Washington: The Biden Administration has elevated hate crimes to a national threat priority, a top US Government official has told lawmakers, stressing that the Jewish community faces nearly 60 per cent of all such religious-based assaults by every terrorist organisations across the spectrum.
Speaking during a US Congressional hearing, FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers that FBI is tackling the rise in hate crimes through a series of law enforcement efforts, including joint terrorism task forces, hate crime investigations, and intelligence sharing.
“We are tackling both through investigations and outreach and intelligence sharing investigations, both through all 56 joint terrorism task forces. And on the hate crime side, we’ve elevated hate crimes to a national threat priority. We’ve done lots of outreach with the Jewish community, both nationally with organisations,” he said.
Wray said he has personally participated in any number of times and then each of the FBI field offices does as well.
“We’ve done active shooter training for those houses of worship, etc. But the reality is that the Jewish community is uniquely targeted by pretty much every terrorist organisation across the spectrum,” he said.
“When you look at a group that makes up 2.4 per cent roughly of the American population, it should be jarring to everyone that that same population accounts for something like 60 per cent of all religious-based hate crimes. And so they need our help,” Wray said in response to a question.
The FBI, he said, has created a domestic terrorism hate crimes fusion cell to try to get at offenses, hate based violent extremist offenses against the faith based communities, which could be either domestic terrorism or hate crimes.
“The idea was to bring the expertise of both together. That has in turn led to some of the first proactive hate crimes, cases including in particular, the one that I can think of is a disruption of an attempted bombing of a synagogue,” he said.
“We have had a number of cases like that that we’re doing, so we’ve also elevated hate crimes to a national threat priority. So, it’s extensive outreach to faith based communities. It’s an extensive investigation. Just in the few years that I’ve been director, we’ve had quite a number of attacks or attempted attacks on synagogues that we have disrupted,” he added.
“Attempted bombings of synagogues in Colorado and Nevada. Attempted shootings up of synagogues in California. Obviously, we had the Colleyville situation. I personally have been to the crime scene at Tree of Life, so it is a major problem. It’s something we’re actively engaged in,” Wray said.
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