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While there are ample statements condemning the attacks, there is not a great willingness to examine how a global milieu of rising antisemitism often leads perpetrators to target Jewish communities, even if their main goal isn’t an attack on Jews.Prefacing this discussion by noting that a day after the incident we don’t know the full details of the perpetrator or how it unfolded, we can conclude that the person targeted a synagogue. Officials have also indicated that the hostage taker was apparently motivated by a demand to have Aafia Siddiqui released from prison....The desire to disconnect the attack from the synagogue and see it as solely part of the wider cause of Siddiqui and the popularity she enjoys among Islamist extremists, as well as some human-rights groups, is part of a wider pattern where attacks on Jewish communities are often portrayed as random.This was the case in the attack on the Hypercacher kosher market in Paris in 2015. That attack was carried out by ISIS supporter Amedy Coulibaly. US president Barack Obama said the attack was related to “a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”Except there was nothing random about it. It’s not reasonable to conclude that in a Paris with thousands of supermarkets and delis a perpetrator just happens to attack a kosher supermarket belonging to a small minority group....In the UK, on London’s Oxford Street, a gang of men attacked Jews celebrating Hanukkah last December. Two years ago, a suspect in a 1982 attack on a Jewish restaurant in Paris was detained in Norway. More recently, there was the case of the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008, when the Mariman House, a Chabad House, was attacked, together with many sites targeted by a Pakistan-based terrorist network.In another vile attack, an Islamist terrorist in 2012 targeted a Jewish school in Toulouse, France. He did so after killing French soldiers in the Pyrenees. Once again, the pattern of attacking one landmark and then killing Jews was part of the manifesto....Jews are attacked as a “normal” target for every group that has grievances, usually groups inspired by Islamist extremism, and official accounts tend to see the attacks as random, as opposed to part of systematic anti-Jewish hate crimes. This is because a more convenient explanation is to see the perpetrators as randomly choosing a Jewish target than asking deeper questions about how those targets enter their minds in the first place.
