It’s time to address hate and anti-Semitism in Massachusetts
On May 26, 2021, Sen. Eric Lesser presented an amendment to raise support for organizations facing domestic terrorism and hate crimes through nonprofit security grants to his colleagues in the Massachusetts State Senate.
These are his remarks as given.
Thank you, Mr. President, and through you to the members. I rise in support of Amendment #613, funding for nonprofit security grants.
Mr. President, On the morning of Thursday, April 2, 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic raged, a 36-year-old man from a small town in Western Massachusetts filled a 5-gallon tank of gasoline, stuffed the opening with Christian religious literature, dropped it at the entrance to Ruth’s House, a Jewish-affiliated assisted living center in Longmeadow, and lit the fuse.
The bomb failed to go off, and luckily nobody was hurt. But this same Jewish organization was also targeted online. One white supremacist user discussed a mass killing at “that Jewish nursing home in Longmeadow,” another created a calendar listing for April 3, 2020, and called it “Jew killing day.”
That’s not all. This December, during our winter COVID surge, a 44-year-old white man from Maine set fire to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Presbyterian Church in the heart of Springfield’s historically black community.
The man had actually attempted to set fire to the church on four different occasions. One witness, the man’s ex-girlfriend, told investigators that the man “frequently displayed racial animus toward non-whites and Muslims, and used the N-word to describe black people.”
Mr. President, we’ve watched with horror as incidents of anti-Semitism, racism, anti-Muslim and anti-Asian hate crimes and hate speech continue to go up, and up, and up.
A cancer is spreading in our country. A pandemic of hate and violence, and it’s growing at alarming rates. Anti-Asian hate crimes skyrocketed nationally by nearly 150% between 2019 and 2020. In Boston, they doubled, and experts say the vast majority still go unreported.
Back in 2017, the Gentlelady from Worcester, President Emerita Chandler, partnered with myself and the Gentlelady from Newton, Majority Leader Creem, to establish a program to provide grants for religious and cultural institutions facing threats of violence, hate crimes, and domestic terrorism.
The program started small back in 2017: $75,000 for three organizations for the entire state. This body championed that line-item year after year.
Since then, the Senate has worked to expand it, year after year to the point where this fiscal year, the grants have totaled nearly $1 million, and have supported 53 organizations in every corner of our Commonwealth. The money helps organizations install security cameras, enhanced lighting, put in ballistic doors and bulletproof windows, rapid response alarms, perimeter fencing, motion detectors, vehicle blockades, measures known in the field as “target hardening” — designed to separate attackers from innocent victims.
What a shame, what a disgrace, really, a societal failing, that these measures are necessary at all. To protect houses of worship. Preschools. Summer camps. Community gathering places, with ballistic windows and vehicle blockades to prevent car bombings? In the United States of America? In Massachusetts? But this is now the world we inhabit.
Today, the Senate is taking an added step, increasing the funding to $1.5 million for the coming fiscal year, twenty-times the original appropriation in 2017.
This funding is going to allow the program to expand, and continue assisting cultural, religious and nonprofit organizations facing bomb threats, arson attacks, menacing phone calls, hate mail, and outright attempts at domestic terrorism.
Mr. President, there are still far more organizations requesting help than available funds, which is why we are adding significantly more money to this program, and I hope we are going to continue to add money to this program. Because the threats are multiplying. Just this Tuesday morning, a swastika was slapped on a fire alarm box in downtown Salem. This weekend, a group of neo-Nazis gathered at the New England Holocaust Memorial steps from this building.
The pattern is becoming all too familiar. It starts with heated rhetoric online, then it moves into full-blown hate speech. Eventually, it moves from the virtual world to the real world: graffiti on street corners, taunts to strangers on the street. When left unchecked, it metastasizes into vandalism, arson, beatings, and outright murder.
Mr. President, I want to ask each of us to ponder what would have happened, if the attempted bombing in Longmeadow had succeeded?
Sometimes, there’s a temptation after an incident like that one, or the arson in Springfield this past December, to move along, or look the other way. There were no physical injuries, so there is always going to be some temptation, there are always going to be some people who are inclined to shrug it off and minimize its significance.
But I’d ask for each of us to pause for a moment, and just imagine what could have happened…
After all, the gas canister was full. The device was placed in a crowded area, near several schools, several synagogues, and an apartment complex. The fuse was lit. The wick was charred.
How many people would have died if the bomb went off? Try to envision it: the shards of glass, the debris scattered in every direction, vehicles in flames, buildings burning or destroyed. The dead bodies? Loved ones hearing the phone ring later that day with dreaded news. Just think about it for a second.
Our Asian neighbors, our Black neighbors, our Jewish and Muslim neighbors, are living with this fear every day. Constituents call me, they write to me, they stop me on the street. They share stories of being terrified that their mosque, their church, their pre-school or synagogue, or community center, is going to be the next one targeted. Do people in America, in Massachusetts, feel comfortable right now in their own neighborhoods? Worshiping or gathering or expressing their identities? The answer is increasingly no.
We must speak with one voice that hate of any type, against any person, is deeply un-American, and is a crime that shakes the very ideals of our nation’s founding, that all are created equal.
The least we can do as a Commonwealth, when these organizations, these community groups, ask us for basic precautions, is make sure that we have the resources to put them in place.
Mr. President, I ask that when a vote is taken, we do so by the recording of the yeas and nays.
Senator Lesser’s 2019 remarks on funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant program can be read here.
State Senator Eric P. Lesser is the Co-Chair of the Joint Committee on Economic Development & a member of the Joint Committee on COVID-19 and Emergency Preparedness and Management. Previously, he worked in the Obama White House, first as Special Assistant to Senior Adviser David Axelrod, and later as Director of Strategic Planning for the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
