Antisemitic attack on Chabad of Poway, San Diego California
On the last day of Passover, a synagogue in San Diego California, Chabad of Poway, suffered a murderous attack. A woman was killed and three others injured, including the Chabad Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein. The alleged shooter, a 19-year-old white male, has been arrested. Authorities are treating the shooting as a hate crime. The attacker left notes justifying his actions by pure fanatic neo nazi arguments, using imagery from classic antisemitic propaganda. Sadly, White Supremacist hate crimes are on the rise in the world. Just 6 months ago the Pittsburgh Jewish community suffered an antisemitic tragedy in the USA. Attacks on the Jewish community, verbal or physical, have unfortunately become more frequent, and very little is done to answer this form of racism, thus leaving Jewish communities vulnerable to similar events.
This form of antisemitism has nothing to do with political leanings concerning the problems or solutions to the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
It is a direct result of the resurgence of right wing extremism, pointing its ugly head in an era where “White fragility” is being spread as a relevant issue in the political spheres, to avoid facing present and past abusive White privileges.
Young people are exposed daily on social media to this type of paranoia creating ideology.
Pittsburgh, Christchurch in New Zealand, and now San Diego have in a few months experienced deadly attacks from young people who were infected online by White Supremacist ideologues. Unfortunately we are not seeing a counter movement, emerging as an answer to the intentional political spread of viral nationalist ideology.
Racist and anti Semitic tropes are heard all over Europe, from Poland to Spain, Hungary to Italy, and even Germany, many countries are witnessing the rise of nostalgia for xenophobia dating back to WWII.
If the targets of these attacks do not unite to fight this racist onslaught with open conversation about human dignity, making online campaigns to educate and warn the youth, and neutralize this baseless stupidity and cruelty, how many more of these events will it take to awaken them to the dangers of this mental epidemic?