Photo Credit: Bill de Blasio via Flicker / Wikimedia
Bill de Blasio, 2013

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio – a declared Democratic presidential candidate in next year’s U.S. national elections – is “very, very clear” about where the city’s rising anti-Semitism is coming from.

Hate crimes against all minority groups in the city are up by 64 percent in comparison to the same time a year ago – but anti-Semitic incidents have risen by a full 90 percent. Of the 352 hate crimes recorded by the NYPD in the past year, 183 were anti-Semitic incidents.

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Speaking at a Brooklyn news conference Tuesday about the skyrocketing hate crime statistics, de Blasio was asked by a reporter about rising anti-Semitism “on the left in the BDS movement and around the world.”

BDS – the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement – is committed to the destruction of the State of Israel through a primarily left-wing economic boycott devoted to terrorizing companies, governments and individuals around the world who conduct business with Israel. The movement campaigns for a total ban on Israeli products.

De Blasio completely rejected the idea that anti-Semitism could be found among leftists.

“I think the ideological movement that is anti-Semitic is the right-wing movement,” the mayor said. “I want to be very, very clear – the violent threat, the threat that is ideological – is very much from the right,” he said, adding that the perpetrators at the national and international level trace their history back to Nazism and facism.

Jewish City Council member Chaim Deutsch of Brooklyn immediately responded, saying he didn’t agree with the mayor.

“I have not seen any white supremacists coming in here committing these hate crimes,” Deutsch told the New York Post.

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Hana Levi Julian is a Middle East news analyst with a degree in Mass Communication and Journalism from Southern Connecticut State University. A past columnist with The Jewish Press and senior editor at Arutz 7, Ms. Julian has written for Babble.com, Chabad.org and other media outlets, in addition to her years working in broadcast journalism.