Days after a Texas mosque was
destroyed in a fire and a right-wing Internet troll
murdered six worshipers at a Quebec mosque, at least 17 Jewish Community Centers across the U.S. have been targeted with bomb threats and evacuated, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency
reports. This is the third wave of such threats to Jewish centers in January alone.
On January 9, bomb threats were
reported at JCCs in Florida, New Jersey, Tennessee, Maryland, South Carolina, and Delaware; on January 18, as many as 27 bomb threats were
reported at JCCs across 17 states. No explosives have been found in any of the reported incidents thus far.
In West Orange, New Jersey on Tuesday, nj.com
reports that a woman called the center saying, “There is a bomb in the building”; when asked where, she said “I’m not going to tell you that” and hung up. After the previous series of threats, the Anti-Defamation League issued a
security advisory “urging all communal institutions to take these threats extremely seriously.”
Donald Trump, whose close circle of advisors include a Jewish son-in-law and
multiple white nationalists, has been
winking at Nazis for some time now. Most recently, Trump sent out a
statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day—the same day his White House
announced their Muslim ban—that omitted the Jewish people entirely. “The president went out of his way to recognize the Holocaust,” spokesman Sean Spicer
said defensively in response to the outcry, adding that “by and large he’s been praised for [the statement].”
This is, of course, not accurate. Even ultra-right wing financier Sheldon Adelson’s organization
came out against it, though they assured themselves that the omission was an accident; it’s
been noted that one of the few sources of praise for Trump’s revisionist statement is neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer.
