Is the possibility really that far-fetched?
BuzzFeed has been panned by the American right for reporting that an Indiana man who vandalized a synagogue with swastikas was “radicalized” by none other than conservative Jew Ben Shapiro. The news outlet that published the unprovable Trump ‘pee tape’ dossier, and had Special Counsel Robert Mueller step in to correct the record on its false “bombshell” reporting is at it again. This time, BuzzFeed suggested that a man recently sentenced to three years in prison for vandalizing a synagogue in Carmel, Indiana was radicalized by none other than Ben Shapiro.
The man and his wife daubed Nazi symbols on the synagogue last year, targeting the house of worship because it was “full of ethnic Jews,” according to a Justice Department statement. The pair also attempted to create homemade explosive devices to set the building on fire, but were “spooked” by CCTV cameras.
The Justice Department acknowledged that the man, 21-year-old Nolan Brewer, “openly identified with Nazism and white supremacy,” but BuzzFeed went a little further. According to the outlet, Brewer’s teenage wife would share articles from right-wing news site Breitbart and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro with her husband, as well as more hardcore material from Stormfront, a well-known white supremacist forum. The American right were in hysterics. A prolific conservative pundit and debater, Ben Shapiro is an orthodox Jew, and regularly wears a Kippah in speeches and public appearances. Shapiro is an outspoken defender of Israel, and an extremely unlikely suspect for encouraging violence against Jews.
Extremely unlikely? That is, at the very least, a significant overstatement given the fact that the most virulent “anti-semite” of the last twenty years is “an Israeli-American” convicted of thousands of fake hate crimes.
JERUSALEM — An Israeli-American man was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Israel on Thursday for making about 2,000 hoax bomb threats that forced evacuations of Jewish community centers across the U.S. and planes to make emergency landings. The threats were made by phone and email in 2016 and 2017, and raised concern at the time in the United States that anti-Semitism was on the rise.
Remember, you can’t spell “neocon” without C O N.