Grassroots/Hank Kalet

A Hate that Runs Deep

A gunman. A synagogue on a Sabbath morning. A hostage crisis that, thankfully, ended without injury to the hostages. This is the United States in early 2022, a nation gripped by a wave of hate normalized by a rightwing growing in power and embedded in some of the nation’s most influential institutions.

The hatred is palpable. Environmental. Political. It has long bubbled up along the fringes, dating back to the early post-World War II years, through the 1950s and 1960s, through the Nixon and Reagan eras, the Bushes, and through the Republican assaults on both the Clinton and Obama administrations. A hate of Jews. Immigrants. Blacks. Muslims.

One can tune to Tucker Carlson on Fox News and hear him offer a modern take on “replacement theory,” the longstanding antisemitic claim that Jewish money is funding immigration or a socialistic war against the aristocrats, that Jews are pulling the strings and controlling outcomes from the shadows. If you listen closely, you can hear echoes of this theory on the right fringe of the anti-COVID vaccine movement, in its accusations that a shadowy entity created the vaccine and orchestrated the pandemic to wrest control and subvert democracy.

Politicians of both parties have trafficked in language that plays on antisemitic tropes about Israel and the dual loyalties of Jews, and there is the violence. The massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. The 2019 shooting in a Poway, Calif., Chabad synagogue. The grocery shooting in Jersey City, and Hanukkah stabbing in Rockland County, N.Y. the same year. And a variety of smaller attacks — arson in Brooklyn and in Newark, Del., the stabbing of a Boston rabbi, graffiti, intimidation, threats, verbal abuse. The perpetrators are White, Black, Latino, Muslim, Christian, Asian, leftwing, rightwing. They spout replacement theory or accuse Jews of controlling the media, Hollywood, the banks. They claim to defend Palestinians, but conflate Israel and Jews, and blame us for the occupation.

The Texas hostage crisis on Jan. 15, which lasted 11 hours, was just the latest case in which Jews were made to stand in for other grievances, though exactly what those were in this case remains unstated as I write this. What we know, according to the the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and other news agencies is that Malik Faisal Akram, a 44-year-old British citizen, was killed as hostages escaped from the Colleyville synagogue. Akram, officials said, was armed, likely mentally ill, and he told his hostages that “he wanted to secure the release of Aafia Siddiqui — an American-educated Pakistani woman widely known as “Lady al-Qaeda,” who was convicted of terrorism charges in 2010.”

Some might point to this and say — as an FBI spokesman said early in the standoff — that Akram’s motivation was “not specifically related to the Jewish community.” Not necessarily an antisemitic act. The choice of target tells a different story, and places the events of Jan. 15 in a much broader context.

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, told MSNBC’s Aaron Gilchrist that the “underlying premise” of the hostage-taking was antisemitism, and that it had to be seen as “part of a larger pattern” in which more and more attacks on Jews and on other groups has been taking place. Akram, he said, entered the synagogue on a Saturday morning during a time of prayer, which is “hardly what we would all an incidental detail.”

Houston Rabbi Joshua Fixler told the Texas Tribune the choice of a synagogue could not be “separated from antisemitism.”

“The expression wasn’t antisemitic, but it was built on some concept of antisemitism,” Fixler said.

Let’s be clear: Akram appears to have been mentally unstable. His actions, certainly, lacked the kind of rationality we might expect were this a planned and well-thought-out attack. But that is how antisemitism often works, how the kind of hate we are awash in works. Antisemitism, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Asian hate, anti-papalism — all of these rely on a similar othering of minority groups. They have an ugly history in the United States and around the world, and they tend to bubble up during times of great stress.

The coronavirus, economic stagnation, opioids, and changing demographics to varying degrees and with varying victims have increased the stress on our institutions. The number of hate incidents against Jews, Asians, and immigrants have been rising steadily, and this rise does appear to coincide with what may have been fringe views working their ways into the mainstream.

This is what ties together what might seem like individual acts or acts that might otherwise be narrowly defined by their targets. This hate is viral and is spreading like the coronavirus, and like the coronavirus, it is leaving an imprint on our bodies and our souls.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalelt@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Substack, hankkalet.substack.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2022

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