The Trump DOJ signals that the blind eye Democratic prosecutors turned to pro-Hamas Jew hatred and the violence it catalyzes has been pried open.
A man who repeatedly physically assaulted Jewish people at pro-Hamas rallies in New York City following the October 7 atrocities has been indicted by the Trump Justice Department for civil rights offenses.
Tarek Bazrouk was charged with three counts of “hate crime acts,” under Section 249 of the federal penal code, which makes it a felony punishable by up to ten years (for each individual offense) to willfully cause or attempt to cause bodily injury to “any person” because of that person’s “actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin.”
The charges were jointly announced on Wednesday by Jay Clayton, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) in Manhattan (who is technically in an “interim” capacity while awaiting Senate confirmation) and Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. In another welcome sign, the case has been jointly investigated by the FBI and the NYPD.
Clayton explained:
As alleged, on three separate occasions, Tarek Bazrouk deliberately targeted and assaulted Jewish victims at protests relating to the Israel/Gaza war. Despite being arrested after each incident, Bazrouk allegedly remained undeterred and quickly returned to violently targeting Jews in New York City.
The indictment alleges Bazrouk assaulted Jewish victims at rallies on April 15 and December 9 last year, and again on January 6. In each instance, the people he allegedly punched and kicked were obviously Jewish — wearing kippahs or Jewish star necklaces, clad in Israeli flags, singing Jewish songs, standing together with other Jewish people, and the like. Moreover, in investigating the case, law enforcement agents searched Bazrouk’s cell phones pursuant to court-authorized warrants. These devices are said to have illustrated his motivation for attacking Jews. According to the DOJ’s press release:
In text messages, for example, BAZROUK identified himself as a “Jew hater,” labeled Jews as “worthless,” extorted “Allah” to “get us rid of [Jews],” called an acquittance a “F***ing Jew,” and told a friend to “slap that b****” in reference to a woman with an Israeli sticker on her laptop. BAZROUK also told a friend that he was “mad happy” to have learned that certain of his family members overseas are part of Hamas. BAZROUK’s phones also contained extensive pro-Hamas and pro-Hizballah [sic] propaganda, showing his support for organizations that have murdered thousands of Jews and Israelis.
Tellingly, these incidents occurred during the Biden administration. For what it’s worth, I’ve opined a number of times that a few high profile civil rights prosecutions of antisemites who attacked Jewish students on campuses and city streets could have put a stop to the surge in acts of Jew hatred that followed Hamas’s October 7 attacks.
Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization under federal law since the designation process started in the mid-Nineties, is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. As I’ve previously detailed (see e.g., here and here), the most influential Brotherhood project in the West has been the establishment of Muslim Students Associate chapters at American universities. As night follows day, the campuses have become cauldrons of pro-Hamas activism and rabid Jew hatred, under the guise of what the media-Democratic complex downplays as constitutionally protected “protest” against “the Israeli government.”
With Islamist groups long aligned with Democrats, the Biden administration and its Justice Department were passive in the face of open and notorious antisemitism, which predictably catalyzed acts of physical assault and intimidation. It is no surprise then, as our David Zimmermann reports, that in the same week that the SDNY and DOJ announced the federal charges against Bazrouk, Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, announced her dismissal of charges brought against agitators who intimidated Jews at a University of Michigan encampment last year. As anyone with common sense knows, a Democratic attorney general or Civil Rights Division would never have idled if the targets and victims were, for example, Muslims.
An important part of the Trump campaign was the commitment to use government enforcement tools to combat antisemitism. As an NR editorial noted, the president’s nomination of Dhillon to run the Civil Rights Division was a positive sign that those laws would be enforced as Congress intended — i.e., in favor of all Americans, not just members of groups portrayed by progressive Democrats as oppressed:
Addressing the scourge of antisemitism must be at the top of Dhillon’s agenda. Congressional statutes outlaw conspiracies to intimidate people in the enjoyment of their federal rights. The Biden DOJ and big-city progressive prosecutors have turned a blind eye to the shocking harassment of Jewish students on university campuses and the vandalizing of synagogues and other Jewish centers in intimidation campaigns against Jewish communities. That has to end, and federal prosecutors have more than adequate legal tools to ensure that it does.
The Bazrouk indictment indicates that Dhillon and the Trump Justice Department have begun to make good on this commitment.