Kane In Your Corner: Jersey City shooting could be latest in rise of NJ anti-Semitic incidents

Tuesday's shootings in Jersey City appear to the latest example of a rising tide of anti-Semitic activity in New Jersey in recent years, according to police records reviewed by Kane in Your Corner.

News 12 Staff

Dec 12, 2019, 11:47 PM

Updated 1,607 days ago

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Tuesday's shootings in Jersey City appear to the latest example of a rising tide of anti-Semitic activity in New Jersey in recent years, according to police records reviewed by Kane in Your Corner.
The surveillance footage is chilling, showing Francine Graham and David Anderson, with guns drawn, storming into a kosher supermarket on Martin Luther King Drive. New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, who had previously urged people to be cautious in making a link between the shooting and anti-Semitism, now says, "the evidence points towards acts of hate."
"I can confirm that we're investigating this matter as potential acts of domestic terrorism, fueled both by anti-Semitism and anti-law enforcement beliefs," Grewal says.
A recent Kane In Your Corner investigation found incidents of hate are on the rise in New Jersey – with anti-Semitism as one of the main motivating factors. Over the past two years, there were 1,118 confirmed bias incidents in New Jersey. In 344 of them, the Jewish community was the target. That means anti-Semitism amounted to 31% of all bias incidents and 85% of the incidents that were motivated by religion.
Oren Segal, who tracks hate and extremism for the Anti Defamation League tells Kane In Your Corner, "In the last three years we have seen increasing activity by hate groups and extremist groups within the hate crimes and hate incidents that we've been tracking. That wasn't always true. For many years the majority hate incidents had no connection to organized extremist movement. Today it seems like those extremists are becoming more emboldened."
The ADL says those extremist groups include factions of Black Hebrew Israelites, an organization in which authorities say both suspects expressed interest. But it's not clear the shootings were actually linked to those groups. For now, at least, the attorney general says it appears the suspects were acting on their own.
 
 


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