A New York Times Hate Crime

The New York Times headline reads: “A Girl’s Killing Shakes Germany’s Migration Debate”. That debate, however, is not what is shaking Jewish lives the world over.

Rather it is the fact that Susanna Maria Feldman, a 14 year old girl from Mainz near Frankfurt, found raped and murdered in woods near Wiesbaden, Germany, was a crime victim — that first of all — but also that she is Jewish, met her grisly end in the nation responsible for initiating and administering the slaughter of six million Jewish men, women and children and that her killer is an Arab.

The Arab, Ali Bashar, who was able to escape Germany with seven members of his family through the services of the Iraqi Berlin embassy, is in custody in Iraq, picked up by Kurdish security police, to whom, under interrogation, he confessed his crime. He now faces extradition back to Germany. So far he has not admitted to knowledge that Susanne was Jewish, despite three years of living as a sanctioned resident of Germany.

It is hard to believe that he didn’t know that his victim was Jewish, a claim rendered even more implausible by a world in which Middle Eastern enmity and crimes against Jews — particularly in Germany–are at fever pitch.

Legally-speaking, to admit to such knowledge would escalate the gravity and consequences of Bashar’s crime, so his pleading ignorance is understandable. But for the German authorities and even the Central Council of Jews in Germany to promote this killer’s word prema facie and perpetuate this obvious lie through the media is as reprehensible as to believe a Missisippi Ku Klux Klanner’s claim that he did not know the identity of his Black victim.

Worst still, the New York Times article makes no mention of Susanne’s ethnicity at all. She is just some “girl”. For the Time’s editors her murder serves only to highlight issues of Arab immigration versus German politics. Even in death this poor child occupies the lowest rung of journalistic concern simply by virtue of being Jewish.

For the New York Times the fact of antisemitism has never been of great interest, not even during the Holocaust, when scant reference was made to the Nazi persecution such stories typically ran in the paper’s back pages.

For years, the New York Times has devolved into the principle mainstream champion of anti-Israel journalism, hiding behind a facade of “impartiality”, but in the reporting about Susanne the Gray Lady has stooped to this: the rape and murder of a Jewish child by an Arab in Germany does not even warrant mention of her Jewishness. That is a New York Times antisemitic journalistic hate crime, a new low.

Understandably, the ever timid Central Council of German Jews has upheld Germany’s request not to assign an antisemitic motive to Suzanne’s slaying, as if decades of murderous Arab hostility to Jews, in the Middle East and throughout the West, were not proof enough. To their eternal shame, in order to avoid friction, rather than to march in outrage they too are prepared to let Susanna’s murder fall under the more anonymous category of Homicide.

Once upon a time it was widely conjectured that Arab enmity to Jews was a product of the “Arab-Israeli conflict”. Later, among the Left in particular, homicidal Arab hatred of Jews was ascribed to anti-Zionism itself, the Arab’s virulent loathing for the Jewish belief that after two thousand years of persecution and then the Holocaust, we must have a state of our own, an army of our own, and in our traditional homeland, Israel.

Today, it is now widely seen and felt but rarely ever spoken of openly that Arab hatred towards Jews is rooted in nothing but itself, an epidemic of deeply held irrational prejudice whose origins may once have sprang from Islam, Arab Nationalism, War, Terrorism, Communism, The New Left, but that now derives only from its own nihilistic core, and growing into a monstrous and murderous cultic belief that anyone of Arab origin has the perfect right to kill a Jew. In some quarters of Islam it is an exalted act.

Is it hate-speech to identify the delusions that support this insane creed, including a willingness to believe that Bashar had no idea of Susanne’s Jewishness?

If so, than it is hate-speech to term the Hutu hatred and slaughter of Tutsi a genocide or to say that the Turkish murder of one million Armenians was ethnic cleansing. To believe that Susanne Feldman was killed without knowledge of her ethinicity is to trust the claim made by a Ku Klux Klansman in Mississippi that he did not kill a Black child for reasons of racial prejudice.

Susanne Maria Feldnam’s murder is a hate crime and nothing else. And in its own lowdown way, so is the reporting of her murder by the New York Times.