Young men on a dark road of antisemitism

There has been a striking commonality in the arrests of three individuals in the tristate area this month in connection with harrowing threats against synagogues or Jewish people.

It is the youth of the suspects.

They include Christopher Brown, 21, of Aquebogue, who tweeted that he was going to “ask a Priest if I should become a husband or shoot up a synagogue and die,” and Matthew Mahrer, 22, who along with Brown was arrested last week by police officers patrolling Penn Station. Brown had with him a military knife and swastika armband. A Glock 17 and 30-round magazine were recovered from Mahrer’s Manhattan apartment, according to charging documents.

They were just a few years older than 18-year-old New Jersey resident Omar Alkattoul, who was arrested earlier this month for allegedly transmitting a manifesto with threats to attack a synagogue and Jewish people.

All three young men are accused of the kind of violent threats that have been the province of young men for much of humanity’s warlike history. But it is unfortunate — even tragic — that this particular disease of antisemitism would be repeated by this particular generation, which should have been well-schooled on the horrors of the Holocaust and the lies and crimes against humanity of the Nazi regime. These are not aging hermits in whom hateful ideas have curdled, but young people — even a high schooler — raised in a multicultural region where the clear and terrible knowledge of what happened during World War II is a familial reality to many.

Family members and a lawyer for Mahrer reportedly said that Mahrer himself is of Jewish heritage and has a grandfather who is a Holocaust survivor.

There is a swirling, and still unclear, collection of potential motives and details that could explain how these young men might have considered going down such a dark road, mental illness and suicidal impulses included. Social media also appears to have played a role here, as it has in so many cases like this. Brown told police that he operated a white supremacist group on Twitter, and charging documents note that he claimed to have “Nazi paraphernalia in my house. I think it is really cool.”

That’s a disturbing idea, but one gruesomely fitting with a contrarian streak that some disaffected young people share. Perhaps it is the very clarity of Holocaust history, the accepted fact that such an event so clearly must never happen again, that draws some disturbed individuals to the dark midcentury forces that spawned this now unacceptable ideology.

Long Island has its own history of Nazi and white supremacist sympathizing, including a Yaphank summer camp that boosted Nazi ideology, currently the subject of an Off-Broadway play. Here, as much as anywhere, we can’t be complacent, and we can’t allow the forbidden and the unusual to become — with horrific consequences — a fad.