Do not say that you did not know: Antisemitic hate crimes and political antisemitism

Just in the last few days.....

A few days before the election, Racist, anti-Semitic and pro-Donald Trump graffiti was found on Mount Tom, in Massachusetts: "Trump 2016," "Gas the Jews," "Fuck the Jews," and "Kill all niggers," plus two swastikas.

At Oberlin College, the home of a Jewish professor was vandalized and an antisemitic note was left on his porch.

OBERLIN, OH (WOIO) - (November 18) 

Oberlin College says that there was an anti-Semitic hate crime against one of their professors and his family Wednesday night. 

Police said that Benjamin Kuperman, an associate professor and chair of the computer science department, called around 3:40 a.m. when he heard a noise outside his home. He told officers that he found the sea shells on his porch were smashed and a note had been left behind a mezuzah he had hung up on his door frame.

The note was a ripped piece of paper that appeared to have letters glued on reading "GAS JEWS DIE."

And on Saturday, at an "alt-right" meeting in Washington, DC, hosted by the National Policy Institute, of which he is the head, Richard Spencer spoke in explicitly Nazi and antisemitic terms:

But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.” 

As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. When Mr. Spencer, or perhaps another person standing near him at the front of the room — it was not clear who — shouted, “Heil the people! Heil victory,” the room shouted it back....

At the conference on Saturday, Mr. Spencer, who said he had coined the term, defined the alt-right as a movement with white identity as its core idea....

Mr. Spencer’s after-dinner speech began with a polemic against the “mainstream media,” before he briefly paused. “Perhaps we should refer to them in the original German?” he said. 

The audience immediately screamed back, “Lugenpresse,” reviving a Nazi-era word that means “lying press.” 

Mr. Spencer suggested that the news media had been critical of Mr. Trump throughout the campaign in order to protect Jewish interests. He mused about the political commentators who gave Mr. Trump little chance of winning. 

“One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem,” he said, referring to a Jewish fable about the golem, a clay giant that a rabbi brings to life to protect the Jews.

Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Spencer said, was “the victory of will,” a phrase that echoed the title of the most famous Nazi-era propaganda film. But Mr. Spencer then mentioned, with a smile, Theodor Herzl, the Zionist leader who advocated a Jewish homeland in Israel, quoting his famous pronouncement, “If we will it, it is no dream.” 

The United States today, Mr. Spencer said, had been turned into “a sick, corrupted society.” But it was not supposed to be that way.

“America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Mr. Spencer thundered. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.” 

But the white race, he added, is “a race that travels forever on an upward path.” 

“To be white is to be a creator, an explorer, a conqueror,” he said.

In July of this year, Steven Bannon, who has now been appointed the chief strategist by Donald Trump, said,"'We're the platform for the alt-right,' Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July." 

Though disavowed by every other major conservative news outlet, the alt-right has been Bannon's target audience ever since he took over Breitbart News from its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, four years ago. Under Bannon's leadership, the site has plunged into the fever swamps of conservatism, cheering white nationalist groups as an "eclectic mix of renegades," accusing President Barack Obama of importing "more hating Muslims," and waging an incessant war against the purveyors of "political correctness."

A former Breitbart employee, Ben Shapiro (who is Jewish) described the alt-right as a "movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism." He called Breitbart News "a party organ, a pathetic cog in the Trump-Media Complex and a gathering place for white nationalists."

The reception he and another conservative Jewish Breitbart critic, Bethany Mandel, have experienced in the Bannonosphere is revealing: In May, when Shapiro, who became editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire after leaving Breitbart, tweeted about the birth of his second child, he received a torrent of anti-Semitic tweets. "Into the gas chamber with all 4 of you," one read. Another tweet depicted his family as lampshades. Mandel says she has been harassed on Twitter for months, "called a 'slimy Jewess' and told that I 'deserve the oven.'" 

After Shapiro called out the anti-Semitism, Breitbart News published (under the byline of Pizza Party Ben) a post ridiculing Shapiro for "playing the victim on Twitter and throwing around allegations of anti-Semitism and racism, just like the people he used to mock." 

Back at the RNC, Bannon dismissed Shapiro as a "whiner…I don't think that the alt-right is anti-Semitic at all," he told me. "Are there anti-Semitic people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. Are there racist people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. But I don't believe that the movement overall is anti-Semitic."