RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/opinion/heading-to-new-york-with-trepidation-and-a-star-of-david/

I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I’m actually nervous—as a Jew—about my upcoming trip from Tel Aviv to New York.

For one thing, the United States has been safer for the tribe than the rest of the Diaspora. For another, it’s pretty ridiculous to fear anti-Semitic assault in America after spending the past two weeks running for cover from Hamas rockets in Israel.

The worry is especially odd, given the many decades I’ve spent trying avoid and protect my family from Palestinian rock, Molotov-cocktail, suicide-bombing, stabbing and vehicular attacks. But there’s clearly something about the dangers one knows and has come to expect that make them less daunting, or at least more manageable.
Growing up in a rough Manhattan neighborhood the 1970s, I was no stranger to perils that felt familiar. The area around our apartment on the Upper West Side was rife with junkies, muggers and deinstitutionalized psychiatric patients. The subways, filled with vagrants, were filthy and covered in graffiti.
The stations, particularly at night, were so menacing that even the cops were hesitant to police them. Central Park, though passable in the daylight hours, was the site of rapes and murders after dark. Riverside Park was iffy at all hours.
And don’t get me started on Times Square, where drug dealers and prostitutes aggressively solicited passersby.
I took all of the above for granted, instinctively crossing the street before reaching a corner at which certain thugs hung out, for example, and knowing when not to “eyeball” the wrong group of girls sparring for a fight.
And though my complexion often made me somewhat of a sitting duck, my Jewishness never was an issue. Indeed, by the time that I moved to Israel at the age of 19, I had experienced a total of two anti-Semitic incidents.
The first took place at an Italian diner in the Bronx, where my best friend and I ate breakfast every morning on the way to school. The year was 1973, and it was the height of the Yom Kippur War.
The owner of the establishment—who, up to that point, had been very chummy with us—began to rant against Israel. While my friend promptly engaged him in a counter-argument, I was taken aback by the hostility in his tone, and I coaxed her off the premises.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/ex-cair-director-hassan-shibly-posts-video-telling-joe-kaufman/

This past January, following his wife’s accusation of domestic violence against her, Hassan Shibly resigned his leadership position within CAIR, a Hamas-linked group founded in June 1994. Shibly was Executive Director of CAIR’s Florida Chapter. Today, Shibly describes himself as a self-employed attorney, but his embrace of Hamas groups continues. This month, as a new Mid East conflict erupted, Shibly has promoted Hamas-related charities and cranked up his own extreme rhetoric. He has even gone so far as to post an anti-Semitic video calling for the Jews in Israel to go back to Europe. CAIR or no CAIR, Shibly is out and about spreading terror.

On December 20th, Imane Sadrati created a GoFundMe page to advertise her claim that she had suffered physical and mental abuse at the hands of her then-husband Hassan Shibly, beginning when she was pregnant with her first child. It was a huge scandal for Shibly, separating him from his beloved job at CAIR and tarnishing the star he had become in Islamist circles. It was just over a year prior that he had successfully fought the US government in the courts on the constitutionality of its terror watch list, a list that Shibly himself had his name on. Unlike his alleged domestic violence, though, he could blame the watch list on “Islamophobia.”

While much of this exposes the true face of Shibly, it is his extreme hatred for Israel that really defines him. In November 2006, he labeled Hezbollah “basically a resistance movement” and “absolutely not a terrorist organization.” In August 2014, he tweeted, “Israel and its supporters are enemies of God…” In April 2017, he used Facebook to laud Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti as a “hero.” And in May 2019, he used CAIR’s Tampa office to meet with convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) operative, Hatem Fariz. According to the indictmentagainst him, Fariz “was a PIJ member” who conspired “to commit offenses against the United States…”

Recent events have, once again, triggered Shibly’s rage.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/05/25/austin-city-hall-is-now-occupied-by-a-tent-city-with-machete-wielding-security-n1449682

Mayor Steve Adler’s Austin is still getting worse. He led the explosion of homeless camping citywide and the defunding of police.

Police are leaving in droves, crime is spiking hard, and homeless camping spread serious blight all over the city. Now that blight is concentrating downtown, thanks to another of Adler’s addle-brained decisions.

If you walk or drive around city hall in Austin, Texas, now, you’ll see a new tent city. It sprung up after voters in the city overwhelmingly voted to reinstate the ban on camping on public land on May 1.

Even during the ban, camping at city hall was illegal. Adler and the then-unanimous Democrat city council took care of itself that way, while allowing the rest of the city to become a trash heap and a disease and fire hazard.

Now, because the voters have spoken, the ban is being phased back in citywide.

But city hall is occupied. A tent city with its own machete-wielding “security” squats on space on which it has always been illegal to camp.

Mayor Steve Adler is doing nothing about it.

https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/americas-public-enemy-no-1-crime-goodwin/

“Another part of the experiment has prosecutors, politicians and judges, their hearts bleeding with social justice demands, setting the accused free and emptying prisons. The results are in, and they are grim. It turns out that human nature, when it fears no consequences, is emboldened in savage ways. ”

On the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, it is beyond dispute that the case sparked new appraisals of race relations and policing. It is also beyond dispute that the protests and unchecked riots that followed Floyd’s death sparked an epidemic of crime that continues to engulf American cities. 

The statistics are familiar, yet still shocking. The nearly 20,000 gun-related homicides last year were the most in decades, and one researcher found that 51 of the 57 largest cities saw increases. New York’s body count was up by nearly 40 percent. 

Violent crime soared by a reported 74 percent in Seattle, 55 percent in Chicago and 54 percent in Boston. This year is on pace to be far worse, signaling that 2020 wasn’t an outlier so much as the start of a deadly new trend. 

From sea to shining sea, America is witnessing the breakdown of public order and safety. Unfortunately, recent days brought a new dimension to that breakdown — the incidents of anti-Semitism roiling New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. 

It is not a coincidence that the same places where violence and murder are soaring are the same places where it is not safe for Jews to display their religion in public. The ancient hatred has come out of hiding and piggy-backed on the collapse of public order to bare its fangs.