Updated: Apr. 15, 1:23 p.m.
Walter Reich is the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior, and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. He is the former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
A man opens fire at two Jewish centers near Kansas City and kills three. Should we – Jews and non-Jews in D.C. and elsewhere – worry?
Of course. All of us – everywhere in America and the rest of the world – should worry. Based on what has been reported, this appears to have been an anti-Semitic act. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, the apprehended suspect, Frazier Glenn Miller, is a former “grand dragon” of the Ku Klux Klan, who has repeatedly advocated murderous violence against blacks and Jews. After he was arrested, he yelled, “Heil Hitler!”
On its website, the SPLC offers numerous quotes by Miller: “America is no longer ours,” he declared in a 2010 radio ad. “America,” he continued, “belongs to the Jews who rule it and to the mud people who multiply in it.” “America’s politicians,” he told Howard Stern that same year, are “all a bunch of whores for Israel.” According to the New York Times, he believes that Jews deserve extermination.
Does Miller’s anti-Semitic history and rhetoric, and the murders for which he was arrested, reflect a growth in anti-Semitism in America?
Overall, probably not. Last year saw a significant decline in “incidents of assault, vandalism and harassment targeting Jews and Jewish property and institutions” from the year before, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
However, anti-Semitic opinion among the general public has grown alarmingly in Europe and the Middle East in recent years, and anti-Semitic speech and incidents have become increasingly common and vitriolic.
Some of this anti-Semitism has been expressed under the guise of anti-Zionism. Some of it has been old-style, simple anti-Semitism.
For example, just last month in Sweden, anti-Semitic demonstrators tried to break into a Jewish community center. In Hungary, Jewish tombstones were defaced with such slogans as “Stinking Jews” and “There was no Holocaust but there will be!”
And last week, a Jewish teenage girl who jumped a lunch queue was told by a teacher in an exclusive London school, “Don’t do that or I’ll have to send you to the back of the queue or to one of your gas chambers.”
In America, the killings in Jewish community centers near Kansas City have prompted precautionary warnings in Jewish centers elsewhere. Very soon after the shootings I received an urgent email from the D.C. Jewish Community Center informing me that its officials had been “in touch with our local police department contacts and per their input we are taking appropriate precautions that will allow our programing to continue as scheduled.”
It seems unlikely that the Kansas City killings will provoke more violent incidents against Jews and Jewish institutions either in D.C. or elsewhere in the U.S. Compared to other countries, the U.S. remains a zone of safety, tolerance and acceptance for the Jewish people.
But the Kansas City killings should remind us all that, even in our home country, safety isn’t guaranteed for any minorities, including Jews. And in the rest of the world, especially regarding Jews, there’s increased cause for worry.
It turns out that, despite the obvious anti-Semitic intent of the gunman who chose to shoot people at the Jewish centers, the three who were murdered there were Christian. Perhaps that disappoints him. But it certainly reminds us that, once expressed, anti-Semitism becomes a threat, even a murderous one, for all of us. Ask the family of the Christian guard who was murdered five years ago by an anti-Semitic gunman at Washington’s Holocaust Museum.