NEW YORK CITY: When the Mayor is Muslim, the Attorney General feels emboldened to criminalize Jews for trying to protect themselves against Muslims who want to kill them

In New York City, synagogues require police barricades and families hide Stars of David under their coats due to violent anti-Israel protestors, but NY’s attorney general acted only against Betar, the group which fought back. After two years of Hamas-supporting Muslims and their Far Left useful idiots assaulting Jewish community members, besieging synagogues, blocking streets, vandalizing buildings and making death threats, New York Attorney General Letitia James finally took action…AGAINST THE JEWS!

INN  For more than two years after the October 7, 2023 massacre of Jews – the day Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1,200 Israelis, raped women, burned families alive, and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza – Jewish New Yorkers have lived in a city that suddenly felt foreign, hostile, and lawless.

University campuses were transformed into encampments of intimidation. Street protests degenerated into rallies where “Globalize the Intifada,” “From the River to the Sea,” and even praise for Hamas were screamed into megaphones while Jewish students were chased, spat upon, and physically assaulted.

Synagogues required police barricades. Families hid Stars of David under their coats. Throughout this metastasis of antisemitic intimidation, one voice was conspicuously muted: that of New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Now, after years of silence as Jews were harassed, threatened, and beaten in the streets of the very state she was elected to protect, James has suddenly discovered her moral voice – not to confront pro-Hamas intimidation, but to pursue Betar.

 

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Betar members once smuggled Jewish refugees past British blockades and fought to rescue European Jews during the Holocaust, not to mention laying the groundwork for the modern Israeli military tradition of never again being defenseless.

The hypocrisy is not merely galling. It is grotesque.

Since October 7, pro-Hamas and anti-Israel mobs have engaged in an uninterrupted campaign of intimidation against Jewish New Yorkers. Protesters blocked entrances to Jewish neighborhoods, surrounded synagogues, shut down Israeli cultural events, and openly called for violence. Chants that any serious legal mind would recognize as prima facie evidence of bias-motivated harassment – “We don’t want no Zionists here,” “Go back to Europe,” “Death to the Jews” – were allowed to metastasize without consequence.

Not once did Letitia James announce a sweeping civil-rights investigation into the dozens of organizations that praised Hamas as “resistance.” Not once did she characterize those actions as discrimination or racism. Not once did she convene press conferences about Jewish students being locked inside libraries or assaulted outside dormitories.

The standard was clear: when Jews are the victims, restraint; when Jews fight back, prosecution.

For decades, Betar activists have prided themselves on unapologetic Jewish self-assertion in the face of hostility. That reputation – fierce, unyielding, proudly Zionist – has now made them the perfect target for a politically motivated Attorney General eager to placate progressive activists while posturing as a defender of “civil rights.”

For example, the filing by AG James complains that “Betar members repeatedly referred to keffiyehs” (the pro-terrorist scarves worn by some Muslims and radical leftist supporters of terrorism) “as ‘rape rags’ in public and private”, that some member of the group stated “that all devout Muslims ‘hate America’” and that the group tweeted that it “hates Gazans.”

Under the First Amendment, Betar members are entitled to say these things. AG James does not allege that Betar members stood outside a mosque and shouted these things. Indeed her filing reveals that some of these comments came from private ‘members only’ chats on Whatsapp that were spied on by Muslims and Antifa.

James’ office now accuses Betar of harassment, intimidation, and bias-motivated conduct, imposing a settlement that forced the organization to wind down operations in New York under threat of a $50,000 penalty. The press release reads as though Betar is a criminal syndicate rather than a political advocacy group that dared to confront the same protest culture the Attorney General spent months ignoring.

Since October 7, pro-Hamas demonstrators have physically assaulted Jewish students, protest leaders have publicly praised a genocidal terrorist organization, Jewish institutions have been vandalized, surrounded, and shut down and chants advocating ethnic cleansing of Jews have become normalized.

In a city where a Jewish man was kicked, punched, and beaten with a metal object while merely walking in the vicinity of an anti-Israel rally, most of the Muslim perpetrators walked away with probation.

Yet Letitia James never once framed this as a civil-rights crisis demanding urgent enforcement of New York’s bias-crime statutes. Instead, she waited – waited until the narrative shifted to allow her to strike at a group ideologically associated with Israel, Trump, and the political right. Only then did she unleash the full prosecutorial fury of her office.

This is not law enforcement. It is ideological theater. The message could not be clearer: if you wave a Hamas flag, you are an activist. If you wave an Israeli one with too much conviction, you are an extremist. Perhaps the most dangerous consequence of James’ action is the signal it sends to Jewish New Yorkers: self-assertion will be punished; submission will be rewarded.

The Betar settlement effectively criminalizes a posture of muscular Jewish advocacy while allowing pro-Hamas intimidation to flourish under the guise of “free expression.” Jewish students are expected to endure harassment quietly, file reports that go nowhere, and trust institutions that have proven, repeatedly, that they will not protect them.

But when Jews organize, document threats, and confront intimidation – suddenly the machinery of the state roars to life. By ignoring pro-Hamas intimidation while pursuing Betar, James has not upheld civil rights – she has redefined them to exclude Jews who refuse to be passive victims.

Betar was ‘low hanging fruit’, but if it can be shut down for a list of charges that includes assembling lists of terrorist radicals and criticicing Islam, then anyone can be shut down. The record will reflect that decision. And history, unlike press releases, does not forget.

Ironically, the Trump administration is embracing policies and ideas that align with Betar. On Jan. 29 the president signed an executive order intended to counter campus antisemitism, the most eye-catching part of which suggested that foreign-born protesters who are deemed to have supported terrorist groups like Hamas could be deported.

It was a policy that could have come straight from a Betar position paper. For months the group has openly gathered dossiers on what it claims are Hamas-supporting students who match that exact profile, with the stated intent of submitting them to the Trump administration for deportation.

 

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