Recently we have been seeing stories that antisemitic incidents have gone down in the US this past year, although the number of violent acts has gone up.Three people are dead after shootings at Jewish-related locations in the Kansas City area. Authorities confirm that a suspect is in custody.
The suspect, according to reports
One of the dead was killed in the parking lot of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City.
Authorities also confirmed that a one person was undergoing surgery at Overland Park Regional Medical Center. It wasn't immediately clear whether that one person died in surgery and was one of the three dead or was a fourth person shot.
A suspect was arrested at the Valley View Park Elementary School, which is a mile away from Village Shalom. KCTV5's Bonyen Lee says the suspect appeared to yell "Heil Hitler" as he was being led away in handcuffs by Overland Park police.
One shooting was reported about 1 p.m. Sunday at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City, according to an Overland Park Fire Department spokesman. This happened at the Lewis and Shirley White Theatre inside the center.
About 75 people were inside the theatre, most of them children.
Teens were auditioning for KC Superstar and parents were frantically trying to get to their children.
A second shooting was reported at Village Shalom, which is an assisted living center at 5500 West 123rd St.
But there have been a number of fatal shootings at Jewish sites in recent years.
Besides today's, there was a shooting at the US Holocaust Museum in 2009, killing a guard.
A shooting by a Muslim at the Seattle Jewish federation building in 2006 killed one woman and injured five others.
In 2002, a man at the El Al counter in Los Angeles Airport killed two people and injured four others before being killed.
There were also a number of foiled bomb plots against synagogues and Jewish centers in the US - 2005 in Los Angeles, 2009 in the Bronx, and 2011 in Manhattan.
In general, the US is a great place for Jews to live. Jews have little to fear in most of their communities. It is not at all like many places in Europe or in the Arab world.
But antisemitism exists, both from the right and the left, and it regularly manifests itself with extreme violence.
Yet when was the last time antisemitism merited a front page story in a major newspaper or magazine?
Time Magazine in 2010 had a cover story on Islamophobia. As I noted then, the number of antisemitic incidents in the US in 2010 dwarfed the number of anti-Muslim incidents.
Unless I am mistaken, there has not been a single Muslim fatality due to an anti-Muslim hate crime in the US since 9/11. (One Sikh was killed in an anti-Muslim attack and two other Sikhs were killed since 9/11 under unclear circumstances, plus a horrific murder of six Sikhs who were killed by a white supremacist.) .)
There is real hate out there in the US, and real people willing to kill people in service of that hate. And the objects of that deadly hate are not Muslims.
Outside of occasional stories like these, you wouldn't know that.
(UPDATE: the information about Sikhs being attacked, h/t Dave Sigeti)