Antisemitism and racism are never limited to rhetoric alone; the hateful words are inevitably accompanied by violent deeds. In New York City, there was a 361 percent increase in hate crimes targeting Asian people in 2021. Nationally, the figure spiked by 339 percent, with record numbers of anti-Asian hate crimes reported in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles.
In some cases, the results have been fatal — for example, the murder in the Atlanta area of eight people, six of them Asians, by a white-supremacist gunman in March 2021. Only last Sunday, Christina Yuna Lee — a 35-year-old Korean-American woman who was active in combating hatred towards the Asian community — was brutally stabbed to death by an intruder who followed her into her apartment building in Lower Manhattan. A few days later, an improvised memorial to Lee outside her home, featuring flowers, candles and signs condemning hatred towards Asians, was vandalized overnight. Lee’s landlord, Brian Chin, told the New York Post that he had tried to reassemble the memorial as best he could. “They try to desecrate her as much as they could, and we as a community are beyond fed up, we are beyond angry, and we are tired of being attacked,” said Chin. “We are tired of seeing this hatred, and we are not going to stand for it anymore.”
The attack on the memorial to Lee reminded me of similar outrages in Paris at the memorial to Ilan Halimi, the young French Jew kidnapped and murdered by an antisemitic gang in 2006. The memorial to Halimi sits in a small garden, the Jardin Ilan Halimi, that has been vandalized with antisemitic graffiti on several occasions since it was erected in 2015. Almost exactly a year ago, when a small crowd of French Jews gathered at the garden to commemorate the 15th anniversary of his death, the sentiments expressed by some were similar to those of Mr. Chin in New York. “There’s a feeling that it’s all been for nothing — that we’re not learning from the past,” remarked one attendee at the Halimi commemoration. Another pointed out that since Ilan Halimi was murdered, other French Jews have lost their lives in antisemitic attacks that range from full-scale terrorist attacks to home invasions in which the Jewish victims are robbed, beaten and occasionally killed.
And just as antisemitism is a global phenomenon, so is anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiment. In other English-speaking countries, there has been a slew of social-media postings about the “Chinese virus,” while in many Asian countries with significant Chinese minorities, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, both hate speech and racist violence have escalated during the pandemic. Equally, both communities have been vilified for their alleged “privilege” even as they suffer from hate crimes that are becoming more common and more normalized. Currently, Asian-American advocates are taking to the Supreme Court their fight with two elite colleges — Harvard University and the University of North Carolina — claiming that both discriminate against Asian-American applicants by scoring them lower in some categories while showing bias towards black and Hispanic applicants at the same time. A century ago, Jews would have told a similar story about this country’s leading academic institutions.
No two forms of prejudice are exactly alike, but whatever the historical and contextual differences between the discrimination encountered by the Jewish and Asian communities, there is no question that we need to be close allies at this point in time. At the end of January, John C. Yang, the president and executive director of the nonprofit civil-rights group Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), said explicitly that the communities he advocates for actively welcome solidarity from other groups. “The support of our allies representing diverse communities of color and diverse faith communities has meant a great deal as our Asian American communities have been under attack,” said Yang.
Such solidarity needs to intensify. The depressing reality is that, in the United States in 2022, antisemitism and anti-Asian hatred are rising precipitously. Jews must make common cause with Asian-Americans to push back.
Ben Cohen is a New York City-based journalist and author who writes a weekly column on Jewish and international affairs for JNS.
"asian" - Google News
February 19, 2022 at 12:14AM
https://ift.tt/2A86yoj
We Need to Step Up the Fight Against Anti-Asian Hatred in America - Algemeiner
"asian" - Google News
https://ift.tt/KgdYa4p
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
No comments:
Post a Comment