Although Jews make up less than 3 percent of the U.S. population, attacks against them constituted some 60 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes in 2019. Lorenzo Vidino takes a careful look at those who commit or applaud such crimes, and presents some illustrative examples:

Nicholas Young, a District of Columbia metro transit police officer, was a fixture in the local DC neo-Nazi scene in the early 2000s. Sporting an SS tattoo on his arm, he collected German World War II memorabilia and attended parties in full Nazi uniform with like-minded Reich enthusiasts. But at some point Young also became interested in Islamism, eventually converting to Islam and spiraling down a rabbit hole of jihadist websites while never abandoning his Nazi sympathies. He soon caught the attention of the FBI, which targeted him in a sting operation that led to his arrest in 2016 for attempting to provide support to Islamic State. He was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

The Nazi-Islamist nexus may seem like a strange one, but Young was ahead of his time. . . . Because of social media, which allows for an unprecedented degree of interconnectivity among extremists of all stripes, anti-Semitic tropes, texts, and memes are shared across ideological milieux.

[E]ven when their targets are not Jews, Jews are often on the mind of America’s militant right-wing extremists. The individuals who carried out the attacks in El Paso in 2019 and Buffalo in 2022, which openly targeted Latinos and Blacks, respectively, left behind manifestos that spoke about Jews. Like many others in their ideological milieu, they embraced the so-called “great replacement” theory that depicts Jews as the sinister masterminds of a plot to replace white people in Western nations with other ethnic groups.

Like the right-wing militants who take inspiration from jihadist attacks on Jews, American Islamists are equally interested in right-wing extremism. That was the case of Muslim convert Damon Joseph, who was sentenced to twenty years in prison for planning attacks against two synagogues in the Toledo, Ohio, area. . . . Joseph was inspired by the attack against the Tree of Life synagogue [in Pittsburgh] despite the fact that the shooter was not an Islamist but a right-wing militant. Joseph went on to publish an anti-Semitic manifesto and shared statements expressing his desire to die a martyr.

As we mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, Israeli special forces carried out a daring boots-on-the-ground raid on September 8 targeting the Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC) in northwestern Syria. The site was used for producing and storing missiles which are then transferred to Hizballah in Lebanon. Jonathan Spyer notes that the raid was accompanied by extensive airstrikes in Syira,and followed a few days later by extensive attacks on Hizballah in Lebanon, one of which killed Mohammad Qassem al-Shaer, a senior officer in the terrorist group’s Radwan force, an elite infantry group. And yesterday, the IDF destroyed a weapons depot, an observation post, and other Hizballah positions. Spyer puts these attacks in context:

The direct purpose of the raid, of course, was the destruction of the facilities and materials targeted. But Israel also appeared to be delivering a message to the Syrian regime that it should not imagine itself to be immune should it choose to continue its involvement with the Iran-led axis’s current campaign against Israel.

Similarly, the killing of al-Shaer indicated that Israel is no longer limiting its response to Hizballah attacks to the border area. Rather, Hizballah operatives in Israel’s crosshairs are now considered fair game wherever they may be located in Lebanon.

The SSRC raid and the killing of al-Shaer are unlikely to have been one-off events. Rather, they represent the systematic broadening of the parameters of the conflict in the north. Hizballah commenced the current round of fighting on October 8, in support of Hamas in Gaza. It has vowed to stop firing only when a ceasefire is reached in the south—a prospect which currently seems distant.