Jew Murdered in Miami Beach not a Hate Crime?

On the anniversary of my dear Mother’s passing, I beg you to pray deeply for the safety of the Jewish People and the State of Israel that she adored and to dedicate an hour of precious time to reading the world’s best seller, our Holy Bible, written by the world’s most popular Author.

Last week, I heatedly debated a successful Jewish entrepreneur in Sarasota, Florida, and community leader, whose solution to the rabid global anti-Semitism and relentless Hamas missile attacks against Israel, was to sell “the strip” of Israel to the Arabs and move the Jews to the United States, where they will be safe…. These proved to be very ominous words ….

Our safety as Jews in America is symbolized by our latest tragedy. A 60-year-old Orthodox Rabbi on vacation from New York, on a picturesque placid North Miami Beach street, at 9:00 AM, in bright daylight, on his way to Shul in his daughter’s Jewish community, a neighborhood where there are nearly a dozen synagogues, was murdered by two young men, one clad in yellow and one in orange, one on foot and one on a bicycle, who simply left the surreal scene, and remain at large.

Our safety can be summarized by the assurances from law enforcement in the area that there is no indication of a hate crime when a bearded Orthodox grandfather, looking distinctively Jewish and distinguishly dressed for Shabbat, walking ahead of his grandchildren on a street in a Jewish neighborhood, is repeatedly shot by two young Black men, minus an altercation, minus any money on the Jew, without any clues as to the murderers’ identities, and minus an encompassing investigation.

Without an investigation, the determination had already been made, hours after the crime scene was viewed, that the youths’ heinous acts were not designed to murder a Jew on a Jewish street in a Jewish community on the Jewish Sabbath as the Jew walked to a nearby Jewish house of worship. After all, who does not carry loaded guns on sunny Saturday mornings that might just accidentally shoot down a Jew multiple times, without malice, of course?

Our safety can be shown by the swastikas and word “Hamas” painted hugely upon a nearby Shul days before the Rabbi’s murder and by the Jewish cars that were covered on a recent Jewish Sabbath with eggs and cream cheese in the same Jewish neighborhood with the words “Hamas” and “Jew” written on their windows.

In answer to the safety of American Jews and Jews worldwide, somehow I cannot buy the offer that selling that little strip of land coincidentally called the Holy Land in the Holy Bible will suffice the insatiable lust for hate against a tiny strip of People coincidentally called “the apple of His eye.” Whether in the Big Apple or the pineapple state or the State of Israel, crimes against Jews are real in real-time.