White Supremacist and Radical Islamist Terror Against American Jews and Israelis

Founded in 2007, the Community Security Service (CSS) is a low-profile, nonprofit organization based in New York City and concerned with protection of American Jewish institutions and public activities. CSS has trained thousands of volunteers in professional security methods, provides physical security where needed, and acts otherwise to improve public awareness of security issues.

CSS has now prepared an 80-page report titled Terrorist Incidents and Attacks Against Jews and Israelis in the United States, 1969-2016. The study was authored by Yehudit Barsky, a leading counter-terrorism expert, and includes a foreword by Mitchell D. Silber, director of terrorism investigations in the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division from 2005 to 2012.

This thorough and scrupulous documentation is alarming without being alarmist. America cannot be described as threatened today by a significant antisemitic tendency. Yet across almost fifty years of analysis, CSS enumerates 104 "most serious incidents" that demonstrate the persistence of prejudice expressed in violence.

A chronicle of vicious plots, through the decades, is more disturbing when compiled in a single document, and leaves the impression that anti-Jewish fanaticism has been overlooked consistently, with assault upon assault covered briefly by media, and then forgotten. The report points out that FBI hate-crime statistics show Jews are "the most targeted religious group" in America.

The CSS survey concludes that the ideologies of white supremacy and radical Islam are the "central influencing factor" in anti-Jewish lawlessness. Silber writes that the perpetrators "include white extremists, Neo-Nazis, Palestinian terrorist groups, Al Qaeda and its varied offshoots and progeny, Iranian supported agents, as well as lone actors." Adherents to these doctrines and groups may differ on details, but they agree in focusing their venom on Jews.