How to Decrease Violence Against Jews in Crown Heights
If Jews were being attacked by skinheads or Muslims in Brookyln, you would be hearing a lot more about it. But strangely, when it comes to black on Chassidic violence, the J-blogosphere is suddenly quiet outside of Crown Heights/Chabad community members. No hippies….no Zionists…no hipsters. No…rather, Eli Valley is taking the brave and controversial stand of attacking England for anti-Semitic leanings and double standards, which is a real first in Leftist minority circles, who usually give white hegemony a pass. Thank you, Eli Valley for (finally!) breaking the silence against England’s colonial inconsistencies.
I don’t know about you, but I have lived through much too much tolerance of violence by blacks against Jews in Crown Heights. With all due respect, I don’t really believe that Dov Hikind’s coalition or other forms of appeals to the mutual victimologies of Jews and African-Americans (which have nothing in common with each other, no…no they don’t) is going to do the trick. Rather, things are heating up yet again.
So what will help?
I have a suggestion. It’s a rough draft.
Find out where this violence is coming from. Specifically. If it turns out the people committing these crimes are coming from section eight housing, deregulate that housing and that neighborhood, including all the housing of the participants, whether or not they are the head of the household. Sell it to a real estate company through bidding. They will take care of the crime. Through eviction.
And if the groups are from the projects, get rid of those housing projects producing such elements. Just get rid of them. It’s real simple. We shouldn’t be subsidizing housing that is producing a culture of contempt and hate that translates into violence. We tried to help. It clearly isn’t working. Figure it our on your own dime. Give the innocent tenants some cash for the road…but that’s it.
Just get rid of that which is problematic and supported by the city. And don’t create new problems. Let someone else somewhere else deal with it.
Watch. Over time, things will change.
But whining will get us nowhere. And dialog is pretty limited when you are not trying to change the attitude of a group’s leadership, but rather, the behavior of a community’s thugs. But changing housing and social services policies…this is a great way to change the neighborhood. And a great way to reduce crime.
And that would be good both for the Jews of Crown Heights and for the bottom line of the City of New York, who should be implementing programs and policies that help regular New Yorkers, not just the dregs of the earth.
11 comments
You’re obsessed with me.
It’s unseemly and disquieting.
And yet, strangely delightful.
Go get me a sandwich, I’m hungry.
ps: You’re just pissed I didn’t ask you to collaborate this time.
But if you had insight, you wouldn’t knock me in one post for being right-wing and in the next post for being left-wing FOR THE SAME COMIC.
If you had insight, you wouldn’t have missed the central point of the comic:
The ostensibly underdog-loving, goodly-hearted, lefty Brits are ACTUALLY ACTING FROM THE SAME IMPERIALIST RACISM THEY CLAIM TO DEPLORE.
Got it? Good boy!
But seriously, get me a sandwich.
EV, Zionists constantly look to England to make themselves look like the underdog in comparison. There is no loyalty to Left or Right in your circles. And I kind of respect that. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be a whore in both directions, Eli. You can be, and you most certainly are.
As for the Brits continuing to act with racist white male hegemony, this is also not so shocking. What is shocking is that you think this is shocking, or that it is a major problem the Jewish community is facing.
Now run along to Crown Heights with Dov Hikind and his pals and gals, and remind everyone that we (blacks and Jews) have the SAME ENEMY, and fight THE SAME RACISM, from (you know) WHITE PEOPLE. see if anyone is buying it…know? Oh, well…at least it made a good photo op…
Who but you talks about “a major problem the Jewish community is facing”? Where does my comic claim to be tackling such “a major problem”? When I drew God raping Israel, did it offend you that God’s (proven) sexual proclivities were not “a major problem the Jewish community is facing”? I mean, sure, I know God’s uncircumcised member led you to many of your fascinating theories about bris and Covenant, but even there I wasn’t trying to lead the Jewish people out of Sinai. You want that, talk to Ariel Beery.
If I were that kind of guy, though, I would certainly argue — since you’ve made this insipid binary comparison — that a world power’s overt anti-Semitism has greater consequences for the “Jewish People” than isolated incidents of Black-on-Jew crime. You, too, would see that, if you weren’t blinded by your own “racial” “issues.”
Now don’t forget the mustard.
Eli, you did not distinguish between normal Britain and the far-Left. They are not one and the same.
Worse still, you did not differentiate between British Muslims and British WASPs. They are also not one and the same.
You’d be surprised the degree to which certain sensibilities have merged — and not only in England. What’s the glue that’s made them stick? A sense of election, and that oldest hatred.
Now’s your cue to accuse me of having a threesome with Abe Foxman and Simon Wiesenthal.
Just curious, but what do you suggest as a solution for the blacks and others that are living in squalid, ill-kept tenements owned by the Orthodox Jews and whose resentment is based on their sub-human treatment by their Jewish landlords? I mean, obviously actually spending the money to make the places decent isn’t going to happen. So how are they going to weed out the hatred and disgust that they themselves caused?
Ahavah,
Tenant rights need to be strictly enforced, fines raised, etc. Slumlords will never do it on their own.
You’d be surprised the degree to which certain sensibilities have merged.
I have to say I agree with this. I haven’t spent a ton of time in England, but from what time I have spent there (and from the Brits I’ve run into in other parts of the world and stories I’ve heard from British Jews) I’ve definitely gotten the impression that anti-Israel sentiment that would be considered “far-Left” in the US is actually quite mainstream in the UK.
There are plenty of exceptions to this generalization, and no matter what Abe Foxman says, anti-Zionism and antisemitism are two different things. But the anti-Israel crowd seems to be winning the propaganda war these days in England, and their depiction of Israel as a fascist, racist, evil country tends to spill over into the public perception of Jews in general.
Heck, the only time in my adult life that I almost got into a physical fight with someone was when a couple friends and I were celebrating Purim in a pub in China a few years ago. One of my non-Jewish friends offered a slightly tipsy, very enthusiastic toast “to Jews.” A Brit who we vaguely knew from around town perked up at the next table. “You’re Jewish? So you support Israel? Fucking Nazis.” He started talking about how Jews have no business being in Palestine, let alone doing to the Palestinians what the Brits had fought to save us from in Germany. When I asked him a couple questions about history to suggest his opinion might be based on mistakes of fact (e.g., what country was the West Bank before 1967?), he threatened to punch me. Luckily, my friends convinced me to leave before he acted on his words.
This anecdote concerns one semi-drunken blockhead, not a scientific survey of “normal Britain.” But I think his ill-informed attitude toward Israel (and Jews in general) is not all that far from the vile seeds anti-Israel propagandists are sowing in the general British public’s minds. And this is exactly what EV is trying to pillory.
themicah, for your consideration: http://www.hagalil.com/antisem.....tism-2.htm
Naomi Ragen wrote, in a letter of her alter-ego in the “Sacrifice of Tamar”(18 years ago) about rabbis continuing keeping Jewish women and children in the dangerous inner-city neighborhoods.
But ask a Lubavitcher supporter, with 1,000 sq. feet appartment, or whatever, in an exclusive building in the new Downtown Moscow, and he will tell that all streets in African-American, btw, neighborhood of Crown Heights have “kingdom” in their name: Empire, Kingston, etc…
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