After recent attacks on Jews, policy experts urge full review of factors behind the violence
Joe StruppIn the week since a machete-wielding man burst into a rabbi's home in a northern New York City suburb and attacked celebrants on the seventh night of Hanukkah, a phalanx of state, local and federal officials have pledged new and redoubled efforts to thwart what they have universally decried as another hate-inspired, anti-Semitic attack.
The strategies announced by the officials have included stepping up patrols in Jewish enclaves in New York and New Jersey, putting task forces to work fighting anti-Jewish violence, better coordination among law enforcement agencies, and giving prosecutors new tools to target perpetrators. The measures are in addition to the self-help urged in some quarters: hiring more private security and purchasing firearms for self-defense.
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New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, grappling with what police said is a 23 percent rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes last year, promised in the first hours after the attack to change the curriculum in Brooklyn schools as early as this month, focusing on "stopping hate ... on building mutual respect, to help young people understand what hate crimes really mean and the dangers they pose to all of us," he was quoted in a BBC report.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who decried the Dec. 28 attack in Monsey as an "American cancer" and "poison" inspired by hate, called for a new domestic terrorism law. "Just because they don't come from another country doesn't mean they are not terrorists," Cuomo said. "They should be prosecuted as domestic terrorists."
And New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, noting the deadly siege on a kosher supermarket in Jersey City in December and New Jersey's epidemic of reported bias incidents, released a five-point plan for addressing hate. It, too, trains a spotlight on school curricula. Grewal said in a statement he awaits the recommendations of a youth task force examining a range of related issues.
"It would be easier if we could say that hate was a vestige of an older, more ignorant time," Grewal said. "But how can we say that in the wake of the Jersey City attacks or the recent spate of anti-Semitic acts in Monsey, N.Y. and elsewhere in the region?"
Yet as more details emerge about the complicated history of the man charged in the Monsey attack, policy experts and analysts said in interviews that they will need to look not only at anti-Semitism and hate to deliver the kinds of public protection so many have called for in the wake of the violence.
Some echoed the view of Rep. Nita Lowey, D-New York, writing after the Monsey attack in a New York Times op-ed co-authored by David Harris, chief executive of the American Jewish Committee, "There is no one-size-fits-all profile for the perpetrators of these attacks."
Grafton Thomas, 37, of Greenwood Lake, Orange County, New York, faces attempted murder and federal hate crime charges, following the attack at a rabbi's home in Monsey, a Jewish enclave in Rockland County. "He pushed his way in, slammed the door shut and said 'none of you getting out of here' — something to that effect, 'nobody's leaving' — and pulls out a machete and unsheathes it and starts doing the unthinkable," Rabbi Yisroel Kahan, a witness, said in a media account.
According to prosecutors, Thomas used his cellphone to search the internet for “Why did Hitler hate the Jews.” His browser history showed other queries related to Nazis, Jews and synagogues dating to at least Nov. 9. A hand-written journal found in a search also contained reference to Black Hebrew Israelites — the extremist group linked to one of the shooters in the fatal siege in December at the kosher grocery in Jersey City.
Lacking probable cause, police said they made no arrest.
Thomas' mother and attorney dispute the assertions by government lawyers that Thomas harbored anti-Semitic views. They said the evidence cited by prosecutors were symptoms of serious mental illness, not the motivations for an attack.
Thomas' mother, Kim, told reporters her son had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He heard voices, sometimes was incoherent and refused to take his medication. She tried to get mental health workers to intervene after his condition deteriorated several months ago. Law enforcement handled the matter instead. "He got no help," she was quoted by the New York Post. "They treated it as a criminal case and that was it."
But something went wrong.
Michael Sussman, Thomas' attorney, said his client received only episodic treatment for his mental illness, including several hospital stays in 2019. He suffered from "various auditory hallucinations and one might say 'demons'," Sussman said. His mother told reporters she sought court intervention to force her son to take medication, again to no avail.
"He has no known history of anti-Semitism and was raised in a home which embraced and respected all religions and races," Sussman said in a statement. "He is not a member of any hate groups."
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Mental health and legal experts said authorities are often under pressure to quickly categorize attacks like the one in Monsey. But they add that quick judgments can be problematic: they can be incorrect; they can raise undue fears among certain targeted groups; and they can add to the stigma when mental illness is identified as a factor.
Typically, according to the analysts, mass attacks can often be traced to a confluence of behaviors, breakdowns, actions and inactions — problems not always evident on initial examination. It other words, the experts said, the "cause" invariably can be tied to more than a single factor; accordingly, the public policy response will need to be just as fluid.
“You shouldn’t rush to any judgment. This is a crime and it should be seen as a crime when you do your investigation and you try to find out the cause,” Robert J. Sternberg, a professor of human development at Cornell University and author of "The Psychology of Hate", said. “Just throwing around words in the minutes or hours after the crime is committed isn’t that helpful. If it is attributed to mental illness it stigmatizes the mentally ill. If it is considered a hate crime it can instill fear in people of that group.”
Stephen J. Morse, a professor of law and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, said labeling a crime as a product of mental illness, as Thomas' attorney has suggested might be the case, is problematic in its own right because such crimes are rare.
“I wish people would wait and see the facts before making claims,” Morse said, in an interview before Thomas' indictment on charges of attempted murder on Friday. “We ought to be very careful in our language. Most of these crimes and mass killings do not involve mental illness. Other things are going on and we should investigate them before jumping to conclusions.”
In the case of the Monsey attack, public officials from President Donald Trump to New York Cuomo were quick to label it a hate crime, with Cuomo describing it as “domestic terrorism.”
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In the December siege in Jersey City, three civilians were killed when two gun-wielding assailants opened fire on a kosher market. The two suspects were killed, along with a police detective, who encountered the pair in a cemetery just ahead of the attack.
While Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop quickly tweeted afterward that the violence was a “hate crime,” Gov. Phil Murphy, Attorney General Grewal and other federal and state officials said the motive of the two shooters was still under investigation.
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"During the early stages of an investigation, others may have incomplete or inaccurate information, which cannot only create unnecessary panic in the community, but also undermine the integrity of an ongoing investigation," Grewal said at the time.
By the following day, however, politicians on both sides of the Hudson River had adopted Fulop's characterization, without equivocation.
“People want to see an immediate do-something response,” said Michael L. Perlin, a professor emeritus at New York Law School and an expert on mental disability law and criminal law. “We want people to make up their mind and then you look for the evidence. That is wrong.”
John J. Farmer, former state attorney general and now director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, also noted the pressure for quick judgments.
“The elected official feels pressure to sound authoritative at the time," he said. "Their interest is in ensuring the public that they are in charge and that things are OK.”
Farmer, who was attorney general during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, recalled an effort at that time to hold back pronouncements until facts were known.
“It was a chaotic time but on the whole I think we were pretty measured," said Farmer. "We followed New York’s lead because they had better information than we did.
“Certainly the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and social media adds to the pressure to communicate. That has gotten much worse, that pressure to have something to say all the time.”
More:Mayor Steve Fulop calls Jersey City shooting a 'hate crime'
Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, said research is finding that describing an event as just a hate crime or based on mental illness or terrorism discounts many other factors that may be involved.
“We have to remember we are dealing with, sometimes, conflicting definitions and chronologies,” said Levin. “When we’re trying to make sense of hateful and irrational violence we are now finding offenders who have mixed motivations or different variables. Today’s terrorist or offender is a jumbled mixture that can include anger, mental distress as well as radicalization. We are dealing with intersecting definitions.”
Sternberg stressed that, "people with diminished capacity generally can hate (or love). They may be less reflective about why they hate. Lately, it seems like much of the world is working to diminish its own capacity."
Morse said the proper law enforcement approach is to wait for evidence and not jump to conclusions that can create fear, and in some cases, jeopardize the case.
“These are attempted murders; that much is clear,” he said of the Monsey attacks. “Then there are any number of questions you could ask legally.”
Sternberg said the immediate labeling can also cause undue harm on either the targeted groups or mentally ill people.
“It’s really pathetic because in terms of mental illness what it does is stigmatize people who are mentally ill,” he said. “It makes you want to be careful to be around someone who is mentally ill because they believe they will kill you. It makes it sound like only a sick person would do this when these are acts of evil.”
Perlin added, “Don’t rush to judgment and especially don’t just start with the mental illness thing, that’s really bad. Judges don’t go around deciding cases before they see the evidence. You collect the evidence, then assign the label.”
Another recent mass casualty attack prompted a broader policy review.
In New York City in October, a homeless man was accused in the random slaughter of four homeless people on the city's streets.
The deaths prompted fresh discussion about why there were so many homeless in the city as well as more scrutiny of the city's beleaguered shelter system. The mayor promised more policing. President Trump has since joined the debate about who is to blame for there being so many homeless on the nation's streets.
"Anti-Semitism, a virus to counter all on its own, has had a helping hand in recent weeks. Many of those arrested in violent attacks on Jews were struggling with serious mental illness. That’s a reminder of a widespread problem: Our fractured mental health system has far few tools to make psychotic people get treatment they desperately need. Too often, treatment comes only when they’re ordered to receive it after committing a crime."
In Jewish communities where residents feel under threat, there was a renewed call Sunday for an end to the violence — no matter the cause. The "No Hate, No Fear Solidarity March" across the Brooklyn Bridge generated crowds in the thousands.
At once, concern over the attacks are being joined by a push for self-help. In Monsey, there has been a surge in weapons training and self-defense courses.
Joe Strupp is an award-winning journalist with 30 years’ experience who covers education and Monmouth County for APP.com and the Asbury Park Press. He is also the author of two books, including Killing Journalism on the state of the news media. Reach him at jstrupp@gannettnj.com and at 732-643-4277. Follow him on Twitter at @joestrupp