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Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.
After two years of Hamas supporters assaulting NYPD officers and Jewish community members, besieging synagogues, blocking streets, vandalizing buildings and making death threats, New York Attorney General Letitia James finally took action. Against Jews.
In a press release, AG James, who had previously worked to shut down the NRA because she disagreed with its politics, announced that she had closed down Betar, a pro-Israel group , for appearing at synagogues to defend them from Muslim mobs, for claiming that “that all devout Muslims ‘hate America’, and for making derogatory remarks about Islam and Gaza.
Shortly after nearly all New York politicians condemned Hamas supporters showing up outside a Jewish school to chant, “we support Hamas”, a fairly straightforward case of bias intimidation, Attorney General James instead decided to announce action against a Jewish protest group rather than against the Islamic and Antifa groups whom it had been defending against.
Many of the ‘charges’ laid out by AG James are forms of speech that may be derogatory or abrasive towards Islam, Muslims or Islamic terrorists, but are not in any way illegal.
For example, the filing by AG James complains that “Betar members repeatedly referred to keffiyehs” (the pro-terrorist scarves worn by some Muslims and radical leftist supporters of terrorism) “as ‘rape rags’ in public and private”, that some member of the group stated “that all devout Muslims ‘hate America'” and that the group tweeted that it “hate(s) Gazans”.
Under the First Amendment, Betar members are entitled to say these things whether or not anyone finds them deplorable. AG James does not allege that Betar members stood outside a mosque and shouted these things. Indeed her filing reveals that some of these comments came from private ‘members only’ chats on Whatsapp that were spied on by Islamists and Antifa.
Attorney General Letita James is criminalizing private speech in a private forum. That reflects the weakness of her case against Betar which is long on rhetoric and short on actual crimes.
The preponderance of the filing by the attorney general’s office and its ‘hate crimes’ division is dedicated to the rhetoric of Betar or members of the group. It’s only able to document three types of illegal activities, these are stealing and burning ‘Palestinian’ flags, pushing beepers at terrorist supporters, and fighting back against pro-Hamas mobs attacking synagogues and Jewish neighborhoods. James does not cite any Betar members arrested for these alleged acts.
While stealing and destroying flags, no matter how hateful, is illegal, anti-Israel rioters and terrorist supporters have routinely stolen and destroyed Israeli flags without any sanctions being imposed against the larger group. For example, James Carlson, a lawyer for some of those participating in the pro-terrorist encampment at Columbia, was charged with grabbing an Israeli flag from a student and setting it on fire, but the movement and organization were not charged.
Tarek Bazrouk, a Muslim activist in the vicinity of the Columbia pro-terrorist protests, was charged with federal hate crimes after he assaulted several Jewish people, and punched a man in the stomach during an incident where he stole an Israeli flag. He was defended by many of the groups involved in the riots including Students for Justice in Palestine, the Palestinian Youth Movement, Within Our Lifetime, and Columbia University Apartheid.
Attorney General Letita James has taken no action against any of them.
In D.C., a Jewish woman wearing an Israeli flag like a cape was choked by a Muslim protester during a Code Pink rally. Code Pink itself, despite a long history of illegal activities, was not sanctioned. Unless there’s an actual assault, such as in the above cases, the perpetrators are rarely charged for seizing and burning American or Israeli flags at their hate rallies.
People on the street pushing objects at those who don’t want them is a New York City tradition. To the extent that they physically made contact with anyone by pushing beepers into their hands or pockets, this may potentially be assault, but this takes place within the context of a city where a Jewish man was kicked, punched, and beaten with a metal object while merely walking in the vicinity of an anti-Israel rally and most of the Muslim perpetrators walked away with probation.
No one was injured by the beepers.
Finally, the New York Attorney General’s office documents claims that Betar “incited” and “promoted” violence at what it misleadingly describes as “pro-Palestinian protests”. What James leaves out is that many of these “protests” invariably involved attacks on Jewish neighborhoods and synagogues. One of the assaults that James accuses a nameless Betar member of actually occurred outside a prominent Brooklyn synagogue besieged by a pro-Hamas mob.
Nowhere in the document does James claim that Betar came to a mosque or a Muslim area. Instead, she does the equivalent of accusing members of a black church of fighting back against a Klan rally outside their doors. Such charges would never be brought except in this case.
Even there Attorney General James focuses on Betar’s social media rhetoric because she lacks incidents of serious acts of violence. So she has to resort to documenting a “shoving” incident and forcing “a beeper into the academic’ s front pocket against his will.” She dubiously claims that at one event where Pal-Awda called to “flood Borough Park”, an echo of the Hamas name for Oct 7, “Betar members attacked protesters and at least one activist was stabbed.”
No such stabbing is documented in a single news story about the pro-terrorist riot. The wording from a legal document filed by the state’s top prosecutor is even stranger in that it claims that “at least one activist was stabbed.” Doesn’t the AG’s office know how many stabbings took place?
Had a pro-Israel activist stabbed a Hamas supporter, that would have been a major news story. And certainly the attorney general’s office would be able to cite specifics, not “at least one”.
There were certainly scuffles involving Betar, yet the document fails to list a single arrest, a single criminal charge and any actual evidence or specifics about prosecutions.
Attorney General Letita James relies heavily on hollow social media rhetoric from Betar because it’s not grounded in anything. For example, “Betar publicly claimed to have used facial recognition software to identify protesters and to have placed their names on lists for deportation in retaliation for their political speech. But Betar informed OAG not only that it had never used any facial recognition software but that it had also never made such lists.”
Not only is there nothing illegal about identifying terrorist supporters and passing their names on to federal law enforcement (just the opposite, even if James opposes it for political reasons) but it never even happened. Most of Betar’s rhetoric is similarly social media online noise, not acts.
Many pro-Israel activists and groups in the New York area deplore Betar’s tactics, but it doesn’t change the fact that the illegal and unconstitutional effort by Attorney General Letita James to shut the group down is a violation of the First Amendment and creates troubling precedents by the Mamdani ally. Betar is a blueprint by Mamdani-allied radicals like James to criminalize any kind of Jewish activism and criticism of Islamic terrorism and violence by Mamdani’s allies.
Betar was ‘low hanging fruit’, but if it can be shut down for a list of charges that includes assembling lists of terrorist radicals and criticising Islam, then anyone can be shut down.
And that is the point.
Attorney General Letita James has a particularly egregious history of political prosecutions that include targeting the NRA, VDARE, an anti-immigration group allegedly targeted for ‘self-dealing’ in a case involving a castle in West Virginia, but in reality targeted for its political speech, as the fact that the prosecution was led by the ‘Civil Rights Unit’ revealed, and now Betar, on the shoddiest of legal grounds and for the most transparently obvious political motives.
James, who is facing several federal investigations, has campaigned on shutting down political opponents like the NRA and now the Jewish community, as part of her plans to run for governor. Her efforts to criminalize any opposition to Islamic violence and terror are a violation of the First Amendment. Only federal intervention can restore civil rights for Jews and everyone else in New York.
Investigate and lock her up before it is too late. Elections are coming 🙂
Send generous “Trump Tariff Bux” stimulus checks to the voters before the election in hopes of deterring low income voters from supporting Democrats and encouraging them to vote for Republicans. Many millions of senior citizen voters are just barely getting by financially. Money in their pockets makes a bigger emotional impact than lower prices for goods and services.
This may be the last chance.
Mossad hollow-point into the back of her empty head would put a stop to her Islamo-Nazi persecution on New York Jews.
James as governor? This brings Isaiah 3:4 KJB, to mind “And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.” I don’t know NYC, but I can’t see how it could ever being a safe place for Jews.
AG James should be removed from the job and retired to a Home of the Unstable nutcases and despots and life time stay just think a shelter for life this old bat a Padded Cell and a straight jacket she is losing her Marbles for sure
Face it, she’s a witch.
Although I wonder….just how many brooms would it take to get her aloft?
Maybe a forklift?
She can take Maduro’s happy spot that he mistakenly declined.
How I detest and distrust this self-serving partisan political hack
Last year, then-cabdidate Mamdani held a rally in support if Tich against the DOJ legal action against her. Now, Islamo-Socialist Mandani ordered her to go after anti Jihadofascist entities. Of course pro islamist genocides SJP/MAS/WOL are emboldened
She needs to be IDF’d
I’d stand in for them if they were too busy…
Letita James, the fat pig is just another islamic terrorist agent.
Shakespeare said it best: ‘Tis a pity she’s a ….. ” and getting away with it, I might add.
Why are we allowing this kind of flagrant disregard for our Constitution? Daily lawlessness is spreading and it seems the DOJ is functionally useless.
From attacks on Federal ICE agents enforcing our federal immigration laws by leftist, insurrectionist groups, to sitting state governors flagrant rebellion of those same laws, along with federal judges issuing dictates outside of their legal purview all we hear is the verbal slapping of wrists.
There is nothing organized, strategic, and comprehensive being done by the administration to stop it. In 2025 it started with the implosion of siphoned monies to NGO’s outed by DOGE outraging those for whom the spending of federal tax monies has been their primary funding source.
The same playbook used by Antifa, BLM and other insurrectionist groups are running the show. Trump is becoming a paper tiger in addressing these internal issues because talk without action becomes the focus and as it spirals out of control becoming more violent (which is exactly what the leftists want), people who voted for Trump are becoming incensed at this continuing without legal enforcement required.
The administration seems to lack understanding of these guerrilla warfare tactics we are witnessing and these DO NOT come under constitutional protections when they involve any forms of violent protest that contravene the law.
Trump’s “Make America Great Again” needs to focus on the internal chaos here and get it stopped–hard stopped NOW!.
Rather than courting Islamists like Qatar and Saudi Arabia under his preferred euphemism of “business” he should be reading a copy of the Quran and the playbook of the left called, Rules for Radicals.
He has recently feted Mamdani at the White House and nothing was to keep him from being sworn into office using a Quran and not a Bible. A seeming nod to tolerance? NO, using the Quran denies his allegience to our Constitution and state and federal laws using their tactic of duplicity.
Now, AG Alicia James is emboldened. In NYC, where she has repeatedly violated the scope of her authority, Jews are already in the beginning of being subjugated.
Islamists know exactly what they are doing. Mamdani is marginalizing Jews because he can. What federal law? He is following the Quran and implementing those laws against the Jews as but a part of their ultimate annihilation of ALL Jews. Ignorance is not bliss, it’s a prelude to death!!
You’ve got a real “hard on” in your Trump antipathy and hyperbole. Your idiotic TDS is obviously getting worse. Do you really think MommyDummy can actually go all Nazi on the NYC Jews without repercussion from the law? Are you delusional?
He would actually have to run for president and win.
Seek help. You need a psychiatrist.
Read today’s ( 1-21-26) article in Frontpage by Anni Cyrus then think about your endless insults born of your blind loyalty and ignorance.
Sadly, the truth sometimes hurts so read her article and take the medicine!
Oooo, take the medicine!!!!!
Thanks Gabby, I’ll pass. You are obviously a longwinded angry fraud. Sometimes you appear to be so overly pleased with yourself you never stop to think that there may be some folks who disagree with your endless B.S.
The only question you never seem to answer is who’s going to take care of fixing that self important pile of your B.S. that you expect Trump to fix.
Thank God he is not listening to you and that you are not the Preezy.. He got his Greenland framework done in Davos. I don’t think you were there lecturing him, were you.
Have fun being mad at Trump.
Spot on. We’ve been waiting a very long time for some actual arrests. Me thinks DeepState2.0 is actually running the show.
My apology to you Daniel. In my reply to Intrepid below I erroneously referenced it as an article by Anni Cyrus but you are the author.
Great article incisive and informative.
Thank you
Gabrielle
Agreed. And once the cheating Dems have cheated their way back to power they’ll go after Trump and his people again. I don’t understand why the Republicans are not meeting the Dems utter ruthlessness with equal fire.
But mainly I’m praying that if it’s the last thing Trump does, to please save the Iranians from these butchers once and for all. And not stop until the job is complete.
What is so frustrating about James is that she told everyone who she was when she ran for AG and they voted for her anyway. You would think that with all the intelligent decent people in New York State they could come up with someone better than this bigot.
Of all the articles I’ve read this is one of them. Betar USA is not some innocent advocacy group. They are a Revisionist Zionist group founded in 1929, went defunct and then was reactivated to support the IDF war against Gaza. They describe themselves as vandals (a crime), engage in doxxing (a crime) and harass people on the streets.
Handing out pagers is an explicate death threat and they’ve targeted Jewish people who they think aren’t onboard with their violent extremism. They are not some group of innocent, little lambs merely engaging in protected speech.
As for the case of Joseph Borgen he was walking to a pro-Israel gathering when he was attacked. That’s not excusing anyone who attacked him of course. Most of the crowd wasn’t charged because they didn’t participate in the attack against him. Five people were convicted with some getting sentences of seven years. So, the matter was handled.
They sound absolutely fine to me.
In fact, Jewish communities across the west could do with more of them.
Why should we always have to be the ones appeasing, assimilating, cowering in corners, while the creatures who would slaughter us in the streets and laugh about it get to run around attacking us, forming mobs outside our synagogues, intimidating our kids, and using lawfare to prevent us from defending ourselves?
I guess you’re a mandami voter.
Well, the censors are on your side. I did reply to you but it got purged. I’m sure this comment will get purged because FPM doesn’t respect its readers.
Wars are barbaric, of course. Here is an example: As it moves along, the rampaging Russian army in the Ukraine is followed by mobile cremation vehicles. Dead soldiers’ bodies are upsetting and need to be out of sight as quickly as possible. Graves are reminders that can make personal and political statements, while ashes from these trucks make good fertilizer.
Israel’s public relations during the war in Gaza have been awful compared to the carefully crafted demonstrations and sloganeering that become permissibe with America’s adherence to freedom of speech that allows Jews to be demonized. Jews are not stereotypes; they are not charicatures. But we would never know it.
I take this opportunity to present two YouTube videos from Israel that depict how Jews mourn their dead and how they celebrate life. The first is a memorial to Tifferet Lapidot, an influencer who was killed on October 7th 2023 held on the field on which she was murdered. Those remembering her sing a poem from the 1700s in praise of the Sabbath. The second is the celebration of the bar mitzvah of Yahel and his family. Ignore the Hebrew and drink in the visuals. These are all individuals connecting with others in an intense manner. There is much to be learned by just watching.
Deport her to Dhimmi Britain. She will be right at home.
Thanks a lot!!!
Don’t you think we’ve got enough like her here already?
Send it to france!
Obviously Muslim loving, Jew Hating, America Hating Leticia James hasn’t learned from her losing attempt to jail Trump several years ago.
In Nazi Germany Jews were blamed for their own harassment. James has picked up this technique from her new boss Zorhan Mummydummy, or perhaps it just comes naturally.
NYC Jews should figure out a foolproof way to neutralize this fat ugly b**ch.
Can someone please explain to me why this alleged criminal is still walking around free as a bird? Once Trump is out of office they will hound him again and yet he does nothing but keep repeating that all those who tried to put him away will get their comeuppance. But crickets for every one of them.