Chicago City Wire

Former mayoral candidate Paul Vallas is addressing Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's tepid response to rising violence against Jewish Chicagoans in a recently published commentary. 

“Days after the Oct. 26 shooting of an Orthodox Jewish man in Chicago,” Vallas wrote in the New York Post. “Mayor Brandon Johnson was publicly rebuked for issuing a perfunctory statement that made no mention of the victim’s background and didn’t demand the incident be treated by police as a hate crime.”

“Anxiety among Chicago’s Jewish community has been aggravated by Johnson’s apparent insensitivity and indifference,” he added.

Vallas points out that Johnson cast the tie-breaking vote on a City Council cease-fire resolution last January that condemned Israel while failing to lay out the depths of violence committed by Hamas.

And he has remained silent as the Chicago Teachers Union, Johnson's former employer, hosted pro-Hamas demonstrations, ratified a Gaza cease-fire resolution, and orchestrated a "student-led" walkout to protest the war.

“His behavior is emblematic of a problematic embrace of a far-left ideology nationwide in which there exists a hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed,” Vallas wrote.

Ryan Mauro, an investigative researcher with the Capital Research Center, said there is something larger and more sinister afoot with Johnson’s lax response to violence against Jews. 

Mauro is the author of a recent study that dives into the recent spike in violence against Jews.

“The commonality between the anti-police, weak on crime rhetoric and the anti-Israel, weak on terrorism rhetoric is a fundamental assumption that Western societies are so oppressive and inhumane that any criminal or violent response is, to some extent, acts of resistance, cries for help or desperation where offenders feel there are no other options,” Mauro told Chicago City Wire in an email.

“Did you rob a store? That’s mostly because the wicked capitalist system robbed you of all your opportunities. Did you attack a cop? Well, that’s mostly because those pigs have acted so brutally and racist that it made you so scared that you had to defend yourself. Did you terrorize Jews or Israel? I empathize, because it is they who terrorized you first. That’s the destructive sentiment behind these similar behaviors.”

According to Mauro, the anti-police and pro-Hamas movements are cut from the same cloth.

“There’s lots of overlap in terms of organizations, activists and rhetoric. In fact, pro-Hamas groups have literally stated that they’d adopt language about racism and police brutality to expand their ranks and longevity since they know Middle Eastern issues are only a hot topic intermittently. They come and go. The anti-police cause doesn’t go away and fits neatly into their themes of revolution and insurgency and seditionist behaviors,” he said.