In the Trenches: Targeting Jews — Again
Once again, Jews have been targeted simply for being Jews.
This time, the victims were in Mumbai.
Though some in the media were slow to identify what should have been obvious—the New York Times speculated that it might have been an “accidental hostage scene”—they weren’t killed randomly. They were sought out in a carefully planned operation.
David A. Harris
The jihadist murderers were looking for Jews, and found them.
Of course, Jews were not the only target. But it is telling that in this teeming city of millions, a tiny community, numbering no more than a few thousand, was pinpointed.
These murderers have been taught in their mosques, madrassas, and media to hate Jews, all Jews. Once again, it doesn’t matter to them what “kind” of Jew it is. Anyone caught in that Chabad House was fair game. In their demented minds, the very act of being in a Jewish space, any Jewish space, was more than sufficient grounds for being captured, tortured, and murdered.
That Israelis have been repeatedly targeted by terrorists is well-known, if not always well understood.
But what is less widely recognized is that Jews anywhere might be singled out by radical Muslim groups, whether motivated by religious creed or political doctrine, or both.
If Mumbai were the first such instance, it would be tragic enough. But it’s not. That makes it all the more important to recall other assaults, sometimes much too quickly forgotten.
In 2006, Naveed Afzal Haq attacked the Jewish Federation office in Seattle. He shot six women, one fatally. The Seattle police chief noted that Haq had been looking for “something Jewish” on the Internet.
In 2003, two Istanbul synagogues, Bet Israel and Neve Shalom, were targeted by terrorists using car bombs. Twenty-seven people were killed in the blasts, and more than 300 were wounded. Six Jews were among the victims.
In the case of Neve Shalom, it was the third such attack. In 1986, two terrorists entered during a Shabbat service and killed 22 worshippers, including seven rabbis. Six years later, a bomb went off at the synagogue, but there were no fatalities.
Also in 2003, a Jewish community center was one of several targets of homicide bombers in Morocco. In all, the death toll was over 40.
A year earlier, the historic El Ghriba synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba was the target of a truck bomb. Thirteen people were killed, including eight German tourists.
On January 23, 2002, Daniel Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped in Pakistan. Nearly a month later, a video was released in which he was seen saying “My name is Daniel Pearl. ... My father’s Jewish. My mother’s Jewish. I’m Jewish.” A few months later, his body was found. He had been beheaded, his body cut up by his assassins into ten pieces.
In 1994, the headquarters of AMIA, the central communal welfare body of Argentine Jewry, was attacked. Eighty-five people, Jews and non-Jews alike, were killed; nearly 300 were injured.
The same year, a van carrying a group of yeshiva students, having just paid a hospital visit, was attacked on the entrance ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan. Sixteen-year-old Ari Halberstam was killed, while several others were wounded. The murderer, Rashid Baz, shouted “Kill the Jews” during the assault.
In 1985, a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, was hijacked by terrorists. The next day, the hijackers grabbed a 69-year-old, wheelchair-bound American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, and shot him. Then, they ordered other passengers to toss the body and the wheelchair into the sea. The PLO’s foreign spokesman, Farouk Kaddoumi, later claimed that the dastardly deed had been done by Klinghoffer’s wife to collect on a life insurance policy.
In 1982, terrorists attacked the main synagogue in Rome. A two-year-old boy was killed; more than 35 others were wounded.
Another synagogue was attacked the same year, this one in Brussels. Four people were wounded.
Also in 1982, a well-known Jewish restaurant, Goldenberg, was attacked in Paris. Six people were killed, 22 wounded.
In 1981, a synagogue in Vienna was attacked. Two people were killed and 23 wounded.
In 1980, a motorcycle packed with explosives blew up outside the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris. Four people were killed. Hundreds of people inside the synagogue were about to exit, which meant that only by a stroke of luck was the death toll not much higher.
And in the same year, a Jewish summer camp in Antwerp was the target. Hand grenades were thrown at youngsters, killing one and wounding more than 20 others.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of attacks against Jewish targets—synagogues, summer camps, restaurants, community centers, communal institutions—in the past three decades.
It also, of course, excludes attacks against Israel or Israeli targets, which number literally in the thousands.
And it doesn’t begin to convey the human anguish, whether of the two-year-old boy who became an orphan when his parents were killed in the Chabad House in Mumbai or the lifelong pain of a parent who lost a child.
Rather, this list serves as a poignant reminder that the Mumbai massacre wasn’t an isolated incident, but the latest in a series of murderous assaults against Jews.
Moreover, it’s a revealing lesson for those who claim that the Muslim world has not been plagued by the same venomous anti-Semitism as the Christian world. Whatever the historical record, today the greatest physical threat to Jews comes from within Islamic communities. As Professor Robert Wistrich wrote in an AJC publication, Muslim anti-Semitism is “a clear and present danger.”
As long as there are some leading figures, like Abdel Rahman Al-Sudais of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, who spout unadulterated anti-Semitism and remain unchallenged, there will be many prepared to listen. The BBC reported the imam saying that Jews are “the scum of the human race” and “offsprings of apes and pigs.”
Or Palestinian cleric Ibrahim Mahdi, who cited this hadith (an oral tradition ascribed to Muhammad): “Who will set the Muslim to rule over the Jew? Allah... Until the Jew hides behind the rock and the tree. But the rock and tree will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, a Jew hides behind me, come and kill him.’”
Or a sixth-grade Saudi textbook that teaches impressionable young minds that God has said in the Koran: “You will find the most implacable of men in their enmity to the faithful are the Jews,” and, in a seventh-grade textbook, that Judaism is “a corrupted religion.”
But one cautionary note.
Some Jews, resorting to a Masada mindset, may once again conclude that the whole world is against the Jewish people—that jihadists may be in the forefront, but others of various faiths are silently cheering them along.
I don’t buy this notion.
Of course, there’s no shortage of anti-Semites out there, requiring constant vigilance. But to conclude that we’re all alone, that we’re without allies in other communities, is simply wrong-headed, if not self-destructive.
It ignores the tremendous strides in both integration and interfaith relations made by the Jewish people in recent decades.
And it fails to recognize that in Mumbai, Istanbul, Casablanca, Paris, and elsewhere, Jews were not the only ones targeted, nor were they by any means the only victims.
This kind of jihadist terror attacks open societies. It threatens democratic countries. It confronts moderate Muslim nations, such as Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey.
Surely, we Jews need not stand alone because, in fact, we do not stand alone.
Sandra Samuel is a symbol of our common cause. She is the courageous Indian nanny who saved two-year-old Moshe Holtzberg from certain death in the Chabad House in Mumbai.
In her selfless act, she embodies the essence of our common humanity.
David A. Harris is the Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC).
