Antisemitic hate crimes in New York City surged 74.4% compared to the previous May. Sixty percent of all confirmed hate crimes in the city targeted Jewish individuals — a community that makes up just 10% of the population. Synagogues vandalized. Jewish businesses tagged. People attacked on the street for wearing a kippah.
So who does Joe Scarborough blame? Benjamin Netanyahu.
"If you wanna blame anybody...blame Benjamin Netanyahu," the Morning Joe co-host said on June 24, the morning after DSA-backed, anti-Israel candidates swept the New York City Democratic congressional primaries. "You can blame all of this on Benjamin Netanyahu."
Scarborough doubled down, calling the Israeli Prime Minister "the guy on the left" who "is the reason why Israel's standing...is lower than it has been since 1948." Co-host Jonathan Lemire backed him up, framing "Netanyahu being the central figure" in the antisemitism outbreak. When challenged, Lemire offered this: "people can have their own opinions. That's not what this was about."
What it was about is a rather specific set of facts that Morning Joe chose to ignore.
Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected mayor of New York City, co-founded a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin College in Maine. He pushed a bill in the state legislature called "Not on Our Dime!" — targeting New York charities that fund Israeli settlements. His wife, Rama Duwaji, is connected to the same activist networks. This isn't a guy who stumbled into anti-Israel politics. He built his career on it.
Then there's Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Mamdani-backed congressional candidate who attended a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square on October 8, 2023 — one day after the Hamas attack that killed over a thousand Israeli civilians. Not a week later. Not after some period of reflection. The next day. The rally celebrated the death toll.
Scarborough's theory requires you to believe that the people firebombing synagogues in Brooklyn are doing it because of Netanyahu's military strategy, not because political leaders in their own city have spent years telling them Israel is a criminal state. It requires you to believe that a 74.4% spike in hate crimes against Jewish New Yorkers has nothing to do with the candidates those same New Yorkers' neighbors just elected.
The NYPD data and ADL reporting tell a different story. The attacks aren't targeting Israeli government buildings. They're targeting Jewish people — visible Jews wearing kippahs and tzitzit, Jewish-owned businesses, houses of worship. The victims aren't selected based on their views on Netanyahu's coalition government. They're selected because they're Jewish.
Brad Lander, himself Jewish, ran in the same political ecosystem. The question nobody on Morning Joe bothered to ask is what happens to Jewish Democrats in a party whose rising stars got their start organizing against the Jewish state — not against a specific policy, but against its existence.
Lemire's deflection — "people can have their own opinions" — is doing more work than he realizes. Yes, people can have opinions. Mamdani has opinions. Avila Chevalier showed hers at Times Square the day after October 7. The voters of New York City just endorsed those opinions at the ballot box. Those are all choices, made freely, by people who live in the same city where antisemitic hate crimes jumped 74.4% in a single month.
The pattern goes back further than the current conflict. The Munich Olympics were in 1972. Jewish communities in Europe have faced this for generations. The idea that antisemitism is a reaction to one prime minister's foreign policy rather than something with deep, persistent roots is not just wrong — it's the kind of wrong that makes the problem worse.
Scarborough spent the segment telling Jewish viewers that the hatred directed at them is really about a foreign leader's decisions. The candidates his network just finished covering spent their campaigns telling voters that the Jewish state shouldn't exist. And the hate crime data says the people being hurt are the ones who happen to live next door.
That's three separate facts pointing in the same direction. Morning Joe picked the one explanation that points somewhere else.