Let’s call a spade a spade, or a Magen David a Magen David. How on earth could anyone ignore the totally Jewish context of this weekend’s terrorist incident at Congregation Beth Israel in Texas? It occurred during a livestreamed bar-mitzvah service and the hostages taken included a rabbi. And yet the FBI suggested on television just a few hours after the hostages were released that the attack “was not specifically related to the Jewish community”.
It’s like stating that a demonstration in Parliament Square has no connection to influencing the members of Parliament opposite.
For Reform Jewish communities like Congregation Beth Israel, online Shabbat services have been a lifeline over the last two years. Ensuring that all congregants have felt catered for, including many who are elderly or live alone, rabbis and lay leaders have used technology to provide socially distanced pastoral and spiritual content. During an uncertain and difficult pandemic, these online spaces have been an oasis of stability and comfort. Many could only watch with horror as their community, their physical and virtual sanctuary, was violated by an armed terrorist.
Places of worship should be safe spaces by default. This has not always been the case – particularly in the US. Antisemitic attacks in recent years, such as the Tree of Life massacre in 2018 or the Poway synagogue shooting in 2019, have targeted all Jewish denominations with the same brands of hate. In both of those cases, white supremacist terrorists (subscribing to ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theories obsessed with Jews) have singled out Jewish spaces as part of their racist agendas.
Yesterday’s attack took on a different flavour, committed by a terrorist in the name of Islam using a language of “liberation” towards his “sister” Aafia Siddiqui (her family have denied any relationship), a convicted deeply antisemitic terrorist jailed in the US for the attempted murder of its citizens. Similar attacks are not without tragic precedent, especially in Europe; in 2015 the kosher supermarket attack in Paris and the Copenhagen Synagogue shooting were both fatal.
We must face such hateful ideologies head-on.
The FBI seemed to claim at first that the suspect in Texas was “singularly focused” on Aafia Siddiqui’s release, not on the Jewish community per se. This implies that the worshippers in the synagogue were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, that the suspect would have held up anywhere to make his point. Within a few moments, Jewish suffering was being erased from a clearly antisemitic attack.
We cannot allow this to happen. We must centre the Jewish community in discussions around synagogue attacks and work harder to include Jews in antiracist and anti-extremist activism.
To reach the FBI’s conclusion we would have to switch off our mental faculties totally and ignore the fact that Siddiqui, a member of Al-Qaeda, has suggested that Jews “backstab” those who “take pity on them”, leading to “repeated holocausts”. At her trial, Siddiqui demanded that prospective jurors were DNA tested to check for a “Zionist background”, stating that the case against her was a Jewish conspiracy and, in order to give her a “fair” trial, Jewish lawyers and jurors be excluded from the courtroom.
This attack was clearly motivated, in no small part, by Jew-hatred. To assert otherwise only enables complacency around Western or Islamist antisemitism to grow. This is something that the Jewish community cannot afford, especially in Texas, where Jews have experienced continuous attacks throughout Covid-19 at the hands of Goyim.tv and other antisemitic organisations.
In 2018 the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council opened a Dallas branch near to Congregation Beth Israel, proving there is local, national and international appetite among both minority groups for collaboration on shared issues and to further cohesion between communities. Facing the wider world together makes us all stronger and diminishes the voice of hate-peddlers. Meanwhile, the universal care and concern directed towards the Jewish community from a diverse host of quarters over the last 48 hours must be commended. Yet this cannot just be lip service against antisemitism - it must translate into action.
Jewish communities - and any groups bound together by shared identities or destinies - must not be afraid to continue to operate proudly and adapt. Sadly, many Jewish communities have longstanding and necessary security protocols, and while Beth Israel did not have an active security patrol, it did have an existing relationship with local law enforcement. Practising our right to assemble and worship as a community is more crucial now than ever.
We must not be cowed by the forces of regression hoping to instil fear and drive us away from our much-needed communal institutions, wherever these voices come from. In a new landscape of Zoom services and ‘Facebook Lives’, the joy of being together as a community must be protected as a precious resource. In an interconnected world, the trauma, and then the relief, of Beth Israel can be shared by all of us who saw videos of the livestream.
We must not equivocate. This came out of antisemitism, and until we confront the reality that there is an epidemic of it threatening our online and in-person communities, we have no hope of tackling it.
Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner is former Senior Rabbi to Reform Judaism
