A young Israeli student in Brooklyn was stabbed in the head late Tuesday night while studying in a library at a Brooklyn Jewish center.
According to the Associated Press,
“Calvin Peters, 49, could be seen on amateur video waving the knife inside the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights around 1:40 a.m. Tuesday after the attack on 22-year-old Levi Rosenblat. Rosenblat, wounded in the side of the head, was listed in stable condition.”
Peters is?reported to have yelled “Kill the Jews!” and “I’m going to kill all of you!” during the attack.
He?eventually obeyed a police officer?by dropping his knife, but not before changing his mind and picking it back up again as the officer approached him. As Peters moved around, officers warned him to once again drop his weapon.?Instead, Peters lunged at an officer, thereby sealing his own fate as the officer shot and killed him.
Peters had a history of mental illness and had been arrested 19 times since 1982, police said.
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This unsettling incident raises important?underlying questions. For starters, why are Jews still being targeted nearly 70 years after the liberation of WWII concentration camps? Wasn’t the routine murder of?6 million Jews during the Holocaust a good enough lesson against the dangers of antisemitism and intolerance of other faiths?
Another imploring question: if Peters had been arrested 19 times and had a proven history of mental illness, what was being done about this? Was he receiving the help he needed?
Another lesson we should have learned by now is that stigmatization of mental illness does no one any good, especially the?victims of all the school shootings and senseless attacks that have been happening frequently?in the United States in the past decade. If you look up any news story about a mass shooting or random attack, chances are the attacker had some form of mental illness. Why, oh why, aren’t these people getting help?
As the old adage goes, “History has a way of repeating itself.” So until humankind brightens up and starts making widespread changes regarding tolerance for religion and mental illness, it appears that history is bound to see made the same mistakes…?over and over again.
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