Officials now say the suspect who shot and killed three people in Kansas Sunday, the day before Passover, targeted them because he thought they were Jews. None actually was, but the attacks nonetheless serve as a reminder that anti-Jewish hatred remains potent in the US, as well as abroad.
The attacks took place near a Jewish community center and a Jewish retirement home in a Kansas City suburb. The accused gunman, longtime white supremacist, Frazier Glenn Cross, reportedly asked his targets if they were Jews before firing. He now faces state and federal charges and a possible death penalty for hate crimes.
We’ve long been dubious of laws that criminalize a perpetrator’s state of mind, particularly when crimes against certain groups are seen as worse than those against others.
But the circumstances of Sunday’s attacks are evidence not only that anti-Jewish hatred is still alive here, but also that it’s more prevalent than other crimes that often garner more attention.
Indeed, the last available national annual hate-crime statistics compiled by the FBI show that in 2012, some one in five hate- crimes targeted victims because of their religion. Of these, 62.4 percent — nearly two-thirds — were directed against Jews.
That’s nearly six times more crimes as those in which Muslims were specifically targeted, despite the ongoing media outcry over anti-Islamic bias after 9/11. And the number for anti-Jewish crimes actually reflects a 14 percent drop from the prior year.
The point isn’t which groups suffer most — an attack, for whatever reason, is an attack. But hostility toward Jews, in America and abroad, is too often discounted. Perceptions notwithstanding, Jews remain a target for too many haters.