The 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida by jewish former student Nikolas Cruz (1) has naturally been the subject of much comment in the media.
One of the consistent themes to be claimed is that Cruz was a ‘White Nationalist’ – despite openly admitting to being jewish – based upon a troll operation by people associated with then Alt-Right. (2)
This combined with the high number of jewish students enrolled at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School obviously lent itself to claims that Cruz was ‘anti-Semitic’. This is however – like claims that Cruz was a ‘White Nationalist’ – utterly without foundation.
To illustrate this; I need but quote Rosa Doherty’s article in the UK’s premier jewish periodical ‘The Jewish Chronicle’. She writes that:
‘Was last week’s murder of 17 high school students and teachers in Parkland, Florida, motivated by antisemitism?
Partly yes, and partly no.
Since the attack, it has emerged that the murderer, Nikolas Cruz, made racist and antisemitic comments on social media, especially a private Instagram group of which he was a member.
“I hate Jews, n****rs, immigrants,” he posted at one point.
As reported by CNN, which obtained transcripts of the chat group, Mr Cruz posted that he hated black people simply because they were black, but hated Jews because they wanted to destroy the world.
Case closed, then? These are classic themes of white supremacist antisemitism, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion through the Alt-Right’s imprecations against Jews who control the media.’ (3)
Notice that Doherty doesn’t actually explain how Cruz saying ‘I hate jews’ is evidence that he is anti-Semitic – which it is isn’t because we are not clear as the context of that statement or what he meant by jew (i.e. ethnic group, religion and/or racial group) and thus we don’t know whether he hated Judaism or jews as an ethno-racial group – but rather takes it as preordained fact nor does she acknowledge that Cruz appears to have said nasty things about the jews because he hated his mother and she was jewish so he therefore transferred this hatred to her (as well as his own) people.
She also doesn’t talk about the other alleged ‘anti-Semitic’ messages that Cruz wrote in said discussion group. Instead she simply cites Paul Murphy’s article published by CNN that allegedly ‘has the details’.
However when you bother to click on the link she provides – and it is clear that she must clearly not have wanted readers to do so but rather just take her word for it – it merely repeats the statement about Cruz allegedly saying ‘I hate jews’ without making any mention of any other ‘anti-Semitic’ messages.
To quote Murphy:
‘The hatred he and others in the group espoused met little resistance from its active members. In one part of the group chat, Cruz wrote that he hated, "jews, ni**ers, immigrants."
He talked about killing Mexicans, keeping black people in chains and cutting their necks.
There are hundreds of racist messages, racist memes and racist Instagram videos posted in the group.’ (4)
So all Murphy is saying is that Cruz wrote ‘I hate jews’ once and this therefore means – according to both Doherty and Murphy – that Cruz – who remember was himself jewish – was an ‘anti-Semite’.
When the simple reality is that we don’t know that and nor is the statement ‘I hate jews’ necessarily ‘anti-Semitic’ unless we can see the context in which Cruz wrote those words (i.e. his difficult relationship with and hatred for his jewish mother). At most even if he meant them as Doherty and Murphy mean; he wasn’t an ‘anti-Semite’ but rather a self-hating jew in the vein of Otto Weininger.
Further evidence that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had absolutely nothing to do with Cruz’s alleged ‘anti-Semitism’ can be easily adduced by pointing out that he killed more non-jewish than jewish students (i.e., he wasn’t targeting jewish students), but also walked calmly past the local Lubavitch Chabad centre (5) and didn’t bother to attack that instead of - or in addition to - the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
So no Nikolas Cruz wasn’t an ‘anti-Semite’ and nor was the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School motivated by ‘anti-Semitism’.
References
(1) On his jewishness see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/is-nikolas-cruz-jewish
(2) https://www.richardsilverstein.com/2018/02/17/adl-duped-white-supremacists-plays-key-role-spreading-hoax-parkland-shooter/
(3) https://www.thejc.com/news/us-news/florida-school-gunman-nikolas-cruz-was-clearly-antisemitic-but-not-only-antisemitic-1.459136 ; for a similar example see https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/call-the-douglas-high-shooting-by-its-name-an-anti-semitic-attack-1.5842172
(4) https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/16/us/exclusive-school-shooter-instagram-group/index.html
(5) https://www.timesofisrael.com/chabad-footage-shows-florida-shooter-casually-walking-after-attack/