The Strange History of the Black Hebrew Israelites, as Group is Tied to Jersey City Murders
Yet another apparent anti-Semitic multiple murder has hit the United States with Tuesday’s killing of four people and the subsequent deaths of the two attackers in a Jersey City, N.J. The New York Times, New York Post and other outlets reported Wednesday that the slaughter appears to be linked to a black supremacist doctrine.
Mayor Steven Fulop had already said that the kosher grocery store where most of the shooting took place was intentionally singled out by the killers, suggesting a terrorist attack that specifically targeted Jews. Now law enforcement official say at least one of assailants had posted anti-Semitic comments online, and was or had been a Black Hebrew Israelite.
If so, it is the latest, and by far the most violent, incident to bring a little-known doctrine that is an outgrowth of early black nationalist thinking to widespread public attention. While people affiliated with the movement had been in the news recently for triggering the Covington students’ apparent confrontation with a native American drummer in D.C. and for walking into the Bronx Zoo’s lion enclosure, the best-known previous atrocity connected to the bizarre theology was the murder, in the late 1980s, of 14 people by killers linked closely to the South Florida-based Nation of Yahweh. The Nation’s leader, Yahweh ben Yahweh, died in 2007 after serving 11 years of a federal prison sentence for racketeering and conspiracy. The severed ears of several of the white victims were reportedly brought to Yahweh ben Yahweh as trophies.