The Collision Course // When mental illness and anti-Semitism meet

“Mr. Greenberg is Jewish, so there’s that,” suggested Louisville, Kentucky Metro Police Chief Erika Shields, about the motive that may have inspired Quintez Brown to enter Louisville mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg’s office last week and open fire on Mr. Greenberg and others present with a 9mm Glock handgun.

“When we greeted him,” Mr. Greenberg recounted, “he pulled out a gun, aimed directly at me and began shooting. The individual closest to the door managed to bravely get the door closed, which we barricaded and the shooter fled the scene.”

Mr. Brown was found by police within ten minutes. He had a loaded 9mm magazine inside his pocket and a handgun, handgun case, and additional magazines inside a drawstring bag.

But the police chief also said that Mr. Brown could have had some political motive or was just “someone with mental issues or [who] is venomous.”

Greenberg is a Democrat, and his website trumpets his commitment to “acknowledge and address the systemic racism that has always been part of our community and consider the racial justice impact on every decision”; and to “invest in minority-owned small businesses and historically neglected neighborhoods by working with the private sector to create a Black-owned bank and other dedicated lending programs.”

Mr. Brown is a young black activist who participated in former President Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” program and was once featured on network television speaking about the need for (irony is doing just fine) “common-sense gun reform.”

So a political motive for the attack, which blessedly didn’t injure anyone (though Mr. Greenberg’s sweater was grazed by a bullet), would seem a stretch.

Which leaves, at least as per Police Chief Shields’ speculations, venomousness or mental illness. Oh, yes, and that Jewish angle.

All of which elements, of course, are in no way mutually exclusive.

In fact, the all-too-frequent farrago of violent hatred, emotional imbalance and anti-Semitism is well established. Needless to say, animosity exists in otherwise mentally sound people; and the vast majority of those suffering from mental illnesses are neither hateful nor violent (and, in fact, much more likely to be victims of crimes rather than their perpetrators).

But there does seem to be some sort of nexus between at least some types of mental illness and rabid, violent anti-Semitism.

And there were, indeed, in Mr. Brown’s case, earlier signs of psychological fragility.

Last June, he suddenly disappeared without a trace, prompting a citywide search. Two weeks later, when he was found safe, Mr. Brown’s parents asked for privacy, noting they were focusing on their son’s “physical, mental, and spiritual needs.”

Whatever mental instability may have precipitated the young man’s vanishing, as in a number of other cases of perpetrators of violence against Jews, it slipped easily into anti-Semitism. Not long before his recent attack, Mr. Brown expressed support for the “Lion of Judah Armed Forces,” a gun-toting group whose leadership has voiced ideas similar to those of the “Black Hebrew Israelite” movement, which considers black Americans to be the “real Jews.” The murderers of four Jews in Jersey City in 2019 were adherents of that latter group.

A few weeks after the Jersey City killings, Mitchell D. Silber, a former director of the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Analysis Unit, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that data he reviewed showed that “approximately a third of the recent anti-Semitic attacks in New York are committed by people with histories of psychiatric problems.”

Black Lives Matter Louisville organizer Chanelle Helm is a co-founder of the Louisville Community Bail Fund, which posted Quintez Brown’s $100,000 bail. She maintains, as does Mr. Brown’s lawyer, that the assailant is mentally ill.

Whether Quintez Brown is in fact emotionally incapacitated and whether he attacked Mr. Greenberg because the candidate is Jewish can’t be said at present with surety. But one thing can: Groups like “Lion of Judah Armed Forces,” the “Black Hebrew Israelite” and, of course Louis Farrakhan’s “Nation of Islam” vilify Jews. And provide wild fantasies and hatred to their followers.

For two years, we have distanced, masked and vaccinated. All, primarily, to limit the spread of a highly communicable disease to vulnerable populations like the elderly and those with comorbidities.

Were there only a vaccine that might prevent Jew-hatred from infecting the mentally compromised, a population that, it seems, is all too susceptible to that evil.