David Anderson and Francine Graham, members of the Black Hebrew Israelite church, a black nationalist hate group that hates white people in general and Jews specifically, were killed in a shootout in a Kosher market after murdering several people in Jersey City.
But the potential attack could have been much worse.
When Detective Joseph Seals stumbled on their van and was shot and killed, the black nationalist duo apparently panicked, and abandoned their earlier plan to bomb a Jewish community center.
The U.S. attorney in New Jersey and the head of the local FBI said Monday that the bomb found in the van of alleged domestic terrorists Francine Graham and David Anderson could have killed or maimed people up to five football fields away.
They also said there was enough material in the van to make a second bomb.
Authorities could not detail what that plan would have been, other than to say that Graham and Anderson had done research on a Jewish community center in Bayonne. They did confirm earlier preliminary suspicions that the shootout was a bias crime against Jews and against the law enforcement community. The shooters were found dead when the gunfire ended.
Authorities do not believe a Yeshiva next door to the kosher supermarket was targeted, but said they had cased the grocery store multiple times, including the morning of the attack. Carpenito also confirmed a News 4 report that several days before the shooting, a Jewish man driving near Newark Airport had been shot at; ballistics show two of the shots that hit the man’s car came from one of Anderson and Graham’s guns. The livery driver who died the weekend before the attack was shot with the same weapon that fired on the vehicle near the airport, authorities said.
I’ve noted before that this BHI attack and the second BHI attack in Monsey were enabled by Democrats, including Senator Corey Booker and Rep. Karen Bass.
Booker had worked to nix the FBI’s monitoring of black nationalist terror.
Earlier this summer, Booker had grinned at a Senate grilling of FBI Director Christopher Wray. “So, you no longer use the term Black Identity Extremism,” he had gloated. “That’s great news.”
“So nobody is being investigated or surveilled under black identity extremism?” he demanded.
After the hearing, Booker issued a press release urging “Director Wray to issue updated guidance notifying law enforcement agencies about the elimination of this misleading designation.”
At the Senate hearing, Booker followed the same talking points as other defenders of black nationalism did, objecting to Director Wray’s suggestion that racist violence was coming from both sides of the spectrum. “That language you said, both ends of the spectrum, the murders at synagogues, the murders we’ve seen motivated,” he rambled. “You said both ends of the spectrum, as if there actually is a movement of black identity extremism: it’s almost creating this reality.”
The reality is real.
Meanwhile Democrats have come forward to defend Joan Terrell Paige, a Jersey City Board of Education member, who had justified the murder of Jews in the attack. They include a chapter of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, which has been addressed by most of the 2020 Dems.
Paige was defended by the Hudson County Democratic Black Caucus and John Flora, a Democrat running for Congress.
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