Glenn Greenwald finally learned (the wrong) lesson.
Finally he found a violent incident involving Jewish victims worth reporting on.
Recently in Miami Beach a man named Mordechai Brafman was arrested for attempted murder against two men he had shot 17 times. The details of the shooting when I first heard about it made little sense to me. Brafman had been traveling in one direction and then doing a U-Turn before pulling up in front of a different vehicle. Brafman then exited and emptied his handgun into the car, injuring the two men inside. He later told police he believed he had killed two Palestinians, which turned out not to be true. Sadly, Brafman had targeted two men for a totally unjustifiable pretext which turned out to be wrong.
This incident is a double gut punch for the Jewish American community, as it comes at a time when there are unprecedented threats and elevated hostility against it originating from points across the political spectrum, and now to add to it is an incident of both delusional and senseless violence involving a Jewish offender. Even more tragic is the fact that voices like Glenn Greenwald, who has touted himself as a free speech advocated, is using this incident to continue his polemical crusade to say that there is no reason for Jewish Americans to be concerned for their safety, and any measure done to facilitate it is overkill.
Greenwald arrived at this argument after mocking the fact that Washington University had a programme utilized for absorbing Jewish students during the Spring 2024 semester who had left other institutions due to hostility at previous colleges. Greenwald sarcastically asked whether this amounted to DEI or affirmative action, even though the school insisted that the early transfer option was available for all students. While Greenwald has been unsympathetic to the issues relating to Jewish life on campus since the Israel-Hamas War began, this was callous even for him. For the students who would exercise this option, unlike DEI recipients, they had already given up on their preferred school and moving to St. Louis to attend a small Division III university. This is more similar to the now common situation where small colleges like Holy Names in California are disbanding and other schools are stepping forward to absorb their now orphaned students.
But what is even more insulting was that Greenwald opted to cite the rare occurrences when Jewish offenders committed acts of violence or harassment like the Miami Beach incident.
What he’s doing is comparing the needle in a haystack (violence by Jewish offenders against Palestinian victims) to a box full of needles (violence by Palestinians and their supporters against Jewish victims). In the first scenario the incidents are so rare that when they do happen it is both newsworthy and causes a sense of embarrassment. There is no community or institutional support for such violence and it is roundly condemned.
However when it comes to anti-Jewish or anti-Israel violence, threats, vandalism or intimidation from the broader pro-Palestine movement there is an attitude of denying or even excusing the behaviour. In November 2023 I wrote an open letter that I sent to Greenwald documenting some of the most egregious incidents until then. At the time he didn’t respond, but I consider his latest tweets to be the answer he would have given had he bothered to care about it. Here are some other ones, including some international examples to show the severity of the situation:
Jewish students attempting to film a pro-Palestine protest at Yale’s Slifka Center for Jewish Life facility affiliated with Hillel were barred from doing so by staff, effectively siding against their own student constituency in order to accommodate their enemies.
In Australia several incidents such as a synagogue firebombing, a truck bomb discovered in New South Wales, and the firebombing of community leader’s home have created a climate of fear among its Jewish citizens.
Domagoj Patkovic, an Oregon resident, recently pleaded guilty to making threats over the phone and “swatting” Jewish institutions and hospitals in Long Island going back to 2021.
Two suspects have been arrested in relation to gunfire directed at the Yeshiva Gedola, a Jewish high school in Montreal, QC in November 2023. Alarmingly authorities have not released the identities of either person. Similar incidents have happened at a Jewish girls school in Toronto on three occasions as recently as December 2024.
At Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ a social media post encouraged violence against an Israeli student and directed followers on where to find him.
A Jewish student at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville was allegedly held at gunpoint by a housemate and threatened by him and another.
In October 2024 a Mauritanian migrant shot and wounded a Jewish pedestrian walking on the Sabbath in the West Rogers Park neighbourhood of Chicago. He also shot at a police officer before being himself wounded and apprehended.
In November 2023 Brazilian police, acting on information provided by Israel’s Mossad arrested 11 suspects in São Paulo involved in a terror plot against the country’s Jewish community on behalf of the Lebanese Shiite terror organization Hezbollah.
In November 2024 Jack Molloy of Pennsylvania was indicted for attempting to travel overseas to join Hezbollah.
One of Greenwald’s tweets was a retort claiming that during a recent visit to Manhattan he hadn’t experienced any incidents targeting him for being Jewish. This is an interesting logical error, the fallacy of composition where conditions for one part of a whole population are assumed to be true for the entire population. It assumes his own experience (sample 1) to be representative of Jewish Americans (population 1) and by extension Jewish college students (sample 2). This obscures key differences.
He was only in Manhattan for a visit and resides in Brazil.
He has some notoriety for being an opponent of Israel. Therefore, if a person happens to recognise Greenwald their response to him is likely to be different from how it would be to an anonymous Jewish student.
He is not part of any campus community, meaning that even if he were to have a negative interaction with someone on an American college campus it wouldn’t otherwise impact his academic or professional life.
Apart from his documented ancestry, Greenwald’s Jewish background plays no role in his life.
He has no skin in the game. And that’s really the reason Greenwald and people of a similar mindset have always been apathetic to violence against Jewish targets. I could write the same narrative as him because nowadays I don’t experience unadulterated Jew hatred in my workplace or home environments, but I certainly did during my time in college and it usually had nothing to do with Zionism or events in the Middle East. Thankfully it never turned into a physical incident, but not everyone can say that.
Targeted populations do exist. During the COVID pandemic it was documented and universally acknowledged that harassment and assault of Asian Americans, in particular the elderly, ballooned. Whether every documented incident warrants the designation of being hate motivated can be conjectured, but not the fact that they happened.
When it came to a different group that Greenwald belongs to, the LGBT community in his adopted country Brazil, he was all too vocal about the violence and intimidation against gay friends of his and his now deceased spouse, and the security precautions that they had to take, which included armed security. Other members of the LGBT community organised self defense classes.
Brazil’s supreme court reacted to the violence by making homophobia itself illegal, going over the heads of the legislature and Brazil’s right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro. To my knowledge Greenwald has never exercised his voice to campaign against such limits on free speech. Yet violent crimes, some of them financially motivated, would continue to plague Brazil’s gay community through 2024 long after Bolsonaro had left office and been replaced with the gay-friendly President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva.
Given his journalistic stories critical of the Bolsonaro government and others in Brazil and the volume of threats he received, it is totally understandable that Greenwald hired security and took precautions for the safety of himself and his family. He only could do so by raising the money through reaching out to donors and trafficking in his notoriety. So wouldn’t he of all people be mindful of the members of Jewish communities like Toronto and Montreal, who don’t have his notoriety and perhaps can’t afford security like he can? Don’t they have the prerogative to take the best precautions and adjustments to their lives the way he has for his own? He would surely understand, but I don’t think he wants to.