I am appalled that this sort of thing is happening in the United States:
Gang Of Teens Playing Disturbing Game Of ‘Knock Out The Jew’
Activists, Victims’ Families Say 8 Incidents Not About Robbery, But About Hate
[…]
released surveillance video that shows one group attacking a Jewish man. The video shows from a few different angles the victim, a man in a hooded jacket, getting punched.
One man who didn’t want to be identified told Slattery his 12-year-old son was attacked in the same way.
“It’s clearly anti-Semitism,” the man said.
The 64-year-old said his son, who was dressed in traditional Jewish clothing, was attacked last Wednesday afternoon on President Street.
“One, full strength with his fist, whacked him, punched him, on the side of the face, full force,” the man said.
The child went to the ground as he heard the group of five to six teens yell out.
“A hysterical, happy shout, ‘We got him,’” the man said.
Video also shows a 19-year-old Jewish man being sucker-punched.
“He was actually holding an expensive camera. And they punched him and nothing was stolen,” Rabbi Yaacov Behrman said.
Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind said the attacks are not muggings. It’s not about money. He said the victims are being attacked because they are Jews.
Behrman said he believes the assaults are part of a disturbing game by some African-American teens.
“And they’re playing a game: ‘knockout.’ ‘Knock out the Jew,’ maybe. And they’re going around the neighborhood punching Jews,” Behrman said.
Assuming this is true, it’s just a complete, absolute outrage that such a thing could be happening in a country which defeated Hitler at an enormous cost.
What’s even more outrageous is that it isn’t being much more widely reported.
(After all, I learned about it on Facebook, which is hardly a news aggregator…)
MORE: It occurs to me that maybe I’m overreacting. Perhaps the perps think that they are merely having fun, like the guy who set a teenager on fire in Oakland.
No doubt the Nazis had plenty of fun on Kristallnacht.
Comments
9 responses to “Never again, huh?”
I think Daniel Mendoza might have had some advice for this occasion.
The following comment is one of hundreds on a gay message board in the Bay Area. Many of the comments were actually sympathetic to the bus attacker, usually with the “prank” memo in force. Until this gay man, Jake, had enough. Here is his story and outrage:
1)One day in high school while waiting for class, I smelled burning hair and quickly realized it was my own. Spun around and saw the idiot behind me grinning. “Sup FLAMER!” I went berserk and jumped on him, we got pulled apart and dragged to the office. He was let off without any discipline, because I guess my having punched him in the throat after being SET ON FUCKING FIRE meant we were even. No harm, no foul! This was in the 90s; we’d probably both be sent to Gitmo if it happened today.
(2….)
3)Conservative talk radio covered this today. Their talking point was “awww it was just harmless fun, kids prank each other all the time! Making this all about gender and HATE CRIMES is just part of the godless liberal agenda to make cross-dressing a thing we are forced by OBAMA to endorse.” Why do I do this to myself? (a good reason: I am most productive when filled with rage and spite)
I’m not here to be an internet judge/jury/executioner, but I want us to reach a point where people can go about their daily business without having to worry about BEING FUCKING LITERALLY SET ON FIRE. Or stoned. Or dragged behind a truck. Or beaten up in a bathroom. It is insane that this still happens, and that people still tacitly or explicitly accept it, or try to explain it away.
posted by jake at 3:41 PM on November 10 [39 favorites]
http://www.metafilter.com/133692/Sasha-Fleischman
It’s why I have a CC permit. And why it’s past time for Jews to realize that 1935 is just around the corner.
Is Luke Fleischman a Jew, and if so is his attack connected to “Knock Out The Jew” game?
When the racists were differently ordered it was called “coon conking”.
If you type “coon conking” into Google you get 7 results. That is odd.
This is one of them:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_10/cain_runs_into_farright_buzzsa032582.php
And the term is only found in the comments:
KurtRex1453 on October 03, 2011 9:53 PM:
When my dad was a kid in Memphis in the 1930s he said teenagers would go in search of black guy and beat him up. They called it, “Coon Conking.” My dad has since repented. I would submit that Cain was “Coon Conked” and that the men who did it will never repent.
There is also a term for black men who are apologists for white racists, but I forget the term.
And people wonder why I have a carry permit? I decided when I was young(more than 50 years ago)that if there was ever the chance for a new Holocaust, I would not go alone. I do not believe I would survive the encounter, but neither will some of them, whomever the them is.
Institutional anti-semitiism in this country was what the adl was founded to stop they and others did such a good job of it all they have left is social outcast and the criminal mentally ill nearly all of which are caught and prosecuted. Jews of 75 years ago would have loved to live in america today where the adl spends more time trying to stop the morman church from babtizing jews after they die if their are worse problems then that the southern poverty law center watches hate groups of crazy racists most of which end up in incarceration. How many jews who have been assulted where the perpatrator has been caught have been found not guilty by a jury? I havent heard of any have you?
My grandparents came to America in 1905 from Odessa to escape from the pogroms. In the year they left Russia, 5,000 Jews were beaten to death in the streets just in Odessa.
Pogroms have a long history in Europe. But this is the United States.