Jewish Man’s Throat Slashed At Protest But What Happened After Is Even More Shocking

Gary Baumgarten
4 min readMay 14, 2021

It’s been happening all across New York City.

The Israeli-Hamas war leading to confrontations between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Sometimes they shout at one another. Sometimes they shove each other. Sometimes it gets violent.

A video making the rounds on social media shows a particularly disturbing incident at Bryant Park, which abuts the main New York Public Library in Midtown Manhattan. It shows a Jewish man bleeding from the neck. It looks like the wound is superficial but there’s a lot of blood for sure.

A cop, one wearing a white shirt so he’s a command officer, can be seen leading the wounded man by the arm and running away from an angry crowd of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who seemed intent on at the very least further intimidating the wounded man, at the worst, wanting to do him more harm. Some are shouting at him. Others are videotaping.

The officer opens the door to a store across the street from the park and shoves the guy inside and then closes the door. Then he and other officers turn to face the crowd. And here’s the part that is even more disconcerting.

The crowd shoves the cops, seemingly wanting to break through the tenuous and hastily assembled police line to get to the bleeding man inside. One of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators can be heard shouting “break the window.”

Police shove back and then so does the crowd. Profanities are thrown. One of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators tells a cop to “stop fucking touching me,” as he advances toward an officer again.

The officers appear to be holding their ground. And then the video ends. So we don’t see if anyone got their asses kicked by the police (although certainly had that happened the video would have surfaced by now to condemn the cops). And we don’t know if anyone was arrested.

But here’s my point.

Emotions are high over those who support one side and condemn the other over what’s happening between Israel and Gaza. Folks are going to demonstrate. And sometimes there will be counter demonstrations. We can almost expect that the two sides will confront one another. And sometimes there may even be violent interactions.

That’s why the NYPD shows up. To keep the peace. In this case, officers were also doing their duty by protecting an…