EXTREMISMAntisemitism and Anti-Muslim Hate Are Surging. Here's How to Curb the Worst American Tradition.
As violence escalates in Israel’s struggle with Hamas, the potential for hate-based violence in the United States grows, too. American leaders need to step in to defuse tensions – with the awareness that the United States has a history of mirroring overseas conflicts in its own communities.
Though the FBI has cited 2022 as the worst year of hate-fueled violence since its recording began in in 1992, Americans should brace for even bleaker future statistics unless they break a terrible trend.
Violence directly inspired by events in Israel and Gaza has already struck the homeland. In Joliet, Illinois, six-year-old Wadea Al Fayoume was murdered and his mother gravely injured in a stabbing attack by their landlord allegedly motivated by anti-Muslim hate. A Muslim community member in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was assaulted by an assailant “wearing an Israeli flag.” American Jews have suffered too. In California, Paul Kessler was killed after an altercation with a pro-Palestinian protestor, and at Cornell University, a student sent anti-Semitic threats to classmates. In Indianapolis, a woman was arrested for attempting to drive her car into what she believed was a Jewish school. In a press conference last month, New York City Mayor Eric Adams warned the city’s Jewish community that their safety was at risk. “We have to be high alert,” the mayor declared. “We cannot let our guards down.” Even though the Hamas attack took place in Israel, “we’re the largest Jewish population outside of Israel,” the mayor said.
The United States has a history of mirroring overseas conflicts in its own communities. During World War II, Japanese Americans were rounded up into internment camps, sometimes for the duration of the war. After 9/11, hate crimes skyrocketed against American Muslims—including a 1,617 percent rise from 2000 to 2001—as the community was blamed for the actions of a terrorist organization twisting their religion into a murderous doctrine. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the Asian American and Pacific Islander community suffered a spike in harassment and hate crimes, cornered by presidential declarations that the coronavirus was a “Chinese virus.” These types of atrocities have been troublingly consistent, from the shooting of Indians believed to be Iranian in 2017 to a hate-motivated attack this November on a Sikh teen on a NYC bus. In fact, targeting minority groups at home when their counterparts abroad are in the news could be called an American tradition.
