts the conversation and starts an argument with the three.  de Santana leaves, but rushes back five minutes later armed with a knife and stabs da Costa to death.   October 7, 2018: The body of Regina Denise Brown, a 53-year-old trans woman, is found in her burning South Carolina home.  Coroners determine that she was beaten to death.   October 11, 2018: A car carrying AfD supporters and leaders in Regensburg, Germany drives by a counter-demonstration against the racist party.  The driver leans out of the car and fires two shots at the demonstrators.  Luckily, none are injured.   October 14, 2018: A 62-year-old Orthodox Jewish man walking to his Brooklyn synagogue is attacked by a 37-year-old man who jumps out of his car, chases him, knocks him to the road and repeatedly beats him.  When another elderly Jewish man attempts to intervene, the assailant chases him off and continues beating his first victim.    

October 14, 2018: More then a dozen uniformed Proud Boys members attack two protestors outside of a Republican Party event in New York City, repeatedly smashing their heads into the pavement while calling them “faggots” and “bitches.”  NYPD officers look on but refuse to intervene or arrest the attackers.

October 15, 2018: A teenager wielding a stick chases an older Orthodox Jewish man down the street in Brooklyn, smashing him in the head and shoulders with the stick until it breaks.

October 16, 2018: South Dakota resident and right-wing extremist Mark Einerwold is arrested when police raid his home on burglary charges and find an improvised explosive device, illegal weapons, and bomb-making materials.  Hilariously, the police at first identify Einerwold as “antifa,” prompting his brother to vociferously deny the label, explaining that his brother hated “antifa” and pointing reporters to years of extreme-right social media posts made by his brother.     October 16, 2018: After receiving anonymous threatens calling her a “dirty Jewish cow,” and warning that she is being watched, the home of a politician in Lund, Sweden is set on fire by arsonists in the middle of the night, completely destroying it.  This is the second arson attack on a Jewish person’s home in Lund this year. October 18, 2018: While over 50 Filipino worshippers huddled inside, attackers launched a volley of molotov cocktails at Seattle’s Iglesias Ni Cristo church.| October 18, 2018: After threatening to murder New Jersey resident  Koebere Bull and her three biracial “monkey children,” 20-year-old Dylan Jarrell was stopped by Kentucky state troopers as he left his house with “hundreds of rounds of ammunition and  a detailed plan of attack on two school districts - Anderson County Schools and Shelby County Public Schools.”     October 19, 2018: 29-year-old Colorado Springs resident Sean Scappaticci decides to tell the Uber driver giving him a ride him that he was going to kill him because he “hated brown people.”  After making repeated threats, the Uber driver stops and car and runs for his life, with Scappaticci giving chase.  When police arrive on-scene, Scappaticci continues making threats to “kill all brown people” and fights with the cops.   October 20, 2018: As he returns from his daughter’s home in Bihar, India, 80-year-old Muslim man Zainul Ansari is attacked by Hindu extremists, who beat him to the ground, drag him through the streets, and then set him on fire, burning him to death. October 21, 2018: After unsuccessfully attempting to gain access to the predominantly black First Baptist Church,  51-year-old Gregory Allan Bush walks into a Kroger grocery store in Louisville, Kentucky where he shoots 69-year-old Maurice Stallard and 67-year-old Vickie Jones repeatedly, murdering both of them.  Both Jones are Stallard are black.  An armed eye witness who came face-to-face with Bush immediately afterwards reports Bush saying to him  “Don’t shoot me. I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.“ October 21, 2018: After a former houseguest leaks photos of him with his partner, a gay immigrant from Cameroon living in Seattle is attacked and assaulted by two men in the parking lot of his apartment, injuring his knees and ears as they yelled homophobic slurs at him.  Days later, the man’s mother is assaulted in Cameroon and her house destroyed   October 22, 2018:  “22-year old Dinesh Kumar barged into the home of one of his neighbours in a remote village in Tamil Nadu’s Salem district and chopped off the head of a 14-year-old girl as her mother watched in horror. He then carried the severed head to his own home before tossing it out on the road.”  Kumar is from an upper-caste family while his victim was Dalit.  The victim’s family allege that Kumar had been sexually harassing the girl and yelling casteist slurs at her and her family. October 25, 2018: Mohammad Azeem, an eight-year-old Muslim student at a South Dehli madrassa, is beaten to death by a mob of local teenagers.   October 26, 2018: After sending a dozen mail bombs to targets linked to the Democrats, 56-year-old Cesar Sayoc - an ardent and vocal Trump supporter, is arrested as the MAGA bomber. October 26, 2018: An arsonist sets fire to the home of a Muslim family in Highland Park, MI. while the family are asleep inside.  The father of the family wakes up in time to put out the fire.  Two days later, the arsonist returns and firebombs the home, forcing the family to jump out of a second-storey window to save their lives.  Their home is completely destroyed in the blaze. October 27, 2018: 46-year-old extreme-right anti-Semite and gun collector Robert Bowers walks into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, screams “All Jews must die!,” and begins shooting.  Eleven people are killed and six others injured before Bowers surrenders after making several anti-Semitic statements during his rampage.  

October 27, 2018: A transgender woman riding a train in Calgary, Canada is subjected to transphobic verbal abuse by an unknown man, who then punches her in the face before fleeing the train. October 29, 2018: Police raid the home of 41-year-old Thorton Heath resident Steven Bishop, seizing bomb-making instructions and materials.  Bishop, facing various terrorism charges, pleads guilty in 2019 to plotting to bomb Morden Mosque.

November 1, 2018: After speaking with a 66-year-old Jewish woman in Cambridge, MA. about a property, 62-year-old Jarrett Harris follows her down the street yelling at her to “shut the fuck up Jew bitch!” before pushing her and attempting to choke her while using more anti-Semitic curses.  Harris now faces hate crime charges.   November 1, 2018: Two men traveling on Italy’s Roma-Lido train spend their trip seig heiling, singing fascist songs, and making loud racist insults before turing their attention to a fellow passenger from India, who they both assault.  When a woman on the train attempts to intervene, they beat her to the floor.   November 1, 2018: 15-year-old “Kekistan” and Donald Trump fan Gregory Ramos ends an argument with his mother about his school grades by strangling her to death.  Ramos then calls on two friends to help him bury his mother under a fire pit and stage a break-in to cover up the murder. November 2, 2018: Arsonists set fire to seven Brooklyn synagogues and Jewish schools overnight, in addition to spray-painting “Kill All Jews” inside a synagogue. November 2, 2018: 40-year-old Scott Beierle walks into a Tallahassee, FL. yoga studio and opens fire, killing two women and injuring four others before turning the gun on himself.  Beierlie was a far-right extremist and self-proclaimed misogynist and “incel” who railed against women, black people, and immigrants in a series of online videos and songs. November 3, 2018: Four teenagers launch a metal pole through the window of a Brooklyn synagogue as members were praying inside.   November 6, 2018: Six far-right extremists are arrested across France and charged with plotting to assassinate French president Emmanuel Macron. November 6, 2018: Two neo-nazis in Skyttorpsvägen, Sweden attempt to beat an anti-fascist to death with crowbars.  The anti-fascist manages to fight both of them off and escape.

November 6, 2018: A man is arrested in Los Angeles after ripping the wig off of the head of an Orthodox Jewish woman.  It was the third time he had attacked an Orthodox Jewish woman in such a fashion.   November 8, 2018: Three African American men and one Latino man walk into a Chicago 7-11 only to be met with a slew of racial slurs from the store clerk, 32-year-old Ranferi Basilio.  Basilio chases the men outside the store, then produces a knife and chases them away from their own car, slashing the car’s tires.   November 10, 2018: German police uncover a terror plot involving a secret terror cell consisting of over 200 elite German soldiers who planned to assassinate German politicians and leaders of refugee support groups.   November 11, 2018: Four Orthodox Jewish boys are walking in their Toronto neighborhood when a group of nine teenagers confront them yelling anti-Semitic slurs before punching and kicking them.   November 15, 2018: 61-year-old Indian immigrant Sunil Edla is confronted by a teenaged boy outside of his New Jersey home and shot dead in what is being described as a hate crime. November 15, 2018: During a drug trafficking sting operation against white supremacist gangs “The Unforgiven” and “United Aryan Brotherhood” in Florida, police seize over 100 firearms, several pipe bombs, and a rocket launcher, in addition to several pounds of meth amphetamine and fentanyl.  Thirty-nine individuals are charged as a result. November 16, 2018: Former captain of the Wales rugby and out gay man Gareth Thomas is physically attacked by a homophobe in his hometown of Cardiff, Wales, leaving him with multiple cuts and bruises to his face. November 18, 2018: A march for trans rights in Kiev, Ukraine is attacked by 30 transphobes and the police.  Activists and journalists are punched and pepper-sprayed by far-right transphobes while the police haul trans activists away. November 19, 2018: 55-year-old Lloyd Edward Johnson begins harassing and antagonizing four Black Muslim teenaged girls as they order food in a McDonald’s in a Minneapolis, MN. suburb.  When the girls respond, Johnson pulls out a gun and threatens them with it.  Johnson is later arrested and charged with second-degree assault.

November 19, 2018: Arsonists set fire to palestra Valerio Verbano - a popular public gym in a leftist neighborhood in Rome named after a 19-year-old antifascisti murdered by fascists in 1980.  The blaze causes extensive damage.   November 23, 2018: 32-year-old Mohamed Mohamed Abdi yells anti-semitic slurs towards two Jewish men as he drives by then in Los Angeles before doing a U-turn and trying to run over them twice before crashing his car.  Abdi is charged with hate crimes. November 25, 2018: A Donegal, Ireland hotel that was set to host refugees is set on fire by arsonists, nearly killing the owner and his daughter.

November 25, 2018: After arguing in a café in Lefkimmi, Greece with 63-year-old Albanian national  Petrit Zifle, a Golden Dawn activist guns him down with a shotgun, throwing his body in a ditch and confessing to the crime after being arrested by police.   November 26, 2018: 37-year-old Balitmore resident and trans woman Tydi Dansbury is shot to death in the street.

November 27, 2018: Yelling “I fucking hate Mexicans,” “I’m here to kill a Mexican,” and asking if the proprietors of the Lopez tire shop in Salt Lake City, UT were “part of the Mexican mafia,” 50-year-old Alan Dale Covington smashes a five-foot metal pole into the face of 18-year-old Luis Gustavo Lopez, knocking him unconscious, then attacked Jose Lopez, Luis’ father, as he tried to help his son.  Luis was hospitalized with serious injuries for several days.   November 27, 2018: After leaving a kosher restaurant in Brooklyn, a 16-year-old Jewish boy is confronted by a mob of about twenty teenagers, who beat him while chanting “Kill the Jew.”  The boy is injured so badly that he is hospitalized for over a week.   November 29, 2018: A gay couple in Las Vegas are followed home from work by two men - one of them a homophobic co-worker, who proceed to punch, kick, and stab the couple while calling them homophobic slurs.   November 29, 2018: In a completely unprovoked assault, 22-year-old Dylan Reynolds and 24-year-old Michael Walters chase a black woman out of a Louisiana Wal-Mart, yelling “nigger!” at her and chasing her through the parking lot before launching a shopping cart at her vehicle as she fled.  Both men face hate crime charges. November 30, 2018: As he leaves a Brooklyn synagogue, a 33-year-old Hasidic Jewish man is punched in the head from behind in an unprovoked attack. November 30, 2018: A 20-year-old woman is confronted in the New York subway system by a man yelling homophobic slurs at her.  As she walks away, the man punches her in the back of the head and shoves her to the ground, breaking her spine in the process.   December 2, 2018: Winchester, VA. resident Robin Anne Coffman yells at a black family walking by her house, calling them “niggers” and threatening to shoot them before brandishing a shotgun. December 6, 2018: Three young men are arrested in various locations in the UK on suspicion of terrorist activities due to their involvement in a nazi terror gang called Sonnenkrieg Division. December 6, 2018: Three men accuse a Roma woman of pickpocketing on a Rome subway station.  They pull her hair and punch her repeatedly in the face.  When her three-year-old daughter cries out, they throw the child to the ground.   December 7, 2018: An arsonist sets fire to a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall in Lacey, WA., gutting it.  This is the sixth attack against Jehovah’s Witness buildings in the country this year.    

December 7, 2018: FBI agents posing as ISIS operatives arrest 21-year-old Ohio resident Damon Joseph after selling him two inoperable assault rifles he told them he would use to commit a mass shooting at a synagogue.  Around the same time, police arrested Elizabeth Lecron and Vincent Armstrong - two fellow Ohio residents with neo-nazi ties who they allege had purchased bomb-making materials and were planning to bomb a pipeline in Georgia. December 7, 2018: 23-year-old engineering student Rohan Sharma and his sister Amrita Sharma are assaulted in their home by their own neighbours after enduring weeks of verbal racist abuse from them, leaving Sharma with a broken nose and various contusions.

December 7, 2018: 35-year-old trans woman Keanna Mattel is found shot to death in her Detroit neighbourhood. December 8, 2018: At least nine members of the Hammerskins, in Washington state to commemorate the death of a white supremacist terrorist and murderer, show up at a bar in Lynwood, WA. and almost immediately attack the African-American DJ, who is hospitalized due to the injuries he sustains in the attack.  Police charge at least six of the attackers with hate crimes. December 9, 2018: Jessica Fowler, 31, and Amber Harrell, 38 encounter a trans woman in the bathroom of a Raleigh, North Carolina bar and proceed to restrain her and sexually assault her.  Both Fowler and Harris now face sexual battery and kidnapping charges. December 9, 2018: Police arrest 20-year-old Monroe, WA. resident Dakota Reed - a self-professed KKK member - who had posted extensively online about plans to commit a mass shooting targeting Jews.  Police seized a dozen firearms along with white supremacist literature from Reed.  When a detective asked Reed why he had targeted Jews, Reed replied “I’ve been around some Jews in my life.  There’s a community here in Washington. They’ve done things as far as to — um. Maybe it wasn’t too personal, but I’ve had them lie to me, I’ve had them, um, I guess, well, this one probably wasn’t their fault, but I’ve had girls like them over me. I’ve, uh, what was the other one?” Before remembering that someone who happened to be Jewish had allegedly gotten him fired from a job once. December 12, 2018: A 32-year-old transgender woman is beaten to death by four men in Klang, Malaysia. December 15, 2018: A Warsaw man of Turkish descent is attacked on a public bus by football hooligans who taunt him with racist insults as they assault him.  Police initially refuse to take any action but begin investigating after it is reported in the media.   December 17, 2018: A black woman riding the subway in Rome with her infant daughter is subjected to racist abuse by a man on the train, who then slaps the woman, spits in her face, kicks her stroller, and punches two other passengers who attempt to intervene.  Police take the man off the subway at the next stop but do not arrest him. December 18, 2018: 60-year-old Portland resident Michael T. Amatullo greets his eight-year-old African-American neighbor by shouting racist slurs at him while the boy is taking out the trash.  When the boy’s 14-year-old brother comes out of the house to investigate the shouting, Amatullo produces a butcher knife and threatens to stab both boys, prompting them to run and hide under a staircase while they call 911.  

December 20, 2018: 24-year-old Brandon Troy Higgs allows his dog to walk over a freshly-laid cement driveway in Reistertwon, MD. as a pretext to start a fight with two African American construction workers, who we calls "boy” and tells them to “go back to Africa.”  Higgs leaves and then returns to verbally abuse the construction workers some more before drawing a pistol.  The two workers wrestle the gun away from Higgs, but not before Higgs shoots one of them in the leg.  Higgs now faces attempted murder & hate crime charges. December 23, 2018: While waiting behind an African-American mother and her two children in line at a Wichita, KS. grocery store check-out, 31-year-old Trace Riff decides to kick the mother’s 1-year-old son in the back with his cowboy boot, knocking him face-first on the floor.  While bystanders subdued him, Riff went on a screaming tirade, calling the mother and her children “niggers” and loudly declaring that he was a white supremacist.  

[zayaanhashistory]

The Munich Massacre

In what became known as the Munich Massacre, eight terrorists wearing tracksuits and carrying gym bags filled with grenades and assault rifles, breached the Olympic Village at the Summer Games in Munich before dawn on September 5, 1972. The terrorists, associated with Black September, an extremist faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, entered the apartment complex where Israeli athletes were staying. Once inside, they murdered two members of the Israeli team and took nine others hostage. Audiences around the world then watched in horror as the international nightmare unfolded on live TV. 

The terrorists demanded the release of 234 Arab prisoners from Israeli jails, as well as two German terrorists held in West German custody. When authorities attempted to rescue the hostages after a 23-hour standoff, all the hostages, one West German police officer and five Black September members were killed. More than 900 million viewers watched coverage of the terrorist attack on TV, including the now iconic sight of a black ski mask-clad terrorist on the balcony. It was the first time an act of terror was broadcast live and took place during a major global sporting event. Hosting its first Olympics in Germany since Adolf Hitler’s Nazi propaganda and racism-laden 1936 Summer Games in Berlin, the West German government had been looking to highlight its democracy and downplay any military presence. Hailing the event as “the Games of Peace and Joy,” and “the Cheerful Games,” West Germany eschewed uniformed soldiers and police for unarmed guards. Less than 30 years after the end of World War II, when approximately 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, Israel entered the Munich Olympics with its biggest-ever team of officials and athletes. According to the book One Day in September by Simon Reeve, "several of them (were) older Eastern Europeans still bearing physical and mental scars from Nazi concentration camps." Israeli officials had reportedly voiced concern about the lack of security at the Games and a 1972 New York Times report pointed to "glaring" precautionary deficiencies. The way the terrorists were able to take deadly advantage of easy access to the village would change security protocols and preparation for future Olympics. 

Ten days into the Games, on September 5, 1972, under the cloak of darkness, the terrorists stormed the Israeli team's quarters at 4:30 a.m., having been helped over a wire fence by athletes sneaking in after a night out who mistook them for fellow Olympians. Upon breaching the Israeli dorm, wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossef Romano were killed almost immediately. Horrifyingly, Romano, according to the Associated Press, was castrated and Weinberg’s body was thrown to the street. Some escaped, but nine Israelis were quickly taken hostage, including weightlifters David Berger, who was born in America, and Ze’ev Friedman, wrestlers Eliezer Halfin and Mark Slavin, track and field coach Amitzur Shapira, sharpshooting coach Kehat Shorr, fencer Andre Spitzer, weightlifting judge Yakov Springer and wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund. A 9 a.m. deadline was set for the terrorists’ political prisoner release demands—not meeting it, they said, would result in one hostage being executed every hour. With no counter-terror unit in place, the West Germans took control of the negotiations, with Munich's police chief as well as Libyan and Tunisian ambassadors to Germany, attempting to deal with the kidnappers. According to the Guardian, the terrorists rejected the offer of "an unlimited amount of money" for the release of the hostages, but did extend their deadline multiple times. At least one attempt at a rescue in the athletes’ dorm was botched when the terrorists were able to view officers approaching on TV—their electricity hadn’t been cut off. 

  Israel's immediate response was that there would be no negotiations. "If we should give in, then no Israeli anywhere in the world can feel that his life is safe," Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said at the time. With negotiations failing, the members of Black September demanded transport to Cairo and, with the hostages, were moved via two helicopters to Fürstenfeldbruck air base, about 15 miles away, where a jet was waiting. In a rescue attempt-turned bloodbath, German snipers, with no sharpshooting experience, inadequate gear, bad intelligence and no means of communication with each other, opened fire on the kidnappers. The terrorists returned fire, killing Anton Flieger Bauer, a German policeman positioned in a control tower. All nine hostages, bound in the helicopters, were killed by gunfire and a grenade. Black September leader Luttie Afif and four other terrorists were also left dead, while three were captured alive. Following the attack, the Games were suspended for 34 hours, with a memorial service held September 6 in Olympic Stadium that was attended by 3,000 athletes and 80,000 spectators. The rest of the Israeli team left Munich, as did Mark Spitz, the Jewish American swimmer who had already won seven gold medals at the Games, and the Egyptian, Philippine and Algerian teams, among others. A month later, the three captured terrorists were released in a hostage exchange after the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 615 and received a “hero’s welcome” upon arrival in Libya, according to Reuters. 

Meir and Israel, meanwhile, responded with Operation Wrath of God, a covert Mossad mission to kill the masterminds behind the Munich massacre. Several suspects were assassinated in the coming months, but the mission was suspended when an innocent man was mistakenly killed in Norway in 1973. The target of that shooting, Black September Chief of Operations Ali Hassan Salameh, was assassinated by car bomb in 1979 in the operation’s final mission. 

[eretzyisrael]

Bret Stephens on Israel's robust willingness to defend itself

Familiar scenes - from seven years ago [Image Source]

In a punchy New York Times column published this past Friday ["Jewish Power at 70 Years"], Bret Stephens starts out talking about a hate crime - with an intriguing twist - in today's Germany. But then he heads off in the direction of the Middle East and the challenges posed to Israelis by the people on the far side of our borders.

Here's a first extract:

On Friday, Palestinians in Gaza returned for the fourth time to the border fence with Israel, in protests promoted by Hamas. The explicit purpose of Hamas leaders is to breach the fence and march on Jerusalem. Israel cannot possibly allow this — doing so would create a precedent that would encourage similar protests, and more death, along all of Israel’s borders — and has repeatedly used deadly force to counter it. The armchair corporals of Western punditry think this is excessive. It would be helpful if they could suggest alternative military tactics to an Israeli government dealing with an urgent crisis against an adversary sworn to its destruction. They don’t. It would also be helpful if they could explain how they can insist on Israel’s retreat to the 1967 borders and then scold Israel when it defends those borders. They can’t.

He's right. We're old enough to remember the coordinated Arab assaults on multiple Israeli borders seven years ago in conjunction with Naqba Day- May 14 and 15, 2011 and around the same time as the ill-fated and unfortunately-named Arab Spring. 

A BBC report at the time ["Palestinian protests: Arab spring or foreign manipulation?", BBC, May 15, 2011] said the not-so-peaceful "protestors" 

undoubtedly embodied the same kind of risk-taking, confrontational people-power ethos that has fired the revolts in many parts of the Arab world.

How did that risk-taking confrontation play out?

Lebanon

In Lebanon, some 30,000 people were pulled together by the organizers near Lebanon's Israel border and walked towards it just opposite the northern Israeli town of Avivim. Soldiers of the Lebanese army first fired into the air to deter them. But then, as they headed recklessly into and across a border minefield throwing stones towards the Israeli and shouting into the hills for a "right of return", the Lebanese forces shot at them with assault rifles and tear gas. Before the retreat was completed, 11 participants were dead and about 100 injured.

Egypt

On the Egyptian border, thousands were reported to about to make their way from Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and other points of origin toward the Rafah crossing with Gaza. But the military regime then in power intervened, warning bus companies not to answer the convoy organizers' requests. The few buses that did set off were stopped by the military and in the end, according to Ma'an, only some 80 individuals equipped with flags and an arsenal of angry demands and slogans got to the border.

Fatahland

According to Wikipedia, around 300 West Bank "protesters" assembled at the Qalandiya Crossing - a busy crossing point - to demonstrate, forming human chains, staging sit-downs, hurling rocks. About 120 were said to be affected by tear gas, stink-spray and other crowd-dispersal means. BBC: "Clashes at the Qalandiya checkpoint in Ramallah continued for hours, with dozens of Palestinians injured. Palestinian protesters threw stones at Israeli security forces, who fired tear gas and rubber bullets."

Jordan

In Jordan, about 500 Palestinian Arab Jordanians were prevented by Jordanian army and police forces from doing harm at the Allenby Bridge, the major crossing point into the West Bank and Israel. They used tear gas and other similar tools and some 25 people were reported injured, including 11 Jordanian police. A Ma'an report said the Hamas-aligned Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood and what Ma'an called "the powerful Islamic Action Front" termed this "shocking" and turning reality on its end demanded "an end to such policies that have harmed Jordan's image".

Syria

On Israel's Syria border, 20 buses of "protestors" arrived from Damascus on Naqba Day, May 15, 2011. According to the BBC, the IDF said it "had only fired warning shots as a large number of protesters tried to breach a border fence near the village of Majdal Shams. But reports said at least two people had been killed and dozens injured. Israel's army says this is a "serious" incursion. Brig Gen Yoav Mordechai said soldiers were still trying to control the crowds and that dozens of protesters had crossed. The army has reportedly sealed off Majdal Shams and is carrying out house-to-house searches for "infiltrators"... "We are seeing here an Iranian provocation, on both the Syrian and the Lebanese frontiers, to try to exploit the Nakba day commemorations," Gen Mordechai said... Syria denounced Israeli actions in the Golan Heights and Lebanon as "criminal", Agence France-Presse news agency reported. "Israel will have to bear full responsibility for its actions," the foreign ministry said." The NY Times said "some 13 Israeli soldiers were lightly wounded from thrown rocks." And Ynet quoting an IDF enquiry, said "nearly 1,000 Syrians approached the fence, with Syrian border forces unable – or unwilling – to stop them. About 300 protesters, including children, rushed the fences and crossed over onto Israeli soil..."

Some weeks later, those May 2011 events in Syria were revealed to have actually been planned ahead of time by the Assad regime. This is all documented in an expose ["Report: Document Reveals Nakba Day Clashes Planned by Syria Government", Haaretz, June 14, 2011]. The bused-in attackers had attempted to breach Israel's border which was the plan. The Haaretz report quotes a Syrian government memo: "Permission is hereby granted allowing approaching crowds to cross the cease fire line (with Israel) towards the occupied Majdal-Shamms, and to further allow them to engage physically with each other in front of United Nations agents and offices. Furthermore, there is no objection if a few shots are fired in the air." There are clear parallels with what's happening now on Israel's Gaza frontier.

Then in June 2011, again on the Syria side of its border with Israel, large numbers of assailants purporting to "protest" were again bused in from Damascus. A Jerusalem Post report quoted Syrian officials saying 23 were killed and 350 injured "as they attempted over the course of several hours to breach the barbed-wire border".

...

The Bret Stephens essay dwells as well on the intriguing case of Adam Armoush. Thought, when the story initially emerged, to be a young German Jew, he is in reality a 21-year-old Israeli Arab living in Germany

 who, on a recent outing in Berlin, donned a yarmulke to test a friend’s contention that it was unsafe to do so in Germany. On Tuesday he was assaulted in broad daylight by a Syrian asylum-seeker who whipped him with a belt for being “yahudi” — Arabic for Jew. The episode was caught on video and has caused a national uproar... There were nearly 1,000 reported anti-Semitic incidents in Berlin alone last year... 

Stephens then connects Israel and Europe:

To be Jewish — at least visibly Jewish — in Europe is to live on borrowed time... There’s a limit to how many armed guards can be deployed indefinitely to protect synagogues or stop Holocaust memorials from being vandalized... There are many reasons to celebrate the date [of Israel's 70th anniversary a few days ago], many of them lofty: a renaissance for Jewish civilization; the creation of a feisty liberal democracy in a despotic neighborhood; the ecological rescue of a once-barren land; the end of 1,878 years of exile. But there’s a more basic reason. Jews cannot rely for their safety on the kindness of strangers... Hence Israel: its army, bomb, and robust willingness to use force to defend itself. Israel did not come into existence to serve as another showcase of the victimization of Jews. It exists to end the victimization of Jews... Though not Jewish, Adam Armoush was once one of the nonchalant when it came to what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century. Presumably no longer. For Jews, it’s a painful, useful reminder that Israel is not their vanity. It’s their safeguard.

Well said.

This Ongoing War

[beardedmrbean]

Following a viral video that captures an attack against a Muslim woman on a New York City subway earlier this month, a 33-year-old man has been arrested and charged with several hate crimes. 

Days after the clip made the rounds, showing a man who appears to strike a young woman and destroy her Palestinian flag, police arrested Greg Kutzin, a Manhattan-based finance director, on Nov. 20. The woman told NBC News that police in the subway station initially dismissed her claims and that it took the video going viral for an arrest to be made.

The 23-year-old, who is Yemeni American and Muslim, said she was on her way to a pro-Palestinian rally in Bryant Park on Nov. 17 when the man began to glare at her. He called her a “terrorist,” snatched and broke the flag she was carrying, and hit her in the chest, according to both her interview and a police statement. She said this led her to take out her phone and start recording. 

In the video, the man can be seen holding her flag and swiping at her as she yelled back and cried out for help. Fellow passengers can be heard gasping as he appears to lunge forward and she stumbles for a moment.

She continued to record as the two deboarded at Times Square-42nd Street, and she filmed him throwing her broken flag to the ground. In the police report, she alleged he threw it onto the subway tracks.

The young woman, who said she moved to the U.S. from Yemen when she was 15, asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.

“I always felt safe, especially in New York City,” she said. “I was always aware of crazy people, but not that people were going to target me because of my beliefs.” 

Kutzin has been charged with six hate crimes including assault, robbery, grand larceny, petit larceny, criminal mischief and harassment, police said. He pleaded not guilty to all counts and was released on his own recognizance. 

His lawyer did not return a call from NBC News. 

When she first got off the train, the woman said she flagged down a police officer who dismissed her story, telling her the video didn’t prove anything. He questioned if she really wanted to make a police report and deal with the hassle, so she didn’t file one at the time. 

It was only after the video went viral that she was encouraged by viewers and friends to make an official report. A day after she visited the precinct and gave her statement to police, Kutzin was arrested, she said. 

“What if I didn’t have a video? What if it didn’t go viral? He would have never even got arrested,” she said. 

The New York Police Department did not respond to questions about the initial officer’s handling of the incident. 

Shared by civil rights organization Yemeni Alliance Committee, the clip of the incident has gained over 1 million views on X and TikTok. The woman who filmed her attack said it’s the first time she’s ever experienced Islamophobia with physical violence. Standing at 4 feet, 10 inches tall, she was scared when the man approached her, and she said when no one on the train stood up for her, she decided to take it into her own hands with the video.

“I don’t want to think that this is ever going to happen again, but if something ever do — because of what’s happening now with the increase in hate crimes — I’m always going to initially record,” she said. 

Kutzin’s employer, financial services franchise StoneX Group, put out a statement on social media saying it was aware of what happened, but it was not clear if the company was investigating the incident or had taken any action.

“We are aware of the social media discussions regarding a StoneX employee. This unfortunate incident occurred outside of work and has been turned over to the proper authorities,” the tweet said. 

StoneX did not respond to a request for comment. 

The young woman who was attacked said she’s deeply concerned by the rise in Islamophobia since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. More than anything, she wants full accountability for attackers and justice for other victims. 

“I have a lot of friends telling me, ‘Wow, you were brave,’” she said. “I thank God I was brave.”

[friend-clarity]

Jew-hatred by the Left

Letting Anti-Semites Be Their Guide by Karys Rhea and Keren Toledano, Commentary, April 2020

It is incumbent on both the left and right to root out the Jew-haters in their midst. But, it is Leftists who mostly hold the reigns of power and it is Leftists who deny abundant evidence that anti-Semitism is endemic to Palestinian society. Anti-Semitism has been a fundamental part of Islamic culture for more than a millennium.

A strange notion has found purchase in progressive circles. It holds that nominally marginalized and oppressed groups, most notably Muslims and African Americans, cannot themselves espouse hateful views. According to this thinking, white people maintain a monopoly on hate, and every expression of hate by someone who is nonwhite is linked to some form of white or Western influence, whether colonialist, capitalist, or Christian.

This idea is also frequently embraced by those doing the hating. Consider the strain of anti-Semitism endemic to Palestinian society, where government-run television, media, textbooks, and mosques encourage violence against Jews, praise Hitler, characterize Jews as "apes and pigs," and deny the Holocaust. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement, widely taken to be the most moderate wing of Palestinian politics and the best chance for a partner in peace with Israel, recently released a video claiming that Jews "led the project to enslave humanity" and that Jewish behavior is responsible for anti-Semitism.

To many on the hard left, this moral inversion fits comfortably with Marxist theories about class struggle and power. When a class of people is deemed to lack power, their misdeeds are recast as noble efforts to obtain that power—even when those misdeeds might include terrorist acts against innocent civilians.

Never mind that the historical record is wholly at odds with Fatah's explanation for Jew-hatred. Islamic anti-Semitism has been a fundamental part of Middle East culture for more than a millennium. Long before capitalism and Western colonialism, Jews were treated as second-class citizens, or "dhimmis," under Islamic law, and they endured frequent pogroms, humiliation, and brutal oppression. Thus, denying the historical record is a necessity if one is set on absolving the wicked.

The lengths to which some will go in their denial is exemplified by a New York–based progressive organization called Jews for Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ). Founded in 1990 by the academic and activist Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark and the activist Donna Nevel, JFREJ claims it is inspired by Jewish tradition to dismantle racism and economic exploitation. On its website, the organization highlights its work with Black Lives Matter and its efforts to fight Islamophobia and dismantle ICE, among other things.

JFREJ cofounders Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark (left) and Donna Nevel (right) JFREJ has published a guide called "Understanding Anti-Semitism" that takes readers through the leftist looking glass into a world where oppressor and oppressed bear little resemblance to their real-life counterparts. It is worth looking at this organization's rhetoric as it helps shine a light on the current pathways of anti-racist activism and how it acts as a cover for Jew-hatred.

The authors of "Understanding Anti-Semitism" blame Christian dogma and hierarchies for the creation of Jew-hatred while writing off centuries of anti-Semitism in the Arab-Muslim world. They even reframe the dhimmi status imposed on Jews, casting it as a "protection" of the sultan. And while they acknowledge that this protection was bought through heavy taxation and that it facilitated "sporadic attacks, forced conversions and mass killings of Jews," they claim that no specific "anti-Jewish ideology" persisted in the Arab-Muslim world because, after all, other non-Muslims were also oppressed. How the presence of additional prejudices makes anti-Semitism less bigoted is unclear. What is clear, however, is that Muslim anti-Semitism culminated in nearly 1 million Jews of Araby ethnically cleansed, forcibly dispossessed, and expelled from their homes in the 20th century alone.

It is telling that the JFREJ guide discusses "Islamophobia" but omits mention of the persecution of Christians currently rampant in the Arab-Muslim world. It misleadingly blames "white Christian nationalism" for the vast majority of domestic terrorist attacks in the United States, conveniently ignoring that 2019 saw roughly an even number of casualties at the hands of white-nationalist terrorists and jihadists. JFREJ also doesn't mention that in 2017 alone, groups such as al-Shabab and the Taliban carried out nearly 11,000 Islamist attacks worldwide, resulting in 26,000 casualties.

JFREJ exonerates Muslims and racial minorities wholesale for anti-Semitism. Just as JFREJ exonerates Muslims wholesale for anti-Semitism, the group exempts racial minorities for it as well. In an interview with the Democracy Now radio show in late December, JFREJ executive director Audrey Sasson referred to New York City's recent onslaught of anti-Semitic attacks as a manifestation of white nationalism—despite the fact that the majority of incidents were perpetrated by African Americans. In the December 28th stabbing attack on five Hasidic Jews at a Hanukkah party in Monsey, New York, for example, the assailant was a 37-year-old black male who reportedly Googled topics such as "Why did Hitler hate Jews," "Zionist Temples in Staten Island," and "Prominent companies founded by Jews in America."

Some leftist Democratic politicians have dabbled in similar scapegoating. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, claimed that the rash of hate crimes in New York City was a "right-wing" problem. On Twitter, Representative Rashida Tlaib blamed "white supremacy" for the Jersey City shooting at a kosher supermarket that took the lives of three Jews and a non-Jewish police officer, even though both perpetrators were African Americans and one was affiliated with the Black Hebrew Israelites—a black supremacist and anti-Semitic hate group.

De Blasio later backtracked on his comments, and Tlaib deleted her tweet. But JFREJ has upheld the notion that there is no anti-Semitism apart from white supremacy, including retweeting an article from the socialist magazine Jacobin that claimed the best way to fight anti-Semitism "is to reject the centrist idea that anti-Semitism transcends politics," and declared it was "pernicious" to point out that Jew-haters exist on the left and the right.

Yet every week, it seems, another video appears on social media, or in the news, showing a black American verbally or physically attacking a visibly Jewish victim. The attacks range from anti-Semitic tirades to throwing objects, spitting, beating, stabbing, and shooting. Indeed, one could rightly describe these frequent and vicious assaults on Jews as a slow-motion pogrom.

JFREJ rails against "white Jews' preoccupation with black anti-Semitism." What is JFREJ's solution to this problem? Apparently, the first step is to deny that it is happening at all. The group's website claims that the real issue is "white Jews' preoccupation with black anti-Semitism," stoked by "a false narrative...that focuses on conflict between white Jews and black non-Jews." And who does the organization see as the true "architects of this conflict"? Get ready for it: "Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South forcing African-Americans to flee to northern cities"—Ku Klux Klan terrorists, that is, who were last active a century ago.

The second part of the solution is no less confounding. In Sasson's recent interview, she said: "Our focus is to build solidarity with other groups targeted by anti-Semitism." Other groups targeted by anti-Semitism? The very formulation defies intelligibility.

But it is revealing nonetheless. Sasson's true intention is to deny that anti-Semitism—understood as a specific hatred against Jews—even exists. JFREJ subordinates the uniqueness of the Jewish plight to a larger narrative about racism—one that ironically excludes the Jews. This explains why, at New York City's January 5th "March Against Anti-Semitism," JFREJ chose to publicize the event as a generalized rally against "hate." In their promotional material, they even mentioned Islamophobia before saying a word about anti-Semitism.

JFREJ effectively denies that anti-Semitism — understood as a specific hatred against Jews — even exists. What we see here are leftist Jews leveraging their "Jewishness" to perpetuate a logical and moral perversion. In a similar fashion, the November 2019 issue of Jewish Currents featured Vermont senator and Democratic candidate for president Bernie Sanders conflating the fight against anti-Semitism with Palestinian liberation: "The forces fomenting anti-Semitism are the forces arrayed against oppressed people around the world, including Palestinians....The struggle against anti-Semitism is also the struggle for Palestinian freedom."

Once anti-Semitism is grouped with bigotry in general, it can be ignored in favor of more fashionable concerns: namely, systemic racism in the United States. In her interview, Sasson asserted that attacks on Jews, if committed by minorities, arise from "rightful anger about real problems." Since black Americans are perceived to be a marginalized group, their hate crimes must be rationalized as an understandable, if misguided, rebellion against oppression—as opposed to the manifestation of anti-Semitism that they are.

By this reasoning, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan—who famously compared Jews to "termites," called Jews "bloodsuckers," "great and master deceivers," and the "enemy of God and the enemy of the righteous"���hates Jews because of some misplaced grudge against the system. And so when Farrakhan refers to Hitler as "a very great man" and attributes gay marriage, abortion, and anal sex to the "Satanic influence of the Talmudic Jews," he is merely reacting to the evil of the white, Christian West.

In actuality, what we know about the Nation of Islam and groups such as the Black Hebrew Israelites is that their members have been actively enlisting people of color for decades, setting up shop and drumming up hatred in local communities. They preach that Jews are to blame for the plight of African Americans and draw an equivalence between black suffering in the U.S. and Palestinian suffering in the Middle East. This line of anti-Semitism gained particular strength after the assassination of Martin Luther King, a Zionist and friend of the Jews. King's tragic departure from the national conversation paved the way for his views to be overtaken by those in the tradition of Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad, who wedded his ideas on black power to a sci-fi version of Islam and made anti-Semitism an enduring feature of the Nation of Islam.

JFREJ has actually aligned itself with Farrakhan supporters. On its website, the group proudly states that it lets the priorities of the marginalized groups with which it partners "guide [its] actions." Thus JFREJ has partnered with two former leaders of the Women's March: Tamika Mallory, an African American, and Linda Sarsour, a Muslim American. Both women have voiced admiration for Louis Farrakhan. And Sarsour's record of anti-Semitic statements in the name of Palestinian activism is well-known. She has said, for example, that Israel is "built on supremacy" and "on the idea that Jews are supreme to everybody else." She also tweeted: "Nothing is creepier than Zionism." Sarsour earned an approving retweet from former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke when she tweeted: "Israel should give free citizenship to US politicians. They are more loyal to Israel than they are to the American people." But, as one headline on JFREJ's website says, "JFREJ Stands with Linda Sarsour (Again, Always, with Love)." If people like Sarsour guide JFREJ's actions, it's no wonder that the group whitewashes hate crimes against Jews.

JFREJ prizes its "alliances" and readily dismisses the sins of its allies. Above all, JFREJ prizes its "alliances" and readily dismisses the sins of its allies—even when those sins run counter to the group's stated beliefs. In her interview, Sasson rightly described anti-Semitism as a "tool that punches up against Jews, in that it portrays Jews as powerful." But this is precisely the conspiracist brand of anti-Semitism espoused by anti-Israel groups such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, with whom JFREJ partners. These outfits rely on an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist framework that sees the Jewish collective (i.e., Israel) as the oppressive power and that equates Zionism with Palestinian suffering.

Either Sasson is displaying willful blindness or she has been corrupted by the very suggestion she claims to condemn: that Jews are the oppressor class, and Palestinians their hapless victims. The latter stance seems more convincing given the activist left's penchant for pitting the powerful against the weak. As John-Paul Pagano has written, if Jews are perceived as the oppressor class, then overt anti-Semitism becomes "easy to disguise as a politics of emancipation," and punching up at Jews becomes "a form of speaking truth to power."

While it is true that abusers are often themselves the victims of abuse, and that a person's experience of oppression may contribute to the ways in which he oppresses other people, it is intellectually dishonest to claim that this is somehow exculpatory. And while it is laudable to condemn all forms of bigotry, there is something obscene about automatically holding up the perpetrator of a hate crime as a victim and subsequently elevating his grievances above the violence done to the actual injured party. Regarding such violence, Sasson's vigilance is wanting. On Democracy Now, she argued against greater security measures for Jews and claimed that the "answer to what is happening is not more policing."

Anti-Semitism has long been a feature of extreme left-wing and Islamist ideologies—from Soviet Communism to Hezbollah's exterminationist creed. As everyone knows, it has also been a feature of fascism and Nazism. It is incumbent on both the left and right to root out the Jew-haters in their midst. But some progressive groups have instead embraced them—as a display of progressive virtue, no less. As is often the case when bigotry is given the gloss of victimhood, it is the Jews who will bear the brunt of the abuse.

Karys Rhea is a fellow at the Counter-Islamist Grid, a project of the Middle East Forum. Keren Toledano is an artist and writer based in New York City.

[bamboomarket72-blog]

“We Try to Learn Every Terrorist Attack”: Inside the Top-Secret Israeli Anti-Terrorism Operation That’s Changing the Game

I pursued my enemies and overtook them; I did not turn back until they were destroyed. —Psalm 18:37 (motto of Israel’s clandestine counterterror squad)

On a spring evening in late April, I traveled to a fortified compound in the Ayalon Valley between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The location is not identified on Waze, the Israeli-built navigation tool, and so, as far as my app-addled cabdriver was concerned, it does not exist. Then again, the same could be said for its inhabitants: YAMAM, a band of counterterror operatives whose work over the last four decades has been shrouded in secrecy.

Upon arrival at the group’s headquarters, which has all the architectural warmth of a supermax, I made my way past a phalanx of Israeli border police in dark-green battle-dress uniforms and into a blastproof holding pen where my credentials were scanned, my electronic devices were locked away, and I received a lecture from a counter-intelligence officer who was nonplussed that I was being granted entrée to the premises. “Do not reveal our location,” he said. “Do not show our faces. And do not use our names.” Then he added, grimly, and without a hint of irony, “Try to forget what you see.”

YAMAM is the world’s most elite—and busiest—force of its kind, and its expertise is in high demand in an era when ISIS veterans strike outside their remaining Middle East strongholds and self-radicalized lone wolves emerge to attack Western targets. “Today, after Barcelona,” says Gilad Erdan, who for the past three years has been Israel’s minister for public security, “after Madrid, after Manchester, after San Bernardino—everyone needs a unit like YAMAM.” More and more, the world’s top intelligence and police chiefs are calling on YAMAM (a Hebrew acronym that means “special police unit”). During his first month on the job, recalls Erdan, “I got requests from 10 countries to train together.”

I made my way to the office of YAMAM’s 44-year-old commander, whose name is classified. I am therefore obliged to refer to him by an initial, “N,” as if he were a Bond character. N’s eyes are different colors (the result of damage sustained during a grenade blast). His shaved head and hulking frame give him the vibe of a Jewish Vin Diesel. At his side, he keeps an unmuzzled, unbelievably vicious Belgian shepherd named Django.

Near Tel Aviv, Israel. March 1978. The aftermath of a bus assault by P.L.O. guerrillas, which claimed the lives of 37 Israelis and wounded 71.

Photograph by Shmuel Rachmani/AP Images.

Last fall, Israeli officials agreed to provide Vanity Fair unprecedented access to some of YAMAM’s activities, facilities, and undercover commandos. When I asked N why his superiors had chosen to break with their predecessors’ decades of silence, he gave an uncharacteristically sentimental response: “It’s important for operators’ families to hear about our successes.” (Field “operators,” as they are called, are exclusively male; women sometimes serve in intelligence roles.) N does not discount less magnanimous reasons for cooperating, however.

First, YAMAM has devised new methodologies for responding to terrorist incidents and mass shootings, which it is sharing with its counterparts across the globe. (More on this shortly.) Second, Israel, as an occupying power, faces international condemnation for its heavy-handed approach toward the Palestinians; as a result, some top officials evidently felt it was time to reveal the fact that governments—including a few of Israel’s more vocal critics on the world stage—often turn to them, sotto voce, for help with their most intractable security problems. And last come the bragging rights—perhaps the unit’s most meaningful rationale.

YAMAM, it so happens, recently won a bitter, 40-year bureaucratic battle with Sayeret Matkal, a secretive special-forces squad within the Israel Defense Forces (I.D.F.). Sayeret Matkal was formerly the ne plus ultra in this realm; indeed, Vanity Fair, in an article published right after the 9/11 attacks, called the group “the most effective counterterrorism force in the world.” It counts among its alumni political leaders, military generals, and key figures in Israel’s security establishment. And yet, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a Sayeret Matkal veteran, had to quietly designate one unit to be the national counterterror A-team, he chose YAMAM over his old contingent, which specializes in long-distance reconnaissance and complex overseas missions.

Netanyahu’s decision, supported by some of the prime minister’s fiercest foes, had all the sting of President Barack Obama’s selection of the navy’s SEAL Team Six (over the army’s Delta Force) to conduct the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. YAMAM is part of the national police force—not the military or the Mossad, which is Israel’s C.I.A., or the Shin Bet, the country’s domestic-security service, which is more akin to Britain’s M.I.5. And yet, in recent months, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has blurred some of the lines between these agencies’ duties. YAMAM’s primary focus involves foiling terror plots, engaging militants during attacks, combating crime syndicates, and blunting border incursions. In contrast, the military, in addition to protecting Israel’s security, is often called upon to respond to West Bank demonstrations, using what human-rights activists often consider excessive force. But as Hamas has continued to organize protests along the fence that separates Israel and Gaza, I.D.F. snipers have been killing Palestinians, who tend to be unarmed. What’s more, Hamas has sent weaponized kites and balloons into Israel, along with mortar and rocket barrages, prompting devastating I.D.F. air strikes. While members of the YAMAM have participated in these missions as well, they have largely played a secondary role.

Off and on for a year, I followed N and his team as they traveled, trained, and exchanged tactics with their American, French, and German counterparts on everything from retaking passenger trains to thwarting complex attacks from cadres of suicide bombers and gunmen firing rocket-propelled grenades. YAMAM’s technology, including robots and Throwbots (cameras housed in round casings that upright themselves upon landing), is dazzling to the uninitiated. But so are the stats: YAMAM averages some 300 missions a year. According to N, his commandos have stopped at least 50 “ticking time bombs” (suicide bombers en route to their targets) and hundreds of attacks at earlier stages.

“I’ve been out with the YAMAM on operations,” John Miller, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, told me in his office, a few blocks from the World Trade Center. “There are a lot of outfits that have a lot of knowledge and do a lot of training, but that’s different from a lot of experience.” He pointed out that for every terrorist attack in Israel that makes the news, there are 10 that are prevented by YAMAM acting on perishable intelligence provided by Shin Bet.

Avi Dichter agrees wholeheartedly. After serving in Sayeret Matkal, he joined the Shin Bet and in 2000 rose to become its director. He now chairs the Committee on Defense and Foreign Affairs in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. For years, he admitted, counterterrorism officials shared only a portion of their most sensitive intelligence with covert operatives, out of fear of its being compromised. Now, Dichter says, YAMAM representatives sit in Shin Bet’s war room to ensure they have the full picture. “It took us a long time to understand that you can’t keep information from the unit you’re asking to perform a mission, because what they don’t know may undermine the entire operation.” When I asked him how he would describe the unit to outsiders, he said, “YAMAM is a special-operations force that has the powers of the police, the capabilities of the military, and the brains of Shin Bet.” They are, in effect, the spy agency’s soldiers.

Nowadays, some terrorists aren’t interested in negotiations or even survival.

The N.Y.P.D.’s Miller, for his part, claimed U.S. law-enforcement agencies benefit from YAMAM’s successes. A former journalist, who once interviewed bin Laden, Miller maintained, “You can learn a lot from the YAMAM about tactics, techniques, and procedures that, when adapted, can work in any environment, including New York. It’s why we go to Israel once or twice a year—not just to see what we’ve seen before but to see what we’ve seen before that they’re doing differently. Because terrorism, like technology—and sometimes because of technology—is constantly evolving. If you’re working on the techniques you developed two years ago, you’re way out of date.”

Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security, concurs: “We have a lot to learn from [Israel—YAMAM in particular] in terms of how they use technology as a force multiplier to combat an array of threats. Over the last 15 years, we at D.H.S. have partnered with them on almost every threat.”

A NEW PARADIGM

“I saw a few Hollywood movies about fighting terrorism and terrorists,” N said. “But the reality is beyond anything you can imagine.” Back in the States, I trailed him and his entourage, who met with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s Special Enforcement Bureau, as well as New York City’s Emergency Service Unit, which falls under Miller. “Terror organizations used to take hostages because they wanted to achieve a prisoner exchange; now they’re trying to do something different,” N observed, remembering a bygone era when terrorism was a violent means of achieving more concrete political ends.

The conventional wisdom for how to deal with fast-moving terrorist incidents has evolved over time, most notably in hostage situations. Since the 1960s and 70s, first responders have sought to establish a physical boundary to “contain” an event, engage the perpetrators in dialogue, draw out negotiations while formulating a rescue plan, then move in with a full team. Similar principles were adapted for reacting to kidnappers, emotionally disturbed individuals, and mass-casualty incidents.

But over the last 20 years—a period that dovetails with N’s rise from recruit to commander—he and his colleagues have come to treat terror attacks the way doctors treat heart attacks and strokes. There is a golden window in which to intervene and throw all their energy and resources at the problem. While units in the U.S. have tended to arrive on the scene, gauge the situation, secure a perimeter, and then call in specialists or reinforcements, YAMAM goes in heavy, dispatching self-contained squadrons of breachers, snipers, rappellers, bomb techs, dog handlers, and hostage negotiators. Metaphorically speaking, they don’t send an ambulance to stabilize a patient for transport. They send a hospital to ensure survival on scene. Moreover, they establish mobile units with clear lines of authority, not an array of groups with competing objectives. These teams can rove and respond, and are not unduly tethered to a central command base.

“The active shooter changed everything,” John Miller elaborated. Nowadays, the terrorist or mass murderer isn’t interested in negotiations or even survival. “He is looking for maximum lethality and to achieve martyrdom in many cases.” Because of this, the response teams’ priorities have shifted. The primary objective, said Miller, echoing YAMAM’s strategy, “is to stop the killing. That means to use the first officers on the scene whether they’re specialized or not. The other part is to stop the dying. How do you then set parameters inside as the people are chasing the threat, going after the sound of gunfire, engaging the gunman? How do you get to those people who are wounded, who are still viable, who could survive? American law enforcement has struggled with [this] since the Columbine case”—when responders waited too long to storm in. “We’ve got to get inside within 20 minutes. It can’t be within the golden two hours—or it’s not golden.”

Major O, the 37-year-old who commands YAMAM’s sniper team, explained that one of the unit’s signature skills is getting into the assailant’s mind-set. “We try to learn every terrorist attack everywhere in the world to find out how we can do it better,” he noted. “Our enemies are very professional, too, and in the end they are learning. They try to be better than us.”

To maintain its edge, YAMAM, after analyzing far-flung incidents, fashions its training to address possible future attacks. In the time that I spent with the operators, they rappelled down a Tel Aviv skyscraper and swooped into an office dozens of floors below, testing alternative ways that responders might have confronted last year’s Las Vegas attack in which a lone gunman on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel fired more than a thousand rounds at concertgoers, killing 58. A YAMAM squad also spent hours on a dimly lit platform taking over a stationary Israeli passenger train—alongside members of France’s elite Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale. (The French had come to Israel, in part, to practice such maneuvers, evidently mindful of 2015’s Thalys rail attack, which recently found its way to the big screen in Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris). And at a telecommunications facility north of Tel Aviv, Israeli operatives simulated a nighttime mission with Germany’s vaunted Grenzschutzgruppe 9, facing multiple gunmen and explosions in all directions. Taking it all in, I felt like I had unwittingly been cast as an extra in a Michael Bay movie.

As they briefed their European guests, the YAMAM team preached its gospel of never allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. “To be relevant and to win this battle, sometimes you must go with 50 percent or 70 percent knowledge and intelligence,” N said. As he considered what his counterparts faced at places such as Orlando’s Pulse nightclub or the Bataclan concert hall, in Paris, N asserted that in today’s scenarios, unlike those in the 20th century, “we don’t have the privilege of time. You must come inside very fast because there are terrorists that are killing hostages every minute.”

Dimona, Israel. March 1988. The so-called Mothers’ Bus attack, in which three nuclear-research workers were executed by P.L.O. terrorists.

From Polaris.

THE SECOND DIRECTIVE

The inside story of YAMAM’s genesis has not been told by its leaders, until now.

In 1972, during the Summer Olympics in Munich, members of the Palestinian group Black September kidnapped and murdered 11 Israeli teammates. The cold-blooded attack—and Germany’s botched response—prompted Israel’s prime minister Golda Meir to initiate Operation Wrath of God, sending hit squads to track down and kill the group’s organizers and others (later depicted in Steven Spielberg’s Munich). And though it may have escaped public attention, a secret second directive would go forth as well, which ordered the establishment of a permanent strike force to deter or defeat future attacks.

This mandate would not be realized until two years later, after terrorists sneaked across the border from Lebanon, killed a family of three, and took over an elementary school in Ma’alot with 105 students and 10 teachers inside—hoping to negotiate for the release of their brethren held in Israeli prisons. Sayeret Matkal raced to the scene and mounted a disastrous rescue attempt. Twenty-one students perished. Addressing the Knesset, Meir exclaimed, “The blood of our children, the martyrs of Ma’alot, cries out to us, exhorting us to intensify our war against terrorism, to perfect our methods.”

Following the attack, counterterrorism responsibilities—especially the delicate art of hostage rescue—shifted from the I.D.F. to a new police unit, initially dubbed the “Fist Brigade” and, later, YAMAM. Chronically underfunded, ostracized by the military, and deemed an unknown quantity by the intelligence services, the unit was a backwater. That is, until Assaf Hefetz was put in charge. He was a well-regarded I.D.F. paratrooper with important friends, among them future prime minister Ehud Barak. Hefetz had supported the April 1973 operation in which Barak—famously disguised as a woman—infiltrated Beirut and killed several Palestine Liberation Organization leaders as part of Israel’s ongoing retaliation for Munich. Hefetz professionalized YAMAM, persuading skilled soldiers to join his new police commando unit—whose work was a secret to all but a handful of Israelis.

In May, I visited Hefetz, aged 74, in the seaside hamlet of Caesarea and found a man with the body of a 24-year-old and the hearing of a 104-year-old. Like many of his generation of Israelis, he speaks his mind without regard for how his words may land. “After 18 months, I had recruited and trained three platoons, and I knew that my unit was much better than the army,” he insisted. “But I was the only person in the country who thought so.” In due course, he found an eager partner in the spymasters of Shin Bet, who agreed to let YAMAM try its hand at the treacherous work of neutralizing suspected terrorists.

Still, it was Hefetz, personally, who first put YAMAM on the map. On the morning of March 11, 1978, armed guerrillas arrived on Zodiac boats from Lebanon, coming ashore near Haifa. Once inland, they encountered and murdered an American named Gail Rubin, whose close relative happened to be Abraham Ribicoff, a powerful U.S. senator. Next, they flagged down a taxi, murdered its occupants, then hijacked a bus. Traveling south along the picturesque coastal highway, they threw hand grenades at passing cars and shot some of the bus passengers. The attack was timed in hopes of disrupting peace talks between Israel’s prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

The rolling pandemonium came to a halt at a junction north of Tel Aviv. “When I arrived, my unit was [still] an hour away,” Hefetz recalled. The bus had stopped, but it was a charred wreck. “No one knows [exactly] what happened. Call it the fog of war.” Hefetz soon learned that some of the assailants had escaped on foot and were moving toward the beach. He grabbed his gun and gave chase, eventually killing two of them, capturing a third, and rescuing some of the hostages. In the process, he took a bullet to his right shoulder and lost hearing in one ear. The incident, known as the Coastal Road Massacre, claimed the lives of more than three dozen people. But Hefetz’s valor raised the question: given what YAMAM’s commander accomplished on his own, what could the unit as a whole do if properly harnessed?

The answer was a decade in coming, during which time YAMAM was bigfooted by Sayeret Matkal during its response to terrorist attacks. In the notorious Bus 300 affair, for example, Sayeret Matkal commandos stormed a bus to rescue hostages and claimed it had killed four terrorists when, in fact, two had survived. The pair were turned over to Shin Bet operatives, who, a short distance away, murdered them in cold blood. The debacle and its aftermath, which disgraced Shin Bet chief Avraham Shalom—who had ordered the on-site assassinations and then tried to cover it up—left an indelible stain on Israel’s institutions and international credibility.

For every terrorist attack in Israel that makes the news, there are 10 that are prevented.

In 1987, Alik Ron, a man with deep credentials and a devil-may-care attitude, took over YAMAM. He had served in Sayeret Matkal and participated in the legendary 1976 raid on Entebbe, in which an I.D.F. team stormed a Ugandan airport and successfully freed more than 100 hostages. “I was in our most elite units and took part in the most celebrated mission in our history,” said Ron, who in retirement has become a gentleman farmer. “Only when I was put in charge of YAMAM did I realize I was in the company of the most professional unit in Israel.”

And yet when he first addressed his men to say how proud he was to lead them—describing all the great things they would accomplish together—they broke out laughing. Apparently, the operatives were fed up with being highly trained benchwarmers, always left on the sidelines. Ron persevered nonetheless. And he is withering in his assessment of his old unit (Sayeret Matkal) and its overseers. “Nobody, nobody, not the head of Shin Bet, not Mossad, not the prime minister, can give me an order [to kill terrorists after they have been captured]. He can get me an order, but I will do like this,” he said, lifting his middle finger. “I will not murder them. I will have already killed them in the bus.”

Ron soon got the chance to try things his way. In 1988, he learned that three terrorists had crossed in from Egypt and hijacked a bus full of working mothers on their way to Dimona, the epicenter of Israel’s top-secret nuclear-weapons program. As Ron raced toward the Negev Desert to link up with his team, he saw CH-53 Sea Stallions on the horizon heading in the same direction. Pounding his fist on his dashboard and unleashing a stream of expletives, Ron recalled, he screamed, “Sayeret Matkal . . . again?!”

Ehud Barak was on one of those helicopters, a man who would go on to hold virtually every position in Israeli officialdom—prime minister, defense minister, commander of the armed forces, and head of Sayeret Matkal. Recalling his first encounter with YAMAM 30 years ago, Barak, now 76, expressed astonishment at how Ron and his team had somehow managed to arrive ahead of Sayeret Matkal’s helicopters, raring to go. “We asked them what they brought with them,” Barak recalled. “It ended up they brought everything which was needed for taking over the bus. So we let them do it.”

Israeli-Egyptian border. August 2011. Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak (gesturing) visits the scene of a deadly jihadist incursion.

From the Israeli Defence Ministry/Getty Images.

According to David Tzur, who was a major at the time and would later take over as YAMAM’s commander, the so-called Mothers’ Bus incident was a turning point because it showcased the unit’s speed, judgment, and agility. “We were called to the field at 7:30 in the morning,” he said. “Before we arrived, [the attackers] had killed three hostages.” At around 10:30, the team’s snipers shot two of the attackers while other YAMAM members stormed the bus and shot the remaining assailant. “No hostages were killed during the operation,” Tzur proudly recalled. Israel’s national-security apparatus—including skeptical I.D.F. generals—took notice and recognized that when it came to counterterrorism they had a scalpel at their disposal instead of blunter instruments. “I don’t believe that anyone has a better unit,” Barak observed. “They are kind of irreplaceable.”

THE ROAD TO SINAI

Lately, YAMAM has gotten used to terror’s new face: extremists intent on inflicting maximum carnage with maximum visibility. “I’ve been in dozens of operations and many times under fire, [facing] many terrorists and suicide bombers,” N admitted. “But the [one] I remember more than all the others is the terror attack on the border in the Sinai Desert.”

It was August 2011, six months after the Arab Spring ouster of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak—and three years before ISIS formally declared its caliphate. YAMAM, tipped off by Shin Bet that a large-scale attack was imminent somewhere along Israel’s southern border, dispatched one squadron and a sniper team by helicopter. They waited through the night before getting word that shots had been fired at a bus, injuring passengers inside. A family of four, traveling the same highway, was ambushed and slaughtered. “This group of ISIS-Salafi jihadists that came from the Sinai Desert, they were a different challenge for us,” N said of the 12-man death squad. “We know from intelligence that they received training abroad. They were proficient with weapons, grenades, explosive charges, [and even] had handcuffs to kidnap people.” They also brought cameras to film their handiwork.

N, who was a squadron commander at the time, was fired at twice as his YAMAM team arrived on the scene. In the skirmish, one militant detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and a bus driver, and, N recalled, “a terrorist shot a surface-to-air missile at one of our helicopters, but it missed.” Two gunmen were spotted crossing the highway. One was killed in an exchange of fire while a second took aim at a passenger vehicle, killing the driver. By midafternoon the scene seemed to be under control, and Pascal Avrahami—a legendary YAMAM sniper—briefed his superiors, including then defense minister Barak. A short time later, shots rang out from the Egyptian side of the border. Four YAMAM operators scrambled for cover, and in the frenzy a 7.62-mm. round hit Avrahami above the ceramic body armor covering his chest. The sniper, a 49-year-old father of three, had been killed by an enemy sniper, who simply melted back into the desert.

I joined N this past April at Mount Herzl, the final resting place of many of the nation’s fallen warriors. It was Israel’s Remembrance Day, a somber holiday when life and commerce grind to a halt. On this day, N spent time with Avrahami’s parents at their son Pascal’s grave, embracing them and reminiscing about his outsize role in the unit. (The previous evening, as the sun descended, squad members had stood in the courtyard of the YAMAM compound, having refreshments and trading stories. Family members of slain commandos were taken inside a darkened shooting range where their loved ones’ holographic images were projected in midair. The scene was otherworldly but somehow appropriate for this secretive, high-tech cadre.)

On this Remembrance Day, N mourned the loss of his friend, whose 24 years of service made him YAMAM’s longest-serving member. But he stopped at one point to stress that his team is focused less on the past than on the future: “We know the enemy will always try and do something worse, something bigger, something extraordinary that they never did before. And for this scenario we are preparing ourselves.”

Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/inside-yamam-top-secret-israeli-anti-terrorism-operation

[antifaintl]

2017: A (Partial) Timeline Of Bigoted Violence

In 2018, we began trying to monitor news reports concerning significantly-violent hate crimes.  Here is a chronological list of the 100+ violent hate crimes we documented in 2017 (the dates link to the news source of each incident): January 2017: Over 40 Jewish centers in the U.S. receive bomb threats. January 1, 2017: 19-year-old Nathan Richardson encounters 67-year-old jogger Wenqing Xu and beats him to death in an unprovoked, random attack.  After committing the murder, Richardson texted his friends that he “fucked sum chink up. Bodied him. I think pure crime scene – his head’s gone,”

January 5, 2017: Neo-nazis bomb a refugee centre in Gothenburg, Sweden, seriously injuring an immigration officer working there.   January 20, 2017: A right-wing extremist shoots a protestor at a Milo Yiannopoulos event at the University of Washington.

January 25, 2017: An arsonist destroys the only mosque in Victoria, Texas. January 25, 2017: Neo-nazis in Gothenburg, Sweden plant a bomb at a refugee centre.  It fails to detonate.

January 28, 2017: a First Nations woman walking with her sister is struck by a trailer hitch hurled from a passing vehicle.  After struggling in hospital for several months, she succumbs to her injuries.   January 29, 2017: Alexandre Bissonnette walks into a mosque in Canada during evening prayers and opens fire, shooting 17 people and killing six of them.

January/February 2017: four men used Grindr to target gay men for assaults and robberies.  Pretending to also be gay, they would arrange to come to their victims’ homes, where they would hold their victims at gunpoint while they beat them, bound them, verbally abused them with with homophobic slurs, and stole property and vehicles. February 2, 2017:  27-year-old active white supremacist William Christopher Gibbs arrives in a Georgia hospital claiming to have accidentally poisoned himself with ricin.  The extremely deadly illegal compound, most popular with terrorist groups, has been used in attempts to assassinate U.S. elected officials in the past.  Gibbs’ hands and his vehicle tested positive for the presence of ricin. Gibbs was later charged with possession of ricin.   February 16, 2017: Inspired by Dylann Roof’s mass shooting of black church-goers, 28-year-old neo-nazi and convicted felon Benjamin McDowell goes online seeking someone to furnish him with firearms so he can commit his own mass murder.  Authorities, who had been monitoring McDowell after he threatened a synagogue, arrest McDowell after he buys a pistol from an undercover FBI agent. In 2018 McDowell pled guilty and received a ten-year prison sentence.

February 19, 2017: less than a month after a white supremacist shot seventeen people in a mosque, killing six of them, 35-year-old Florida resident Gerald Sloane Wallace calls several mosques, leaving threats to come and shoot their members.

February 21, 2017: a 24-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Chicago, IL.

February 22, 2017:  Adam Purinton tells two men from India to “get out of my country” then shoots both plus a bystander, killing one.

February 26, 2017: a transgender woman is shot and killed in New Orleans, LA. February 28, 2017: a mosque in Toronto is set on fire by arsonists.

March 1, 2017: a transgender woman is stabbed to death in New Orleans, LA.

March 3, 2017: A Sikh man is shot and injured in front of his Seattle house by a white man wearing a mask, who yells at him to “go back to your country!”

March 7, 2017: After repeatedly harrassing his Hmong neighbours, 81-year-old Wisconsin man Henry Kaminiski steps out of his home and fires a pistol at neighbor Mai Houa Moua as she worked in her garden.  Kaminski then fired twice more at Moua from inside his home, then fired at a deputy responding to the resulting 911 call.  During his arrest, Kaminiski made several racist remarks concerning the Hmong and his belief they were “taking over.”  Police also found child pornography on Kaminski’s computer.

March 12, 2017: a mosque in Ypsilanti, MI. is set on fire by arsonists. March 20, 2017: James Jackson arrives in Manhattan with a sword and stabs the first black man he sees to death.  He later tells authorities he “intended to kill as many black men as he could.”

March 22, 2017: a 38-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Baltimore, MD.

March 23, 2017: Two Liverpool sisters chase a Muslim man down the street, calling him a “fucking Paki” and demanding that he go back to his country, before knocking him to the ground, kicking him in the head, and biting him in the leg so hard that he was left with permanent scarring.   March 24, 2017: Yelling “I hate Muslims!” a man in Minneapolis stabbed a Somali man in an attempt to kill him.   March 26, 2017: A racist mob attacks a 15-year-old Polish boy in Gloucestershire and, when a local Asian shopkeeper tries to intervene, attack him as well with crowbars and baseball bats, then attempt to run him over with a car.

March 26, 2017: Seven or more members of the Jewish Defence League assault a 54-year-old Palestinian-American college professor.  The authorities lay hate crime charges against the assailants. March 31, 2017: A 17-year-old Iranian/Kurdish boy is nearly beaten to death by a mob of eight people in Croydon after he revealed to them that he was a refugee.

April, 1, 2017: Members of an extremist Hindu nationalist group physically assault people in Alwar, India who had purchased cows.  One of the victims - a 55-year-old Muslim farmer - died of his injuries two days later.

April 4, 2017: a 27-year-old man breaks into the home of 65-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman Sarah Halimi, beating her to death while calling her “Satan,” and then throwing her body out of a third-floor window.   April 6, 2017: A Charlotte store is set on fire by an arsonist who leaves a warning message for the shop owner that he “did not want any refugee business owners and that they would torture the owner if they did not leave and go back to where they came from,” according to police.  It was signed “White America.”

April 7, 2017: 24-year-old Scottish resident Connor Ward is arrested on terrorism charges after police accuse him of preparing a bombing campaign against mosques and Muslim centres in Scotland.  Police are forced to evacuate his neighbourhood when a search of his home uncovers explosives, bomb-making materials, a cache of illegal weapons, as well as neo-nazi flags and other materials.  A year later, Ward is convicted on all charges and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for six years. April 11, 2017: A 55-year-old Palestinian-American college instructor is hospitalized after being brutally assaulted while attending a Washington, D.C. protest against Israeli apartheid by a group of five Jewish Defence League members.  32-year-old Canadian Jewish Defence League member  Yosef Steynovitz and 23-year-old Canadian “Proud Boy” Brandon David William Vaughan are charged with assault with significant bodily injury while armed, among other charges.  

April 21, 2017: a 28-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Miami, FL.

April 30, 2017: A  white man storms a pool party in San Diego and shoots four black women, two black men, and one Latino man while allowing white attendees to leave.  One victim dies while the other six sustain critical injuries.

May 5, 2017: A man walking his dog on South Beach in Miami is confronted by two men who call him a “fucking faggot,” then attack him, beating him unconscious.  At one point in the attack, one of the attackers shouts  “all faggots need to die and we’re going to make sure they do!” May 14, 2017: Vandals spray-paint hate graffiti on the home of a black family in upstate New York before attempting to set the house on fire while the family slept.  Although the family escaped unscathed, their garage burnt to the ground and their house suffered some damage. May 14, 2017: 24-year-old lesbian Lerato Moloi is found raped, beaten, and stoned to death, her body dumped in a field and burned beyond recognition.  Two men are arrested. May 17, 2017: A homophobic mob break into the home of a gay couple and shoot and stab both men to death.   May 17, 2017: a 34-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Fresno, CA. May 20, 2017: University of Maryland student and member of the “alt-Reich” facebook group Sean Urbanski walks up to 22-year-old Richard Collins III, who is black and who Urbanski does not know, and stabs him to death in an unprovoked attack.  Urbanski is later charged with a hate crime.

May 20, 2017: A man begins screaming homophobic slurs at a lesbian couple riding the subway before attacking them both, beating one woman unconscious.

May 24, 2017: A barrage of doxxing, rape threats, and death threats received by trans comic book artist Sophie Labelle forces her to cancel an appearance and event at a Halifax book store, which also received bomb threats and threats of attacking the event.  Labelle is forced into hiding.

May 25, 2017: A black woman riding the train home is subjected to extreme verbal harassment by Jeremy Christian, who admits to being a neo-nazi and tell her he will kill her.  As she leaves the train, Christian hits her with a bottle, cutting her eye open.  When police arrive, they refuse to arrest Christian.  The next day Christian would stab three people, killing two of them. May 26, 2017: Three men intervene on a MAX train in Portland when they witness another man verbally abusing two Muslim women with an Islamophobic tirade.  The Islamophobe responds by pulling out a knife and stabs the three interveners, killing two of them.  

May 26, 2017: Two Muslim butchers are beaten by members of an extremist HIndu nationalist group in Malegaon, India after being accused of trading in beef.

May 27, 2017: A white man drives his pickup truck through a campsite, targeting the Native Americans camping there while yelling racial slurs at them.  He intentionally drives over two Native American men, killing one and injuring the other.

May 27, 2017: A 34-year-old Anthony Hammond lets loose with a flurry of racial slurs directed at a black man in a parking lot, then pulls out a machete and stabs the man before barricading himself in his apartment for several hours, until finally surrendering to police.

May 28, 2017: Two teenagers attack a Jewish couple and their five daughters at a beach.  

June 3, 2017: 38-year-old white supremacist Phillip Wade racially abuses a 57-year-old black man on an Oakley, CA. bus, then pulls a knife and stabs the man to death while the man is walking away from the confrontation.  The victim is the third racialized person Wade has stabbed in the past six years and the second person he’s murdered.  

June 6, 2017: A 15-year-old black boy cutting through a park on his way to see his girlfriend is hit from behind and beaten unconscious by a group of men yelling “Nigger!” and “Go back to Africa!” at him as they punched and kicked him.

June 7, 2017: a 23-year-old white man in a Chicago Starbucks spits at a black man, telling him his children are “disposable vermin” and calling a second black man a slave, then punches a black passerby, knocking him unconscious.  He’s charged with a hate crime three months later.

June 10, 2017: A mob screaming transphobic insults attacks three trangender women, stabbing one and sending two to the hospital.

June 18, 2017: two men armed with baseball bats attack a group of Muslim teenagers, kidnapping a 17-year-old girl, who they beat to death, dumping her body in a pond.

June 1, 2017: A Princeton professor and racialized woman is forced to cancel a three-city lecture tour to promote her book about the Black Lives Matter movement after receiving over 50 death threats. June 19, 2017: Shouting “I’m going to kill all Muslims!” 47-year-old Darren Osborne drives a courier van through a crowd of Muslims leaving a Finsbury mosque, killing one person and injuring ten others.

June 21, 2017:  an Islamophobe approaches a Muslim man and woman sitting in a car stopped at a traffic light and knocks on the window.  When the driver rolls down the window, the Islamophobe sprays the driver and passenger with acid, severely burning both.  

June 22, 2017: Three Muslim teenaged brothers on a train out of Delhi, India are attacked by other passengers who accuse them of not being Indian nationalists, abuse them with Islamphobic slurs, and then assault them, stabbing 17-year-old Hafiz Junaid Khan to death and injuring both of his brothers. June 23, 2017: After assaulting his wife, a drunken Britain First supporter and neo-nazi Marek Zakrocki drives off in his work van after declaring he would “kill a Muslim” “for Britain.”  Shortly thereafter, he tries to run down restaurant owner  Kamal Ahmed outside of his establishment.  Failing to kill Mr. Ahmed, Zakorcki does drive his van into the restaurant, shattering its windows. June 24, 2017: 20-year-old neo-nazi Ethan Stables is arrested near the New Empire public house in Cumbria.  Having learned that the pub was hosting an LGBT event, Evans - who was known to refer to LGBT people as “degenerates” and to deny the Holocaust - had purchased a machete and researched bomb-making - told acquaintances he was planning to murder attendees and was arrested during his final reconnaissance of the pub.  Stables is convicted of terrorism early in 2018.

June 27, 2017: A huge mob attacks a dairy farmer and his family in Jharkhand, India after a dead cow was rumoured to be found outside of their house.  The mob tries to burn down the family’s home with them inside and beat the entire family so badly that they all require hospitalization.  The father of the family is in a coma for eight days and spends two months in the hospital recovering from head injuries and various broken bones.

June 29, 2017: A 40-year-old butcher is pulled out of his car by an angry mob in Jharkhand, India and beaten to death upon suspicion that he was transporting beef.

July 2017:  A 39-year-old passenger in a Lyft car begins insulting the driver’s race and religion before pulling the driver’s hair, punching him, and choking him. July 2, 2017:  a 28-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Lynchburg, VA.

July 9, 2017: Britain First leader Paul Golding viciously attacks someone he befriended and had attended a “self-defence” training with earlier in the day in what the sentencing judge described as “a really nasty and vicious assault.”

July 14, 2017: Lane Davis, a 33-year-old “alt-right” racist activist and former unpaid intern for Milo Yiannopoulos,  starts a fight with his own parents.  After accusing both of being “leftists,” Davis grabs a kitchen knife and stabs his father to death.  

July 16, 2017: A man attempts to pull the hijab off of a Muslim woman waiting for the tube in London, then hits her when she resists.  He then pins her friend to the wall and spits in her face before leaving.   July 16, 2017: Arsonists set a mosque in Manchester ablaze. July 18, 2017: A NASA researcher of South Asian descent has her car windshield shattered by a rock thrown through it by an assailant screaming “go back to your country!”  She’s injured in the attack. July 19, 2017: Two men exit a car and attack a racialized pedestrian with their fists and an iron bar.  

August 2017: a gay man has his jaw broken by a man shouting homophobic slurs and a group of people outside of a fast food outlet. August 2017: After enduring eight different racist attacks, including having the front window of their home smashed in and their car set on fire, a Pakistani family is forced to flee their Dublin home of the past ten years.

August 2, 2017: Two men chase down and beat up a 29-year-old transgender women while yelling transphobic insults at her.

August 2, 2017: Five white men attack a black couple at a KFC drive-through, using racial slurs as they assaulted them and pointing a gun at them. August 5, 2017: A mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota is firebombed, narrowly missing killing & injuring dozens of members there for morning prayers.  Police arrest three white Three Percent militia members who admit to the attack, stating that they wanted to “scare Muslims out of the country.”

August 6, 2017: someone lights the car of the president of a Québec City mosque on fire.  His mosque is the same one where  Alexandre Bissonnette had shot 17 worshippers in January. August 8, 2017: A well-known Chicago neo-nazi starts an altercation at a concert, then pulls out a smuggled knife and stabs a man and a woman at the show. August 12, 2017:  A white supremacist in Charlottesville, VA. drives his car at high speed directly into a crowd of anti-racist protestors, killing one woman and seriously injuring 19 other people.

August 12, 2017: A self-identifed member of the white supremacist “three percenter” movement is arrested by the FBI after unsuccessfuly trying  to blow up a bank in Oklahoma City with a car bombed modeled after the one used by Timothy McVeigh.

August 14, 2017: A man boards a train in New York when he notices another man glaring at him.  Feeling uncomfortable, he moves to another car only to be followed by the glaring man, who kicks him in the face while screaming “death to all faggots!” before exiting the train and getting away.

August 20, 2017: A racialized man standing outside his own home is attacked by a motorist who, without any provocation, jumped out of his car and ran at him, shouting racial slurs, before physically assaulting him.  The victim is seriously injured in the attack.

August 20, 2017: While waiting in line at a food truck, a 22-year-old man is subjected to homophobic abuse and demands that he “go back to your country!” before 24-year-old Gregory Brzoza beat him unconscious.  The victim loses several teeth and has a broken jaw. August 23, 2017: A 37-year-old man and a 47-year-old man start a fight with a black high school student on a city bus, yelling racial epithets at him as they beat him.

August 26, 2017: Four white men attack a black couple  at a recreation center in Rustenberg, South Africa, yelling racial slurs at them as they beat them.  One of the accused was evading charges for a racially-motivated attack against three petrol pump attendants in 2014 when he was arrested for this assault.

August 27, 2017: yelling “ this should clean away the AIDS!” a 56-year-old man throws boiling hot water over a 21-year-old gay man before hitting him about 16 times with a metal bar.

August 28, 2017: Several white teenagers begin shouting racial epithets at a 8-year-old black boy playing in an adjacent yard before wrapping a rope around his neck and hanging him.  The boy survives but has to be airlifted to medical care for the injuries he sustains.

September 2017: an extremist Islamphobe group claims responsibility for a series of hammer attacks by masked men on hijab-wearing women and racialized people in Burgundy, France that left three people injured.  

September 3, 2017: Ally Steinfeld, a transgender teenager, is beaten, stabbed repeatedly, tortured, and mutilated before being murdered by a gang of assailants.  Police arrest three people, with more arrests forthcoming. September 7, 2017: A swastika-adorned neo-nazi assaults a Filipino-Turkish man in a Fullerton, CA. parking lot while yelling racial slurs at him.

September 12 and 14, 2017: 23-year-old white supremacist Kenneth Gleason drove through Baton Rouge, shooting black men he passed in his vehicle before jumping out and shooting his victims again at close range.  Bruce Cofield and Donald Smart are murdered.   A speech made by Adolf Hitler is among items recovered by police from the racist murderer’s home. September 14, 2017: A 40-year-old man begins spitting and repeatedly punching a 37-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman on the subway in New York.  When her 57-year-old mother tries to intervene, the man punches her, pulls her hair, and spits on her as well, yelling “dirty Muslims” as he escapes from the train car. September 15, 2017: A black Cornell University student returns to his residence to find five members of a white fraternity shoving and harassing his roommates.  When he asks them to leave, they attack and beat him while shouting racial slurs.  Two months later, one of the attackers is charged with a hate crime. September 15, 2017: A 29-year-old white supremacist covered in racist tattoos repeatedly enters a hookah lounge in Lake Forest, CA., threatening to kill the Iranian staff and patrons.   September 18, 2017: two men jump out of a taxi to racially abuse a teenage boy walking with his friends.  One of the men pulls out a knife and threatens to stab the teenager.

September 20, 2017: A man is charged with a hate crime after attempting to murder a Muslim woman and 12-year-old girl by deliberately driving his car into them in two separate incidents on the same day.  The woman is severely injured, with broken limbs, extensive cuts and other injuries requiring skin grafts. September 24, 2017: A 58-year-old surgeon on his way to his mosque is confronted by two men who begin shouting Islamophobic insults at him and then stab him in the neck.  

September 27, 2017: Police arrest six members of neo-nazi terrorist group National Action for plotting to murder a Labour MP.

October 2017: a gay teenager and her two friends are harassed and then beaten by a mob of 20-30 high school aged boys. October 2017: Two teenaged sisters - both hijab-wearing Muslims are approached by 32-year-old Christopher Beckham as they get off of their school bus.  Beckham yells “Allah Akbar” and “go back to your country!” at them.  When their father comes to their aid, Beckham produces a knife and tries to stab him and punch him, all while yelling Islamophobic slurs at the family.

October 6, 2017: A stranger starts an argument with a Syrian refugee outside the refugee’s home, making disparaging remarks about Muslims and refugees and then attempting to break into the home when the refugee flees inside for safety.  A few hours later, a mysterious fire is started in the refugee’s family’s backyard.  The fire quickly engulfs the home, completely destroying it.  Although the Syrian refugee family are able to flee, they lose everything but the clothing they were wearing when they fled. October 8, 2017: A 66-year-old black man is held at gunpoint in his own garage while two white assailants shout racist epithets and beat him.  The two leave only to return minutes later to shoot up the victim’s home.

October 17, 2017: 64-year-old Gerard Medvec is arrested after telling police of his plans to firebomb the home of his neighbours, who he erroneously believes are Muslim.

October 18, 2017: Three neo-nazis pull up to a Gainesville bus stop after the aborted Richard Spencer appearance at a local campus and proceed to taunt people waiting for the bus with pro-Hitler and racist verbal abuse.  After someone throws something at the car, one of the neo-nazis gets out, points a handgun at the crowd, yells “I’m going to fucking kill you!” and fires at the crowd, happily missing.  All three are charged with attempted homicide; one is charged with being a convicted felon in possession of a weapon. October 18, 2017: A white couple in a pickup trucks begin shouting racial slurs at a black woman in another car as well as black pedestrians.  At one point, the man claims that he “we kill niggers!”  Moments later, he reverses the truck at high speed, ramming the black woman’s car and totaling it before speeding away.

October 21, 2017: Two men board a train in London where they verbally abuse a gay teenager before strangling him and punching and pushing his female friend to the ground. October 22, 2017: 26-year-old white supremacist and card-carrying National Socialist Movement member Taylor Michael Wilson attempts to derail an Amtrak train and is arrested on terrorism charges after the train crew tackles him and holds him until the police arrive.

October 22, 2017: A 60-year-old black man standing outside his neice’s home is attacked by two white men who yell racial slurs at him as they beat and stab him multiple times, puncturing his lung and lacerating his kidney.  

October 22, 2017: After a string of attacks by vandals, an interracial couple and their young son are forced to leave Belfast when their car is firebombed and completely destroyed in a racist attack.  

October 28, 2017: Hours after a “white lives matter” rally 50 miles away, 20 white supremacists enter a Tennessee restaurant and immediately begin arguing with an interracial couple eating dinner.  When the white woman in the couple argues back, one of the men in the white supremacist group punches her in the face, splitting open her forehead.  

October 29, 2017: A 26-year-old lesbian is confronting in a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant by a mob of at least five people, who begin taunting her and her girlfriend and homophobic slurs before assaulting her.  The attack leaves her with broken teeth and a permanent injury to her left eye.   November 1, 2017: 47-year-old Scott Ostrem, best known by his neighbors for his frequent racist tirades, shoots two Latino men and a Latina woman to death in an unprovoked mass shooting in a Colorado Wal-Mart.

November 1, 2017: an immigrant family’s restaurant is completely gutted in an arson attack a few weeks after the restaurant was hit by vandals.  The arsonist spray-painted the words “GO BACK” on the restaurant before burning it down. November 2, 2017: a 52-year-old man murders his 14-year-old son after a lengthy, loud, and heated argument about the son being gay.

November 6, 2017: A black woman driving out of a parking lot is accosted by a man on the street.  When she exits her vehicle to find out why he’s trying to get her attention, he calls her “a black bitch” and punches her repeatedly in the face, dropping her to the ground and breaking her nose.   November 6, 2017: Two adult women in a London KFC begin throwing food at a 15-year-old girl eating in the restaurant with her friends.  As she stood up to turn around and face her attackers, they throw a hot drink in her face, pull her to the ground by her hair, and begin kicking and punching her while yelling anti-Asian racial slurs at her.  The two women break the girl’s arm before fleeing.

November 7, 2017: A mob of youths kick down the door of a racialized family and later that night attack another racialized family’s home with a barrage of bricks.   November 11, 2017: A group of men confront a man walking home and ask him if he’s gay.  When he confirms that he is, they beat him to the ground.

November 12, 2017: A Liverpool-area home is firebombed at 4AM while the Syrian refugee family of two parents and three toddlers slept.  No one is injured, but the family is forced to find a new home because of the extensive damage. November 13, 2017: A white man on public transit in San Francisco repeatedly tells a fellow passenger that he hates him, calls him a “Chinese nigger,” and punches him several times.  

December 1, 2017: FBI arrest Bernandino Bolatete for possession of an unregistered silencer after several weeks of investigation during which Bolatete described in great detail his plans to commit a mass shooting at the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida.

December 2, 2017: A 41-year-old man enters a Jewish seniors’ residence where he hits an 84-year-old Jewish man with a fire extinguisher while yelling anti-semitic slurs, threatening to kill him before robbing him.  

December 3, 2017: after an altercation in a parking lot,  38-year-old Jeffrey Peters follows an African American driver home.  Once at the man’s home, Peters pulls out a loaded handgun, yells  racial epithets, and threatens to shoot him.

December 3, 2017: A gay man standing outside a London nightclub is attacked by two men yelling homophobic slurs, injuring him so severely that he requires reconstructive surgery afterwards. December 3, 2017: A gay married couple & their friend are drinking in a Provincetown, MA. bar when 49-year-old Scott Rego walks up to the group, smashing one of them in the head with a beer bottle, then kicking him on the floor and assaulting the two other men while yelling homophobic slurs at them.  A civil complaint is filed against Rego four months later for attacking the victims because of their sexual orientation.

December 4, 2017: An 18-year-old Muslim woman on a train is approached by a man that tells her he is going to kill her and all Muslims before he begins slapping her and trying to force her head to his crotch.  At the time, the man was awaiting trial after assaulting a 10-year-old Filipina girl on a train seven months previously.

December 6, 2017: A 50-year-old Muslim man Rajasthan, India is lured to a remote location by 37-year-old Islamophobe Shambulal Regar.  While Regar’s 14-year-old Regar nephew filmed, Regar severely beat his victim, then poured kerosene on him and burnt him to death.  Regar had previously posted videos condemning romantic relationships between Muslim men and Hindu women.   December 7, 2017: A Colombian immigrant is hospitalized after stepping between his 13-year-old son and a baseball-bat wielding attacker.  The victim, his son, his wife, and a family friend were walking across a parking lot while shopping when a man jumped out of a white BMW with the baseball bat, screaming about how the frightened family were “ISIS” and “terrorists” before swinging at the 13-year-old boy and repeatedly striking the father with it instead. December 7, 2017: A 48-year-old Muslim man is hacked and burned to death in a murder recorded by the perpetrator and posted on YouTube as a warning to Muslim men against marrying HIndu women.

December 9, 2017: After retired veteran Kevyn Fowler moves to a predominantly white Jacksonville, AR suburb, his dog is poisoned and his truck and trailer are stolen.  Then on December 9th, someone sets Fowler’s garage on fire after spray-painting “MOVE NIGGER.”  Fowler is African-American.

December 12, 2017: 21-year-old white supremacist William “Bill” Edward Atchison walks into a high school in New Mexico and shoots two Latino students, killing them, before turning the gun on himself.  It’s later revealed that Atchison was heavily-involved in the “alt-right” and was known to police.  

December 16, 2017: On his way to practice, Manchester City winger Raheem Sterling is subjected to racist insults by an unidentified man who goes on to kick Sterling.   December 17, 2018: A 52-year-old neo-nazi who had previously been convicted of murdering a man who had called Adolf Hitler a criminal detonates a nail bomb on the platform of an S-bahn train station in Hamburg, Germany, injuring one commuter.

December 22, 2017: After convincing their daughter to break up with her 17-year-old neo-nazi boyfriend, Scott Fricker and Buckley Kuhn-Fricker are shot to death in their home by the neo-nazi.   December 22, 2017: A 45-year-old man leaving a gay club in Ohio is immediately assaulted by an assailant who fractures his skull, breaks his nose, and leaves him with a black eye and concussion after screaming homophobic slurs at him and stealing his phone. December 25, 2018: A 31-year-old trans woman is attacked from behind by a 40-year-old man in a Brooklyn homeless shelter, who hits her with a chair while yelling transphobic slurs at her.   December 27, 2017: A 51-year-old Muslim woman in a Brooklyn Panera Bread is accosted by a mob of teenagers, who call her a terrorist, spit on her, and then begin punching her. December 31, 2017: Responding to a noise complaint, police in Colorado encounter a man who, after barricading himself into his apartment, engages them in a firefight, killing one sheriff’s deputy and wounding four others.  37-year-old Matthew Riehl was a self-described “libertarian” who frequently shared Islamophobic and alt-right posts on social media.   2017 = twenty-one shootings, fifteen arsons, sixteen stabbings, seventeen mob beatings, over 41 bomb threats, one bombing, three thwarted/failed bombings, one thwarted train derailment, a foiled political assassination, an acid attack, a hanging, and several other miscellaneous assaults by bigots, Islamophobes, nazis and racists which took the lives of forty-nine people and seriously injured eighty-four others in the countries we looked at (Canada, France, Honduras, India, Ireland, Malta, South Africa, Sweden, the UK, and the US).  And those are just the ones that we found media reports for.   Here’s hoping in 2018 we’re all more effective at undermining bigoted extremism and the horrific violence that comes with it.