A young Jewish man was stabbed early Saturday morning near the Chabad movement’s headquarters in New York City by a man yelling “Free Palestine,” according to a local rabbi who said he knows the victim, as well as CCTV footage of the incident published online.
Yaacov Behrman tweeted that during Shabbat, the young male attacker asked the man: “Do you want to die?” He then stabbed him.
The victim was taken to the hospital and is expected to make a full recovery, Behrman said.
It is not the job of any minority community to denounce members of that community when they do heinous things. If a black man stabs a white man because he hates white people, no one would be calling on the black community specifically to denounce him (except maybe Republicans).
He committed murder. There’s no need to make some public denouncement. He’s on video attempting to commit the murder. He’s been arrested for attempted murder. He’s clearly a guy who planned to commit a murder. He can say it was for Palestine, but that doesn’t make Palestinians responsible and it certainly wouldn’t make, for example, a Muslim from Indonesia responsible.
Sorry I meant the local Muslim community, not anyone at large. Muslims are not a monolith.
But that’s my point though, I don’t think it’s a good idea for a random Muslim to blame a random Jewish person for what politicians are doing. If anything, our shared and collective helplessness against larger and out of control forces should unite us.