Also, antisemites at the beach club
It’s every man for himself these days, isn’t it?
Early signs of a threat to shoot up a Manhattan synagogue were detected on Friday morning not by law enforcement officials but by an online security analyst working in a Manhattan office building.
A Twitter user with the handle @VrilGod posted a series of alarming tweets caught by the analyst’s filters used to identify possible online threats.
In one post, the user warned: “Big moves being made on Friday.”
In another, the user wrote: “Gonna ask a Priest if I should become a husband or shoot up a synagogue and die.”
Another post — “This time I’m really gonna do it” — seemed to reinforce the threat of attack, which the user indicated could be carried out at 10 p.m. Friday night along with a willingness to “die by cop.”
When the analyst saw these tweets, “alarm bells went off,” said his boss, Mitchell Silber, who leads the Community Security Initiative for the UJA-Federation of New York. They resulted in a police investigation that ended in the arrest of Christopher Brown, 21, and Matthew Mahrer, 22, just before midnight on Friday at Pennsylvania Station.
Incidents of harassment and violence against Jews and Jewish institutions have increased nationwide and have only intensified as celebrities like the rapper Kanye West, who goes by the name Ye, and the basketball player Kyrie Irving have come under fire for antisemitic posts on social media. This month, federal investigators issued a rare warning about a security risk at New Jersey synagogues and questioned a man who holds “radical extremist views” in connection with it.
On Tuesday, city and state authorities in New York announced increased security at synagogues and other Jewish institutions going into a long Thanksgiving weekend and with Hanukkah approaching on Dec. 18.
Gov. Kathy Hochul directed the State Police to intensify monitoring and increase support for communities that are potential targets of hate crimes. She also signed legislation requiring people convicted of hate crimes to undergo sensitivity education and training, as well as establish a new campaign under the state’s Division of Human Rights to promote inclusion and tolerance.
In New York City, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said her department would be responding by “strategically deploying assets at sensitive locations.” She credited the work done by her department and other law enforcement agencies.
Analysts on Mr. Silber’s team who contacted the authorities about the threat were monitoring filters that scrape the internet for possible local attacks by employing search terms like “Jewish, New York, synagogue, kill, shoot and die,” said Mr. Silber, a former director of intelligence analysis with the New York City Police Department. The initiative was created after the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue attack in Pittsburgh, he said in an interview on Tuesday.
The filters search mainstream social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, as well as other chat forums including 4Chan, 8chan, Gab.com and Telegraph, he said.
The tweets on Friday morning, from an account linked to Mr. Brown, stood out from the online antisemitic chatter his analysts comb through daily because “they were talking about action” and included a time and day, Mr. Silber said.
Initially, the tweets indicated that perhaps the threat might occur on Long Island, so the consultants immediately alerted law enforcement authorities there. By early afternoon, the security team found additional online profiles seemingly linked to Mr. Brown that mentioned other threats, Mr. Silber said.
And by 2 p.m., it became apparent that the threat could be in New York City, at which point Mr. Silber’s team alerted city police officials.
“We basically told them that, ‘We know you get a lot of incoming, but you should pay attention to this,’” he said.
The police claimed it was all their doing but ok. I think these folks are less interested in credit than in saving lives.
The threat of antisemitism is very real. So, I’m sure you’ll be thrilled to hear that Donald Trump apparently welcomed Kanye West and white supremacist, holocaust denier Nick Fuentes down to Mar-a-Lago this week.
Fuentes is the leader of the so-called Groyper Army and holds an annual white nationalist conference as counter-programming to CPAC. Groypers are a loose network of alt-right figures who are vocal supporters of white nationalist ideals, often trolling mainstream conservative events to try and move conservativism more toward white nationalism.
Fuentes, who has also denied the Holocaust, supports “the closure of the U.S. borders to immigrants while opposing “liberal” values such as feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. Fuentes views these societal changes as the “bastardized Jewish subversion of the American creed,” according to the ADL.
While it remains unclear what Fuentes did at Mar-a-Lago or if Donald Trump and his staff even knew he was there, West claimed that he met with the former president in a tweet:
Reactions to the news that West and Fuentes, who have been seen meeting in recent days, reportedly traveled to Mar-a-Lago ranged from shock to condemnation.
“It’s hard to be shocked by anything anymore, but Charlottesville marcher and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes being hosted at the former president’s resort still feels uniquely bad,” wrote the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer in response.
No word from Mar-a-Lago denying that they met with Trump or denouncing him if they did. Gotta keep the cult together and these guys are founding members.