An Indiana woman was arrested Friday night after backing her car into a building used by a Black Hebrew Israelite hate group, thinking she was attacking a Jewish school on behalf of “her people back in Palestine.”
Ruba Almaghtheh, 34, was charged with criminal recklessness after being triggered by the Star of David on the building. The Jewish symbol has also been appropriated by the Black Hebrew Israelites.
The group last came to prominence after a 2019 attack in which a man allegedly linked with the group attacked a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Some branches of the movement are explicitly antisemitic, the Times of Israel notes: “Extremist Hebrew Israelites can be found on street corners literally shouting their doctrine, which can include Holocaust denial, misogyny and anti-LGBTQ invective, at passersby.” Other parts of the movement are not antisemitic, and one branch settled in Israel in the 1960s.
The Indianapolis building was used by the Israelite School of Universal and Practical Knowledge, which the Anti-Defamation League calls an “extreme and antisemitic sect” of the movement.
Indianapolis-area WXIN Fox 59 reported:
Almaghtheh told officers she was watching news coverage of the Israel-Hamas war on television and decided to plan an attack on the building because she was offended by the “Hebrew Israelite” symbol on the front of the building.
Police said Almaghtheh passed by the building a couple times and called it the “Israel school.”
IMPD said she made reference to “her people back in Palestine” and told officers, “Yes. I did it on purpose.”
Jewish institutions around the world have been forced to add extra security because of the risk of antisemitic attacks by people motivated by the Hamas terror attack on Israel on October 7. The attacks and threats began before Israel’s military response began in earnest.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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