On NPR this morning, David Greene interviewed Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti Defamation League about the mass murders in the New Zealand mosques and asked how common it is for “hate speech online and in social media platforms” to “turn into an actual mass shooting this terrible?”
Greenblatt said the attack is unprecedented.
Well I think this act of violence really doesn’t have a precedent as far as we know, murdering people in a mosque like this, and the social media dimension is something new. However, hate speech on-line is an increasing problem. We’ve got a big problem on our hands. We need to recognize social media allows white supremacy much like other forms of hate to travel across borders. and we’ve got to recognize it for the global terror threat that it really is.
Greenblatt failed to remember 1994’s rightwing Zionist attack on the Ibrahimi mosque, at the Cave of the Patriarchs, when Baruch Goldstein, a messianic Jewish settler who had moved to occupied territories from Brooklyn, killed 29 Muslims while they prayed.
Palestinians survey bloodstained rugs at Ibrahimi mosque after 1994 massacre.
Though Greenblatt did link the New Zealand killings with the murder of 11 last October in an American synagogue:
Coming off the heels of the awful massacre that happened in Squirrel Hill Pennsylvania late last year we know what it’s like to see a community attacked and assaulted in a sacred space.
Greenblatt’s omission demonstrates the extent to which American Zionist organizations will always cut Israel a break, overlooking atrocities by Jewish chauvinists against Palestinians.
Out of the same ideological attachment, Greenblatt has lumped anti-Zionists like Jewish Voice for Peace in with white nationalists as a threat to American Jews (!).
It doesn’t take much imagination to extend the condolences Greenblatt gave to the Muslim community of New Zealand to the Muslims of Hebron. Chaim Levinson of Haaretz made the connection today (per Jonathan Ofir’s translation):
Imagine to yourselves, that in 20 years, a person who keeps a poster of the mosque-killer on his wall, would run for parliament, supported by the Prime-Minister. What would you think of that state?
That state is Israel. Itamar Ben-Gvir is a rightwing Jewish supremacist who is running for parliament now and has a poster of Baruch Goldstein on his wall. The sitting Prime Minister, Netanyahu, worked with Ben-Gvir’s racist party, Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), to forge a bloc with another rightwing party so that Netanyahu might be able to call on their parliamentary mandates to build a governing coalition after next April’s election.
The ADL has condemned the Netanyahu deal with Otzma Yehudit, and even cited the Goldstein mass murder as a charge against the party.
Today that obvious precedent just slipped Jonathan Greenblatt’s mind.