The Buffalo Massacre Was More Than Meets the Eye 

In what has been called the “Buffalo Massacre,” on May 14, 2022 18-year-old white college student Payton Gendron shot over a dozen people, nearly all black. Ten have died. Despite massive coverage, politicians and commentators are mostly getting the story wrong.

No matter how you look at it, this brutal act was horrific. Beyond the immediate victims, the shooting has spread terror throughout America, especially in Buffalo’s Black community.

The massacre was surely “motivated by race,” as many have argued—and by white supremacy, as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul specified. Gendron chose the crime scene for its high concentration of Black people. His anti-Black racism was real, reprehensible and tragic.

But there is more to this story than meets the eye. The Buffalo Massacre is not just about anti-Black racism, white supremacy, or the so-called replacement theory.

Reflecting a widespread but incomplete understanding of Gendron’s crime, Hochul pledged, “Mark my words: we’ll be aggressive in our pursuit of anyone who subscribes to the ideals professed by other white supremacists, and how there’s a feeding frenzy on social media platforms, where hate festers more hate,” she said.

But this misunderstands the problem.

Gendron explained his motivation in a manifesto. He says he targeted the Black community, because they present numerous, convenient, “soft” targets. This is a disgusting way to talk about human beings. But the point is that he had more targets in mind, beyond the Black community.

The Buffalo victims were not the sole source of Gendron’s hatred. Nor do they represent the whole “problem” Gendron sought to solve.

Without diminishing the horrors of Buffalo, we need to understand that this crime fits a pattern. Gendron chose Black victims, but his loathing ran deeper.

Like other recent mass-murderer—from all parts of the political spectrum—Gendron was driven by an age-old conspiratorial hatred.

In his manifesto, Gendron wrote, Jews “are the biggest problem the Western world has ever had …They must be called out and killed.” In Gendron’s warped view, Jews are orchestrating a global system in which racial minorities are taking public funding and usurping roles previously held by white Christians. He drew these ideas from “replacement theory.” That theory, however, is not fundamentally what is at issue here.

The Buffalo Massacre is the third major, multi-victim crime this year in which antisemitic conspiracy theory played a central role. In all three cases, the antisemitic element has been ignored, downplayed or misunderstood. And yet the failure to grasp this problem has endangered members of all communities.

The scapegoating of Jews for societal ills has led to violent crimes against Jews, against people thought to be part of Jewish conspiracies, against those living or traveling near Jewish neighborhoods, as well as against members of other targeted groups.

The day before the Buffalo Massacre, accused Brooklyn Subway Shooter Frank James appeared in court for firing his handgun 33 times on a crowded subway train. James had posted a Facebook video that castigates Jews while showing photos of Adolf Hitler and images of Jewish Holocaust victims. “This is gonna be about Jews and my personal relationship with Jews.”

Like Gendron, James sees Jews as the center of a system that abuses persons like himself. James, however, is no white supremacist. In his case, antisemitism was laced through an ideology of black supremacy. Like Gendron, James chose victims who were not primarily Jewish, yet Jew-hatred rendered his worldview lethal.

In January, Malik Faisal Akram, a British Pakistani man, entered a Colleyville, Texas, synagogue and held a rabbi and his congregants hostage to demand freedom for imprisoned terrorist Aafia Siddiqui— a convicted terrorist who dismissed her legal defense team because her lawyers were Jewish and who wanted jurors to take DNA tests to make sure they were not Zionists. “Study the history of the Jews,” Siddiqui once said. “They have always back-stabbed everyone who has taken pity on them and made the ‘fatal’ error of giving them shelter.” Nevertheless, the FBI initially failed to understand the antisemitic character of this event.

Yet their ideas were unified and made murderous by the same central principle: the age-old conspiratorial fantasy that Jews are an all-powerful cabal who are responsible for all the world’s evils.

Gendron, James, and Akram represent three different races and three different mindsets: white supremacist, black supremacist, and radical Islamist. Yet their ideas were unified and made murderous by the same central principle: the age-old conspiratorial fantasy that Jews are an all-powerful cabal who are responsible for all the world’s evils.

The end-game for this ideology is genocidal. Gendron speaks for genocidal antisemites of all stripes when he calls for a war between Jews and non-Jews. “The real war I’m advocating for is the gentiles vs the Jews,” he wrote.

In the meantime, no one is safe from these criminals. Some perpetrators, driven by antisemitism, choose Jewish targets, as in Poway, California, or the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. In other cases, they choose targets who are not Jewish. That is because antisemitism is commonly at the core, and it serves to bolster and metastasize, other forms of hate, including anti-Black and anti-White racism. Antisemitism is also often the first sign of a deteriorating society.

To prevent the next Buffalo Massacre, the next Brooklyn Subway shooting, the next Colleyville hostage-taking, we need to grasp that what unites all of these criminals in murderous ambition is the all-encompassing global ideology of antisemitism. We must confront that evil, and fast, or we will have many more bodies to bury.

Marcus is founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and author of The Definition of Anti-Semitism. He served as the 11th Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education for Civil Rights.