Buffalo shooting proves a challenge for Jewish leadership

DAN COLEMAN: Jews and Blacks have the same enemy peddling the Great Replacement Theory but they can't always hear each other

“THEY CAN BE DEALT WITH IN TIME.”

Thus, the manifesto of Payton Gendron, the man charged with killing ten people and wounding three more last week in Buffalo, NY, explained his targeting African-Americans rather than Jews.

Gendron was operating from a belief in the Great Replacement Theory, now central to extremist thinking worldwide. As Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes about race in America, told Slate, the theory holds that “there’s a conflict between the races, and the white race is under threat. The Jews are the ones coordinating this threat.”

This was the view of Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter, who titled his 74-page manifesto “The Great Replacement”. Tarrant’s livestream of the shootings can still be found on the web.

The Buffalo shooter is not the first to have drawn deadly inspiration from the Australian-born gunman.

Patrick Wood Crusius, who killed dozens of Latinos at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019 expressed his admiration of Tarrant in a manifesto of his own.

Blacks, Muslims, Latinos… in a perverse twist on the old advertising slogan, “‘you don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye bread”, in the 21^st century, you don’t have to be Jewish to be a victim of antisemitically-informed violence.

But you can be.

The open letter written by the shooter at California’s Poway Synagogue cited Tarrant and expressed the view that Jews “meticulously planned genocide of the European race”.