{"id":5267,"date":"2022-01-18T10:26:48","date_gmt":"2022-01-18T15:26:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=5267"},"modified":"2025-01-19T21:48:29","modified_gmt":"2025-01-20T02:48:29","slug":"why-a-synagogue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/01\/why-a-synagogue\/","title":{"rendered":"Why a synagogue?"},"content":{"rendered":"

L<\/span>ess than 3 months after an 18-year-old neo-Nazi set fire to a synagogue in Austin, Texas, the state\u2019s Jewish community came under attack<\/a> again this week.<\/p>\n

This time, the culprit was not a white nationalist. He was a Muslim. And already, social and traditional media are full of disgusting, Islamophobic responses to the attack.<\/p>\n

But this attack is not about Islam. It\u2019s not about a feud between Muslims and Jews or about Zionism or anti-Zionism. It\u2019s not about anti-racist activism, and it\u2019s certainly not about gun control or insufficient policing. This is not the left-wing counterpart to October\u2019s arson; it\u2019s highly unlikely the attacker was left-wing by any stretch of the imagination. Saturday\u2019s attack was caused by the same antisemitic, fascist conspiracism that motivated the attack in Austin\u2013and indeed, acts of violence across the country from Pittsburgh, to Poway, California, to New York.<\/p>\n

It is believed that Saturday\u2019s attack was intended to force the liberation of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani prisoner of the United States\u2019 imperialist war on terror. The attacker, Malik Faisal Akram, forced Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, one of the hostages, to place a phone call to a New York City rabbi and communicate Akram\u2019s demand that Siddiqui be released. Akram\u2019s choice of target was not symbolic, but eminently practical: according to one of his hostages, Akram said<\/a> during the attack, \u201cJews control the world. Jews control the media. Jews control the banks. I want to talk to the chief rabbi of the United States.\u201d Responses to the attack have shared a sense of confusion: why Jews? Why target a synagogue? It appears that Akram was a true believer: he thought that rabbis would have the power to release Siddiqui.<\/p>\n

The confusion over Akram\u2019s targeting of Jews is misplaced\u2013at least insofar as commenters see this episode as distinct from the other attacks on Jewish places of worship which have accumulated over the past several years. Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, was motivated first and foremost by an opposition to immigration, and yet he targeted a synagogue. John Earnest in California possessed paranoid fantasies of a genocide of the human race; and so he attacked the Poway Chabad house. For some reason, those attacks felt more explicable to the media: antisemitism which can be written off as the violent hobby of a deranged fringe of neo-Nazis is assimilable within liberal notions of progress. But antisemitism is not a set of kooky myths; it is an oppressive ideology which trafficks in a conspiracist elevation of Jews above the highest ranks of actual human social power to explain real social events. It should not be so hard to connect white nationalist delusions of Jewish power over immigration policy with the delusion that a phone call made to a certain rabbi could bring about the liberation of a prisoner of U.S. empire.<\/p>\n