You didn't really say that did you?

From Is It Safe to Be Jewish in New York? by Ginia Bellafante.

When I first moved back to the States in the late 1970's for boarding school from overseas, I attended a prep school in New Jersey. I recall being startled in speaking with a Jewish classmate from New York when he was describing how he was planning to get home to New York City for a long weekend. The logistics were not the surprise. Once he arrived in New York at the train or bus terminal, he had an anomalous path home. Anomalous enough for me to ask why he was going that way?

He looked at me as if I were stupid. "Because I am Jewish." Further elaboration yielded that there were streets and locations in New York where it was unwise for a Jewish person to travel. I was shocked that that could still be happening in America.

My sense is that things have continued to get better since then. From the mid 1990s we have had laws against hate crimes and the FBI tracks trends. Granted the mechanism is deeply flawed for a variety of reasons but it is what we have. Since 1996, recorded hate crimes have tumbled from 8,759 incidents to 6,121 in 2016, a drop of 30% in absolute terms. This during in a period when we added 57 million people, going from 266 million to 323 million people. A 42% drop in incident rate.

But there are interesting trends in these reports and in Bellafante's reporting that defy the mainstream media narrative. For the MSM, hate crimes are largely a far right issue and a product of ignorance in general and small town or rural white deplorables in particular. But that is not what the numbers say.

Hate crimes are concentrated in big cities that have been under Democratic Party administration for decades. Whites commit only 36% of hate crimes.

In terms of anti-semitic hate crimes, this mirrors Europe where anti-semitic hate crimes have seen a huge surge in the past two decades with refugee immigration into Europe. As shockingly, routine, accepted anti-semitism is rife within left and center left parties, the British Labour party and its leader Jeremy Coburn being the most recent and most notorious example.

Here in the US, anti-semitic commentary and advocacy are prevalent within Democratic circles, especially on campuses.

For all that the mainstream media wish to conjure up a vestigial violent, far-right, white supremacist movement in the US as a stick with which to whack Republicans, the numbers just aren't there. We bankrupted the KKK thirty years ago. We incarcerated the Aryan Brotherhood. The Nationalist Socialist party is threadbare, scarcely able to muster a couple of dozen people for even their most significant protests (personally I credit "Joliet" Jake Blues with the decline of Nazi fortunes).

Bellafante reports.

Just past midnight on May 1, a young rabbinical student was walking home on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn when he thought he was being followed. A moment after that intuition struck, two men grabbed him, threw him against a car and started punching him.

The victim had dropped a box containing $200, meant for charity, but the money went untouched. The student, it seemed, was attacked because he was overheard speaking Hebrew on his cellphone. His two assailants were indicted on assault and hate crime charges.

No other American city is more closely associated with Jewish identity than New York or more adamantly imagines itself as the capital of liberalism’s most cherished values of tolerance, acceptance and diversity.

And yet, at the same time, New York has become an increasingly unsettling place to be Jewish. The first inkling of this emerged several days after the 2016 presidential election when swastikas and the phrase “Go Trump” showed up on playground equipment in Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn Heights.

But, in fact, anti-Semitism was already quietly on the rise. For several years now, expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment have made up the preponderance of hate crime complaints in the city.

Contrary to what are surely the prevailing assumptions, anti-Semitic incidents have constituted half of all hate crimes in New York this year, according to the Police Department. To put that figure in context, there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews — 142 in all — as there have against blacks. Hate crimes against Jews have outnumbered hate crimes targeted at transgender people by a factor of 20.

Within the course of a few days this month, a swastika showed up on an Upper West Side corner and two ultra-Orthodox men were attacked on the street in Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn in separate incidents. In one of them, according to the police and prosecutors, a Muslim livery driver jumped out of a car and started beating up his victim, seemingly at random, yelling “Allah.” (Just this week, more swastikas appeared in advance of Halloween on Garden Place, a popular trick-or-treating spot in Brooklyn Heights.)

Looking at that interesting construction in the article. Burying the lede, anti-semitic hate-crimes have been "quietly rising for several years" in New York. So the appearance of swastikas after the 2016 election had nothing to do with the election. It was part of a continuing trend. Why introduce the election if it is an irrelevant factor? Got to feed the narrative, presumably.

The next paragraph is striking.

If anti-Semitism bypasses consideration as a serious problem in New York, it is to some extent because it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy. During the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group, Mark Molinari, commanding officer of the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, told me.

In other words, none of the anti-semitism in New York can be traced to white supremacists or Republicans. Bellafante almost seems to be saying that anti-semitic hate crimes are not being covered because they can't be used for political purposes against Republicans. I know that is not what she said but that sure feels like the implication. Anti-semitic crime is not being treated seriously because "it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy", i.e. it is being committed by our side and not their side. Yikes!