As his visit to Israel drew to a close, Mayor de Blasio decried the resurgence of anti-Semitism Sunday - calling for a “broken windows” approach to acts of hatred around the world.
“The cancer of anti-Semitism has grown again,” de Blasio said in a speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, citing attacks in France and cemetery desecrations from Poland to Hungary.
De Blasio said hate would flourish unless confronted head on - drawing a parallel to New York's experience fighting rampant crime in the 1990s.
“It can't be stopped by an indifferent society,” he said. “It takes consistency, sending a signal at every turn that no act of hate is acceptable, that even acts that appear small must be addressed.”
De Blasio noted that Police Commissioner Bill Bratton was able to turn the tide on crime by aggressively enforcing low-level offenses. Similarly, even small gestures of intolerance against Jews or other targeted communities should provoke an aggressive response from city and national governments, he said.
“That very simple notion of not looking away when the law was broken started to change us,” he said. "That's what we have to strive for in fighting prejudice and bias…The theory's quite simple: If we don't attend to one broken window, we implicitly extend an invitation to break another and another after that, and another after that." more
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