They’ve caught the bomb threat hoaxer! (and: can you be a Jewish anti-semite?)

Last updated on: March 23, 2017 at 10:45 am by Jane the Actuary

They’ve caught the bomb threat hoaxer! (and: can you be a Jewish anti-semite?) 2017-03-23T10:45:58-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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They’ve caught the individual believed to be responsible for hoax bomb threats on JCCs, not just in the U.S., but in Australia and New Zealand as well.

In Israel.

He’s a teenager.

And Jewish.

We don’t know much more, except that this was a multi-nation effort, and that he used very sophisticated technology to disguise the origin of the calls, and the agencies that found him used equally sophisticated technology to find him. Here’s a link to the CNN article, which only appeared well after bloggers such as Instapundit and Legal Insurrection had reported this based on Israeli press.

What does this mean?

Trump hinted that these threats could be a “false flag” operation. He can’t possibly be right, can he? If not, what in the heck is going on?

And, incidentally, it seems like something of a relevant fact, that could have been reported on at the time, that these calls were being made to other countries besides the U.S., so much less likely to be a Trump-inspired racist.

And here’s what CNN reports:

“While the details of this crime remain unclear, the impact of this individual’s actions is crystal clear: These were acts of anti-Semitism,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “These threats targeted Jewish institutions, were calculated to sow fear and anxiety and put the entire Jewish community on high alert.”

“We’re very relieved that the person was caught,” Rick Zakalik, the executive director of the JCC of Greater Buffalo, told CNN. “It’s obviously a very disturbed young man, and I pity his parents.”

Is he “disturbed”? Did he have an agenda? Was it an anti-Jewish agenda? Can these actions be classified as “anti-Semitic” if the intention was not to harm Jews as an ethnic/religious group?

This makes no sense – and, yet, on the other hand, it makes perfect sense for it not to have been the sort of Trump-supporting racist we’d all been led to expect it to be.

Image: a JCC. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AOsher_marin_jcc.JPG; By Kiddo27 (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

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