On Nov. 19, around noon in the Upper Park Heights neighborhood of
Northwest Baltimore, an attack on a 15-year-old African American youth
took place. The victim,whose identity is being kept confidential at the
request of his family, is a student at nearby Northwestern High School.
The attacker, Eliyahu Werdesheim, was a former member of the Israeli
Special Forces and current member of a Jewish community patrol group,
Shomrim.
According to police reports, the young man was walking
on Falstaff Road when he noticed he was being followed by a vehicle.
Upon noticing the vehicle, he asked the occupants: “What’s up? What are
y’all looking at?”
The passengers proceeded to get out of the
vehicle and respond: “What’s up? You’re the guy from yesterday on Park
Heights, you want some problems?”
The teenager then proceeded to
walk; he noticed that the men got back into their vehicle to follow him
again. At this point, he picked up a stick for safety but put it down
as the men got out of the car for a second time.
Once he was
confronted by the two men, a third man pulled up in a van. They
surrounded him, patting him down and asking: “What you got in your
pockets? Keep your hand out of your pockets, you want trouble?”
This
third man struck the teen in the head with a two-way radio, causing
cuts to his head, and court records have shown that his wrist was also
broken in the process.
The three men were members of Shomrim.
Told ‘you don’t belong around here’
Werdesheim
was the one who allegedly assaulted the young Black victim. The
Baltimore Sun reported that upon assaulting the young man Werdesheim
shouted, “You don’t belong around here.”
Now, a young African
American male being told “you don’t belong” in a predominantly white
Jewish neighborhood, part of an ethnically mixed area of Baltimore,
suggests that there were more reasons that led Werdesheim towards this
violent attack than simply “protecting the neighborhood.” Over the
decades, racists have driven African Americans out of many neighborhoods
through violent attacks and campaigns of intimidation. “You don’t
belong” is the clear message of the racists harassing African American
youth, even in cases that do not result in physical assault.
Werdesheim
is currently free on bail, charged with first-degree assault. There was
no mention of a hate crime and no questions about the operations of the
patrol organization and the purpose it serves.
The Baltimore
Police Department and the state government have condemned the attack,
while also praising “community patrol groups”—specifically Shomrim. We
cannot expect a police department that has a long history of racist
conduct to properly charge and prosecute a racist assailant. In no way
would it be beneficial to the police department or the mayor’s office to
go after an organization that they both value highly.
While this
attack appears to have been fueled by racist sentiments on the part of
Werdesheim and his cohorts, this factor has been ignored by city
officials and the police department. Leaders in the Black community have
called for Shomrim to be disbanded. It is not simply a case of one bad
apple.
Shaquille Carbon, a junior at Northwestern, told The
Baltimore Sun he has seen Shomrim members on their neighborhood walks.
“My experience is when I walk through this community, they don’t look at
me, they don’t speak to me if I say hi, and they don’t acknowledge my
existence,” he said. “That’s what makes the racial tension more severe.”
These
racist attacks will not be tolerated. It will take a strong fight-back
movement to ensure that nothing like this incident takes place in the
future. Whether carried out by the police department, the governor and
mayor’s offices, or allied community patrols, racial profiling and
attacks will be met with community resistance. This is why all
progressive and revolutionary people should call for Werdesheim to be
charged to the fullest extent under the law to ensure that justice is
served!
