Over the weekend, a large anti-Palestinian mob violently attacked New Yorkers protesting outside the Chabad-Lubavitch Headquarters, where racist war criminal Ben-Gvir had been invited to visit. The mob sent at least one protester to the hospital, and then chased, harassed, and assaulted a woman they mistook for a protester. 

A spokesperson for Chabad correctly denounced the mob’s actions as “entirely unacceptable and wholly antithetical to the Torah’s values,” but also dismissed the large crowd of men as a “small breakaway group of young people.” While the political ideologies of Jewish New Yorkers are diverse, including within the Hasidic community, it is impossible to separate the mob’s hateful, violent attacks from the ideology Ben-Gvir promotes. As the Institute for Middle East Understanding pointed out in a statement, the attacks "bore chilling resemblance to Israeli settler mob attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank...these attacks are often encouraged by Ben-Gvir himself, who has personally provided thousands of rifles to Israeli settlers to attack Palestinians."

The mob attack and the NYPD response to it stands in stark contrast to the peaceful protests we've seen across our city's college campuses, which were met with extreme NYPD brutality, and the abduction and threatened deportation of non-violent student activists. 

Anyone serious about making New York a safe home free from hate violence of all kinds must condemn not only the violence that occurred this weekend, but also the extremist ideology behind it, which has been normalized and defended in our city and country's halls of power for far too long. 

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Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ) is a 6,000-member grassroots organization and the home of New York’s Jewish Left. For over 30 years, JFREJ members have organized alongside our neighbors to transform New York from a playground for the wealthy few into a real democracy, free from all forms of racist violence.