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Taj Patterson says he was attacked by a dozen Hasidim at 4:30 AM. But he was so drunk, it took police days to put together his story.

A black fashion student says he was brutally attacked by a gang of Hasidic men who shouted anti-gay slurs at him while he was walking through Williamsburg after a night of partying, the NY Daily News reported.

Taj Patterson, 22, told the Daily News he was on his way to the largely black neighborhood of Fort Greene, on Dec. 1 around 4:30 AM, when more than a dozen Hasidim attacked him on Flushing Ave., yelling, “Stay down, [anti-homosexual slur]!”

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On the face of it, as someone who covered Jews in NYC for decades – it sounds a bit farfetched. More than a dozen Hasidim, out on the street at 4:30 in the morning, looking to beat up an innocent goy passing by? I don’t know.

“I’m walking down some block by myself and then the next thing I know, I’m surrounded by a group of Hasidic Jewish men and they’re attacking me,” Patterson told the News. “I was alone. I was an easy target. I’m black. I’m gay, a whole slew of reasons.”

Patterson sustained a broken eye socket, a torn retina, blood clotting, and cuts and bruises to his knee and ankles, and ended up in Woodhull Hospital.

The NYPD hate crimes unit is investigating the case. Same NYPD that’s been waiting a few months to define “Knockout the Jew” as a hate crime.

Oh, before I forget, here’s another fact: according to police, Patterson was “highly intoxicated, uncooperative and incoherent.”

The Daily News has an eyewitness. Of sorts. Evelyn Keys, an MTA bus driver, was rounding the corner of Flushing Ave. and Spencer St. when she saw the horrific attack unfold before her eyes.

“I get out of the bus and all these men were standing up straight around him,” Keys stated. “Taj is laying down on his back. I went up to him and he was in so much pain. He says, ‘I can’t see . . . I can’t breathe.’”

Apparently, they didn’t ask her if they were Hasidim.

Context is direly missing in this story. News reports say Patterson was so drunk, it took police several days to piece together what had actually happened.

Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind said there’s no doubt someone attacked Patterson, but “it sounds so out of character” for Haredi Jews to be the culprits. Hikind called his allegations “bizarre.”

How did the Hasidim know Patterson was gay?

For our younger readers, please permit me to copy and paste the following from Wikipedia:

Tawana Glenda Brawley (born 1972) was an African-American woman from Wappingers Falls, New York, who gained notoriety in 1987–88 for falsely accusing six white men of having raped her.

The charges received widespread national attention because of her age (15), the persons accused (including police officers and a prosecuting attorney), and the shocking state in which Brawley was found after the alleged rape (in a trash bag, with racial slurs written on her body and covered in feces).

Brawley’s accusations were given widespread media attention in part from the involvement of her advisers, including the Reverend Al Sharpton and attorneys Alton H. Maddox and C. Vernon Mason.

After hearing evidence, a grand jury concluded in October 1988 that Brawley had not been the victim of a forcible sexual assault and that she herself may have created the appearance of an attack. The New York prosecutor whom Brawley had accused as one of her alleged assailants successfully sued Brawley and her three advisers for defamation.


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Yori Yanover has been a working journalist since age 17, before he enlisted and worked for Ba'Machane Nachal. Since then he has worked for Israel Shelanu, the US supplement of Yedioth, JCN18.com, USAJewish.com, Lubavitch News Service, Arutz 7 (as DJ on the high seas), and the Grand Street News. He has published Dancing and Crying, a colorful and intimate portrait of the last two years in the life of the late Lubavitch Rebbe, (in Hebrew), and two fun books in English: The Cabalist's Daughter: A Novel of Practical Messianic Redemption, and How Would God REALLY Vote.