Video: Texas Synagogue Hostage Jeffrey Cohen Talks Anti-Semitism
On CNN’s Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, powerful insight from Jeffrey Cohen, one of the hostages in the Texas synagogue attack who talks about what the terrorist said about Jews that are all too common tropes in wider society.
Jeffrey Cohen, a hostage at the Colleyville synagogue, on his experience with the gunman: "He came to us, he terrorized us because he believed these tropes, these anti-Semitic tropes that the Jews control everything, and that if I go to the Jews, they can pull the strings." pic.twitter.com/xoBBrnZsPD
— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) January 18, 2022
Yesterday for MLK Day I was writing about diversity, and trying to make the point that having an awareness of America being a diverse, pluralistic society and country is essential to adjusting how we talk about things like freedom, rights, and equal opportunity. Listing to Mr. Cohen, it is damning to hear things that are tropes online, or jokes, or throwaway everyday lazy prejudices we hear all the time coming out of the mouth of someone who took them to heart in an evil and wicked way with the intent to do harm about them. It should be a reminder of the power of words, even words we in our privileged land of free speech think nothing of slinging around just for a moments affect or social media attention. What’s just “a joke” or trope to you in the hands of hearts and minds twisted with hate and bent on destruction becomes fuel for the fires they seek to burn the world down with. Confronting them in the arena of ideas seems like a small thing compared to folks like Jeffrey Cohen who had to confront them with life-or-death consequences, but confront them we must.
Free speech in America means folks can say, and tweet, and post, and joke about prejudicial (or worse) tropes about Jewish people or anyone else. But that right of free speech doesn’t mean they should not have consequences for such speech. At a minimum folks of good faith who care about freedom, who care about liberty, who care about everyone getting a fair shake should push back, shout down, and call out such speech for what it is. Hateful, unnecessary, harmful, and unacceptable to a society that needs to do better treating everyone like equals. And it shouldn’t take a hostage situation to realize that in the wrong hands, or the wrong twisted dark hearts, intolerance passed off as jokes or harmless can be deadly serious.
Thank the stars they all escaped safely. They must have been a terrifying experience, but I’m so glad they all lived to carry on.Report
One of these tropes, that may seem harmless, is that Jews are genetically smarter than other people. It isn’t.Report
Despite what Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss state, I am not sure that things like this are more of a threat than Richard Spencer and home grown white supremacy.Report
Richard Spencer and home grown white supremacy are a threat to a larger swath of Americans, but no less pernicious. That homegrown white supremacy has also and always carried a healthy dose of anti-Semitism with it.Report
Many years ago, in the 90s, a Jewish coworker mentioned in conversation that “Jews can never trust a Gentile.” And he said it calmly, matter of factly, without anger or bitterness, just like he was explaining that water was wet or the sky was blue. He went on to say that no matter how wealthy or established or seemingly accepted a Jew might be, all it took was a spark, a financial crash, a pandemic, or anything really, and the Jew would suddenly have to grab everything and run for his life.
At the time I thought he was just offering some unique and idosyncratic view and dismissed it.
But over time, I’ve heard that same sentiment from black people, or women, where no matter how safe they seem to be, at any moment , a Rodney King trial might happen, or a seemingly safe gentleman could turn violent and predatory.
And I’ve seen the truth of this. When I came of age in the 70s, it looked like civil rights was a settled matter, that feminism was won and it was all behind us.
If a time traveler had told me in 1979 that forty years later, there would be a howling mob of torch carrying neo-nat-sees chanting “The Jews Will Not Replace Us!”- a mob of young men who had not yet even been born I would have scoffed in disbelief.
But here we are., living in a world where the rights and dignity of half our population is still a hotly contested idea.Report
Exactly.Report
Is there a solution for this problem? Like, I mean, a long-term one.
I’d hate to think that the melting pot/salad bowl was a mistake.Report
“Is there a solution for people hating each other?”, he asked.Report
I suppose we could make two tribes of people: People who love and people who hate and kill all of the people who hate.
I’m not sure that the people who survive would be the people that love, though.
I imagine that that’s how they’d imagine themselves, though.
Maybe that’s the most important thing.Report
The solution to anti-Semitism is constant vigilance, and even that’s a solution that’s never worked long-term. Ten thousand years from now, the population of terraformed Titan will be arguing over air laws, science policy, and the Jews.Report
I’m just irritated how a guy from England gets on a plane, flies over here, takes hostages on behalf of a Muslim terrorist, and now I’m the guy getting a lecture about hate.
Maybe we should be lecturing Britons.Report
And you wonder why people, as you see it, ignore what you regard as the substance of what you have to say and, instead, talk about you. You make it about you. Exhibit 4237.Report
Well, what are you doing about antisemitism in your community, CJ?
What are you doing to help? What steps have you taken to protect the Jewish people that you know, following this horrible event in Texas?Report
Did someone ask you what you, personally, were doing about antisemitism in your community? Did anyone “lecture” you about what you were or weren’t doing? Or about anything, for that matter?
Unlike you, I’m not going to make this about me.Report
Did you see the “we”s in Chip’s original comment?
Do you see yourself as one of “us”?Report
I didn’t mean you personally..
I’m sure you would have been nice to Jesus while the rest of us shouted “Crucify Him!”Report
If this is just one of those things where our grand declarations serve as nothing more than an opportunity to differentiate “the good ones like us” from “the bad ones like them”, then I’m sure it provides some short-term endorphins but I can’t help but notice that you’re just reshuffling the members of the dichotomy instead of making something more unified.Report
Yes, I did. Yes, I do. So I answered your questions. Now answer mine.Report
I saw an implied call to action in Chip’s comment. How “we” needed to change despite all of the illusory progress he thought he saw back in the 70’s.
If there was no call to action, then allow me to say “nobody”.
Was there a call to action?
Perhaps there wasn’t. Chip’s sarcastic question “is there a solution for people hating each other?” might imply a deep nihilism about what’s actually possible.Report
The question answers itself.
The solution for people hating is…to stop hating.
And implicitly to refuse to turn a blind eye to hate. And to rebuke those who do. And search for ways to encode this in our norms and laws.
I mean, this isn’t new or novel, people have been talking about it for thousands of years.Report
Oh, is all we’re doing is refusing to turn a blind eye to it?
Did the hostage-taker have any demands?
What were they?
Maybe we should communicate that whatever this hostage-taker wanted was unacceptable and how people who want this sort of thing need to be mocked, shunned, and otherwise dissuaded from their thought process.Report
You seem to have trouble identifying trees and forests here, so let me help you out:
Chip was mocking you for asking a question, that, frankly, doesn’t need to be asked if you actually care. OT – and many other sources – are brimming with the how of this. You’ve even suggested some of those ideas over the years (like decriminalizing marijuana). SO if you honestly, legitimatley don’t know how, then we can’t really help you at this point.
And if you are asking the WHY of this – I made it clear in my response. Humans deserve to exist without threat of violence because they are human. The “easiest” way for you to ensure they exist that way is to choose to not meet them with violence because they aren’t you. Then you choose to fight back – in all the ways shown in the many, many HOWS – against anyone and everyone who would do other humans violence for their human characteristics.
That’s as clear as any of us can make it. And frankly I’m disappointed that it has to be made that clear to you, because doing so requires me to lower my assessment of you as a person. I should you wouldn’t want that outcome, but I’ve been wrong around here before.Report
Well, one of the things that I keep noticing is that we aren’t really talking about the British guy who took the hostages.
The seed crystal, if you will.
What could we have done with regards to this British guy?
Or am I focusing on the tree of this British guy instead of the forest of the US and its relationship to diversity?Report
I don’t know who this “we” is, but if you think you have something worth saying about the British guy who took the hostages, or even if you just want to talk about it, nobody’s stopping you. Have at it.Report
“I think it’d be reasonable to be afraid of people like that. Maybe even to take precautions against them.”Report
See how simple that was? Now if anyone wants to engage, they can.Report
Is that because we don’t have anti-Semitism here, or because they don’t have internet access there?Report
I know that we do, but I’m not sure that the Texas Synagogue Hostage situation is the best platform from which to discuss it and how to best address it.
And *ESPECIALLY* if the takeaway from the Texas Synagogue Hostage situation is that “Jewish people never feel fully safe around white people and, more’s the point, they probably are right to never feel fully safe around them.”
AND USING THAT LOGIC, I have follow up questions for all kinds of violence in the US and whether it would be right for members of group X to never feel fully safe around members of group Y.
How much does this insight scale?
What government policies follow from this insight?Report
There is a category of thinking that I would describe as understandable in certain contexts, and maybe deserving of some empathy, but not the sort of thing we ought to encourage, institutionalize, or accept as inevitable.Report
Moving from “Is it understandable that they think this?” to something like “Should they stop thinking this?” gets hairy.
If their thinking this puts an obligation on me (maybe it does!) then I’d like to know what that obligation is.Report
That obligation is to defend the rights of your fellow humans to exist as and where they are, free from threat of violence (including death).
Will that be hard? Yes. Might you be exposed to threat of violence for doing it? Yes. Are you willing to do it?Report
Does meeting this obligation look like what you’re doing right now?
Or does it look like something else?
Does it look like outsourcing this responsibility to others? Like, calling for more prosecutors or police?
Does it look like buying a gun and making sure that I’m prepared if violence breaks out around me?
Does it just look like posting a selfie in front of a BLM lawn sign?Report
I’d love to be able to follow your thought on this thread but I’m having trouble. Are you worried that people are trying to score points due to this incident? That people are doing so while not trying to make this better? That people are doing so while making this or other things worse? Is there something about anti-Semitism that makes this different from a more general complaint on the topic? You mentioned the foreign origin: are you using that as evidence that we’re not properly addressing the problem?Report
As I keep being reminded – sometimes daily – you gain little by asking for clarity in Jaybird’s thinking.Report
You should try harder though. He’s one of the most interesting thinkers on the site.Report
I’m not particularly worried.
I *AM* particularly noticing that our jumping off for a speech about the badness of Americans was a British guy flying to the US and taking hostages at a synagogue calling for the release of an alleged terrorist in custody.
It strikes me as similar to me looking at the Texas Synagogue Hostage situation and saying “this drives home the point that we need to have Congress reschedule Marijuana.”
I mean, there are a lot of problems and there is nowhere near enough justice but running, stampeding, to how this is Congress’s fault for not dealing with marijuana sooner would be more of an indicator of me and my thought processes than actually wrestling with what actually happened.
Because wrestling with what actually happened might get us to explore the topic of “is it appropriate for members of this group to fear members of that group?”
And then we might even want to look a little closer at the British guy. Maybe see if there’s something about British people that we could use as a red flag to tell us “hey, I’m not saying it’s *GOOD*, I’m just saying it’s *REASONABLE*”.
And see if that scales.
If we agree that that would be bad (not out of the question!), then we get to ask whether it being bad scales.Report
do you agree that Jewish people deserve to be free from worry about threats of or the enaction of violence based on them simply being Jewish?
Because that’s why they were attacked. Because they are Jewish. I believe that being free of threat for being Jewish (or Black, or a Woman) is not just reasonable, its critical. Its foundational. Its a moral foundation.
And trying to see if the actions of a crazed British Muslim might be REASONABLE in this context suggest you don’t agree.Report
Come on, he’s at least clear enough that you shouldn’t be asking that. He’s saying that they were attacked because they were Jewish and the British Muslim was crazed, not either/or.Report
Actually based on the reports I think that’s still not quite clear. Always tentative at this stage but they’re saying he was demanding the release of a Pakistani national in federal prison for attacking US military personnel in Afghanistan. I think that’s what the FBI spokesman was trying to get at in the interview Jaybird linked to when he said the attack was not specific to the interests of the Jewish community. Of course it was also kind of rambling and we should always be careful to draw too many conclusions before the facts emerge.
Still I appreciate Jaybird’s call for rigor here. I don’t want to predict anything but I’m hearing echoes of that time attacks on Asians by often black, often homeless and/or mentally disabled people, plus a religious zealot with a sex addiction shooting up (apparently) brothels, was…. cause for a renewed and urgent discussion on latent white supremacy as a cause of anti-Asian violence?
I always reserve judgment until we get all of the facts but we have gone places like that before, and recently too.Report
Oh, yeah. Jewish people totally deserve to be free from that worry.
You bring up the point that he’s Muslim.
Is it reasonable for us to have heightened awareness when it comes to Muslms or is that beyond the pale?
Because it certainly seems that we’d much rather talk about Marijuana Legislation following this incident than what actually seems to have happened.
Have you seen the early FBI reports?
It looks like they don’t want to talk about what happened either.Report
I still adhere to the quaint notion that there is no they, at least when it comes to how to think, only individuals. In that regard it puts no obligation on you or anyone else.
That said I do think as Americans we ought to broadly be against sectarian hatred and certainly never tolerate violence. The whole thing falls apart if the vast majority of us can’t get to a conclusion that such a thing is wrong.
The good news is that federal SWAT team adhered to the principle without hesitation.Report
How to say you are a talk radio conservative/Fox News Republican without stating you are a talk radio/Fox News conservative Republican.Report
Heh, no. I see myself as being a passenger in the vehicle.
We either need to slow down or change the weight distribution.Report
Why do see what you getting is a lecture? What is wrong with contemplation? Why is being asked to think about something inherently a lecture?Report
Proverbs 28:1?Report
It’s a variation of “denounce Stalin”.
I imagine you’d recognize it if someone had questions about Palestine and what you thought about some of the forced relocation of the occupied people there.Report
More than 100 years after Pasteur, a significant fraction of Americans are a hard No on vaccines. Progress is illusory.Report
Audio of the call between the hostage-taker and his brother during the standoff.
Some notable things:
* He’s not ranting about Jews. He describes his location as “a synagogue” and the hostages as “four beautiful guys, Jewish guys”. No slurs, no accusations. His brother calls the hostages “innocents” and he doesn’t dispute it.
* He’s ranting about the US. “Why does Afghanistan have to be a defensive war? Why can’t the sick Taliban bastards enter American and have a defensive war?”
* He’s quite clear that he’s going to die and doesn’t expect his demands to be met. His goal is to take the war to the US and inspire other Muslims to do the same.
“Maybe they’ll have compassion for f*cking Jews”. “They” is the US, and his complaint here is that the US has none for Muslims.
Anti-semitic? Yes, he sought out a synagogue because he wanted Jews to take hostage. But not frothing, the way I was expecting.Report