I wish I could say I was even remotely surprised when I read about the waves of bomb threats targeted toward Jewish Community Centers across the United States, but I wasn’t. On Jan. 9, someone left prerecorded messages saying that bombs were located inside the JCCs. The next wave of bomb threats on Jan 18 included a live phone call.
Other waves occurred Jan 31, Feb 20 and Feb 27. Tuesday and Wednesday, 14 JCCs in six states and Canadian province received phoned and emailed bomb threats. Luckily, no bombs were found in any of these centers.
The FBI arrested one suspect, a former journalist named Juan Thompson who allegedly tried to get back at his ex-girlfriend by making the bomb threats in her name. However, just because one suspect is arrested, it does not mean we should let down our guard. Thompson’s actions have inspired copycats; Thompson was arrested before the sixth wave of bomb threats.
I have to recognize these incidents as part of a larger phenomenon of growing antisemitism in the United States.
Antisemitism has never gone away; 51.2 percent of victims of anti-religious hate crimes were victimized by actions of an antisemitic nature, according to 2015 hate crime statistics conducted by the FBI.
The U.S. has witnessed an uptick in antisemitism in the wake of the election of Donald Trump. He drew the support of David Duke, the former Imperial Wizard of the KKK, and Richard Spencer, president of the white nationalist think tank National Policy Institute.
The Trump campaign, and now the Trump administration, is playing a direct role in fanning the flames of antisemitism in our political environment.
Trump appointed Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist. Bannon was the former editor of Breitbart News, a website filled with white supremacist and antisemitic conspiracy theories. If Trump is not antisemitic himself, then he is certainly welcoming antisemites into his innermost circles and letting them guide him in his policy making decisions.
One subtle, yet impressive sign of this was the Trump administration’s failure to mention Jews in the speech made on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Sen. Tim Kaine called the purposeful omission a form of Holocaust denial, and John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary Magazine, said that attempts to “universalize” the Holocaust rid the genocide of its meaning.
When Jewish reporter Jake Turx of Ami Magazine tried to ask Trump how the government would address the increase in antisemitism in light of the bomb threats, Trump had shut the reporter down.
Only after the fourth wave of bomb threats and the vandalism at the Jewish cemeteries did Trump speak out against antisemitism. He made a speech decrying antisemitism, and Vice President Mike Pence visited the vandalized cemetery in St. Louis. However, executive director of the Anne Frank Center Steven Goldstein said that Trump’s speech was “a pathetic asterisk of condescension” after the Trump administration had committed anti-Semitic acts without apologizing for them.
I know that Trump defenders may point to his amicable relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or to his Orthodox Jewish daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, but I’m not interested in hearing the classic “he/she/they have a Jewish friend” defense.
I also don’t want the anti-Trump side to stop caring about the bomb threats simply because it wasn’t done by an avid white nationalist and Trump supporter.
I am grateful that in the wake of this election, people are expressing solidarity with the Jewish community. In our current political climate, it is vital that antisemitism is condemned, no matter the source, and that we educate ourselves in how antisemitism manifests. Despite our visibility and the myth of us being an unnaturally powerful group, we are still a minority that needs your solidarity and support. That should start with the president.
Aryn Plax, a sophomore journalism major, is metro editor for the Campus Times. She can be reached by email at aryn.plax@laverne.edu.
