{"id":81884,"date":"2020-10-31T17:05:42","date_gmt":"2020-10-31T15:05:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=81884"},"modified":"2020-10-31T09:10:45","modified_gmt":"2020-10-31T07:10:45","slug":"07-00-58","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=81884","title":{"rendered":"Black Hebrew Israelite shouts antisemitic slurs at racial justice protest"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Black Hebrew Israelite shouts antisemitic slurs at racial justice protest<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

BEN SALES \/ JTA <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Philadelphia Police Department, Pennsylvania \/ (photo credit: DOMINICK REUTER\/ REUTERS)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

An episode in which three visibly Jewish men were harassed with slurs during the aftermath of a racial justice protest in Philadelphia this week was instigated by an adherent of a fringe extremist movement connected to an antisemitic shooting last year.<\/span><\/p>\n

The incident, which was captured in a video circulated widely on social media, happened late Tuesday night, after demonstrations erupted across the city protesting the killing one day earlier by police of Walter Wallace, an African American man.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAmalek, Amalek, what are y\u2019all doing down here?\u201d a man off camera says, referencing a biblical tribe traditionally seen as the eternal enemy of the Jews. \u201cY\u2019all know that we\u2019re the real Jews, right?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A handful of people then advance on the three Jews, urging them to leave. At one point, someone pushes one of the three Jews, who later moves behind a line of police officers. One man appears to try to shield the Jews from the man holding the camera, who later calls the Jews \u201csynagogue of Satan.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That term is used by extremist sectors of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement (which is different from Jews of color) and offered one clue about what had taken place. But the video left some questions unanswered: What happened before it began? Who was doing the shouting? Was one of the Jews wearing a t-shirt with a white power symbol?<\/span><\/p>\n

Interviews with two of the Jewish men and a longer video of the same incident provided answers. They paint a picture of an unprovoked verbal assault on a group of people who said they were there out of curiosity.<\/span><\/p>\n

At least one of the Jewish men has shared content from far-right activists and returned home believing, as he had previously, that the Black Lives Matter movement is antisemitic \u2014 even though the verbal abuse he received reflected the rhetoric of a separate movement.<\/span><\/p>\n

Parts of the Black Hebrew Israelites constitute a fringe group that operates independently of racial justice activists, and long predates and is unconnected to Black Lives Matter. The extremist segments of the movement see Jews as impostors and believe themselves to be the true representatives of Judaism, making anti-Jewish rhetoric a regular part of their activity.<\/span><\/p>\n

That movement, according to Brian Levin, a professor who studies hate crimes, also has a tendency to \u201ckind of glom onto any kind of event or controversy,\u201d and frequently aims to instigate conflict. The shooters in the attack on a Jersey City kosher supermarket last year were also Black Hebrew Israelites.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAround election times and particularly when there are conspiracy theories and discussions of elites, the first stop is always the Jews,\u201d said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. \u201cBut the Black Hebrew Israelites are anti-Semitic no matter where you run into them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For the Jewish men in the videos, two of whom were wearing yarmulkes, the encounter came as they stood at an intersection in West Philadelphia when they were approached, unprompted, by a man yelling the anti-Semitic slurs. The man had previously been taunting a row of police standing with shields at the intersection.<\/span><\/p>\n

In another video shot that night at the same intersection, a voice can be heard saying, \u201cGet your Jewish ass on.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Philadelphia Police Department told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency it has no further information on the incident.<\/span><\/p>\n

The man who appears to have shot the extended video and uploaded it to Instagram has the handle @hoi_philly. HOI, or the House of Israel, is a subgroup of Black Hebrew Israelites that also took part in a widely publicized altercation at the March for Life in 2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

The owner of the Instagram account has posted other content disparaging Jews. This week, he posted a meme juxtaposing a photo of an Orthodox man wearing a yarmulke with a photo of a Black man. The caption reads \u201cJew-ish\u201d below the Orthodox man and \u201cJew\u201d below the Black man.<\/span><\/p>\n

While extremist Black Hebrew Israelite activity hasn\u2019t changed recently, it now exists in the context of a rising tide of polarization and extremism nationally surrounding Election Day. But the group\u2019s extremist activists do not fit neatly onto the country\u2019s polarized political divide, and are not progressive. Some members are known to shout misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic epithets on the street.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn such a fraught environment, extremists of all kinds are starting to take to the streets,\u201d said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. \u201cWe\u2019ve already been in a period of heightened street activity. We\u2019re also going to see more street activity in the days to come and this is emblematic of the things that are happening.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Two of the Jewish men in the video spoke with JTA, though both asked that their names not be printed and denied knowing each other before meeting that night, shortly before the video was taken. One of the Jews, a student at a yeshiva in New Jersey, said he and a friend had come to Philadelphia to visit acquaintances and later came to the protest to see firsthand what they had seen in the news and pay tribute to Wallace\u2019s life.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe went down there to pay our respects and assess the situation,\u201d he said. When people began saying anti-Semitic things to him, he said, \u201cWe didn\u2019t think that it would escalate. We were nodding in approval and listening and understanding their hurt. There was a life lost. I didn\u2019t read too much into the details.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Another Jewish man in the video has publicly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement and came to the protest wearing a shirt bearing the OK hand gesture, which in the shirt\u2019s context is a white supremacist symbol, in addition to dogs seemingly making Nazi salutes. (The shirt was created by a far-right activist who first gained notoriety after he was prosecuted for teaching his girlfriend\u2019s dog to make a Nazi salute.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The Jewish man\u2019s recent Twitter feed is a stream of almost exclusively pro-Trump and anti-left-wing posts, including retweets of a few people associated with the far right. He has written and retweeted tweets that call the Black Lives Matter movement a terrorist organization as well as anti-Semitic. After first telling the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he had come to the protests just to observe, he later acknowledged that he had prior opinions about it and wanted to see if he would experience anti-Semitism.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI did have a preconceived opinion,\u201d he said. \u201cI came there because I wanted to get my own first person perspective and see, what\u2019s this all about? Are they actually going to say anti-Semitic things to me? It\u2019s hard to believe until it actually happens to you. I didn\u2019t think they were actually going to and I was shocked out of my mind when they did.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He said that police officers also shoved him as he was leaving the protest.<\/span>
\nThat man\u2019s takeaway from the incident is what Graie Hagans, a Jew of color who lives in West Philadelphia and has participated in this week\u2019s racial justice protests, said he was concerned about this week. Hagans says he is \u201cdeeply heartbroken\u201d because of Wallace\u2019s death and police abuse he\u2019s seen, and he is concerned that the video will reinforce the mistaken idea, among some Jews, that crowds of Black people are inherently dangerous.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s what gets reaffirmed for us as Jewish people when the story and the setup continue to be the danger posed by gathered Black folks,\u201d said Hagans, the vision praxis director for Bend The Arc, a progressive Jewish organization. \u201cMe and three other Black folks gathered has a very different story and feel to it than four white folks gathered.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The entire incident comes against a context in which a vocal minority of American Jews are deeply skeptical of or opposed to Black Lives Matter, accusing it of anti-Semitism. They have pointed to instances where synagogues were vandalized amid protests and to anti-Israel rhetoric from parts of the movement\u2019s loose network.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the majority of the Jewish community does not appear to share those feelings. Hundreds of synagogues and Jewish organizations have pledged their support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and Jewish leaders have taken part in the racial justice protests that swept the country earlier this year, including this week in Philadelphia.<\/span><\/p>\n

Earlier Tuesday night, a group of rabbis joined an interfaith clergy contingent in Philadelphia\u2019s racial justice protests. Rabbi Annie Lewis, co-president of the Board of Rabbis of Philadelphia, said the alliance between Jewish and African-American clergy in the city is more representative of the Jewish role in the protests than an anti-Semitic act by a member of a fringe group.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEverywhere in the world, there\u2019s anti-Semitism and racism, but the stories that need to be told in Philadelphia are of Black clergy working in partnership with White Jewish clergy, all of us, to call out for justice and work against all kinds of hate. We\u2019re trying to lift up, together, ways we can work together peacefully.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Black Hebrew Israelite shouts antisemitic slurs at racial justice protest BEN SALES \/ JTA Philadelphia Police Department, Pennsylvania \/ (photo credit: DOMINICK REUTER\/ REUTERS) An episode in which three visibly Jewish men were harassed with slurs during the aftermath of a racial justice protest in Philadelphia this week was instigated by an adherent of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81884"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81884"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81900,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81884\/revisions\/81900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}