It’s the email no parent wants to receive:
“Emergency Building Evacuations” read the subject line. “This morning,
we were made aware of a threat to our school buildings.” My son texted
me the missing detail: “We are in lockdown right now because there was a
bomb threat.” For once, his phone served a positive purpose.
A couple of hours later, after a thorough
search by the NYPD, kids returned to their classes, though many parents
had picked up their children by then. It’s a private school and roughly
half the kids are Jewish. It’s also one block south of a huge mosque.
Rightfully, the parents were terrified. The school has security, but
nothing like what synagogues and Jewish community centers have.
Many of us lived through 9/11. Many of us
lived close enough to the Twin Towers to endure the black smoke and
endless helicopters for weeks. But very soon after the planes hit, the
city began to unify. Most importantly, the local, state and federal
governments took control of the situation. We soon felt safe.
Precisely the opposite has happened since
Oct. 7, beginning with the riot in Times Square on Oct. 8, days before
Israel began to respond. Pro-Hamas riots occur daily—up at Columbia
University, down at Washington Square Park, in the subways, on the
bridges, and in the streets.
But most egregious for many New Yorkers is
what happened in December and then again last week: Pro-jihad
“disrupters” took over the World Trade Center, first outside the
building and then inside. It was both symbolic and “normalizing.” Any
strong political leader would have condemned it, as well as all the
other riots. But Mayor Eric Adams, who has repeatedly said he “stands
with the Jewish people,” said nothing.
Five months after 9/11, I felt completely
safe. Five months after Oct. 7 I am trying hard not to be terrified.
Many of us have begun to call New York by a new name: Jihad City.
At the same time that a bomb could have
blown up my son’s school, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) thought it was a
good idea to lambaste the Israeli government before Congress and then
tweet: “NYC will receive a fresh $106M from feds to reimbursement for
migrant costs.” That no doubt made every NYC parent feel so much safer.
To say that the Democratic Party is
clueless right now is an epic understatement. And it is precisely its
embrace of terrorism, both here and in the Middle East, that led to a
recent poll showing that Jewish New Yorkers prefer former President
Donald Trump to President Joe Biden by 9%. An astonishing shift—but
anyone who lives here completely understands why.
For decades we’ve been told that the
increased violence during Ramadan stemmed from hunger. It never made
sense—I personally have never felt a desire to blow up a building during
Yom Kippur—but this was the prevailing explanation.
The Yom Kippur War of 1973 occurred during
Ramadan. Only this year is the truth about it beginning to emerge.
“Egyptian and Syrian soldiers were given an exemption from fasting
because they were engaged in the religious duty of killing infidels,”
wrote David M. Weinberg in The Jerusalem Post. The connection
between violence and Ramadan goes back to the beginning of Islam, when,
during that month, Muhammad won brutal victories over his enemies.
Needless to say, students in NYC schools
will be taught none of this. And while there’s no question that the city
handled 9/11 better than it handled Oct. 7, perhaps a grave mistake was
made in not taking a deeper look into what is being taught in mosques
globally.
Meanwhile, parents in NYC were just given
another reason to not trust the Democratic Party, though the growing
Candace Owens contingent on the right continues its bizarre embrace of
jihad.
There’s no question that Europe is doing a
better job controlling their pro-Hamas mobs than we are. At what point
will U.S. elected officials have a “come to sanity” moment and begin to
take this growing threat to not just Jews but to Western civilization
seriously? Is it really going to take a school being blown up during
Ramadan? Right now, all we hear is pro-Hamas virtue-signaling—or
silence.
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