Haaretz is reporting today that the New York City Police Department has identified the arsonist who has set fire to seven Bukharan Jewish homes in Forest Hills, a heavily Jewish neighborhood of Queens.

The article reports:

Police said the fires are not hate crimes, but were motivated by the arsonist’s opposition to new construction of Bukharan Jewish homes in Forest Hills, a heavily Jewish neighborhood of Queens.

…“If seven Jewish homes had been burned in France within a month, there would be much more of an uproar,” said Boris Yuabov, a doctor who has lived in the community for the past six years.

“We are scared,” he added. “These fires are started in the dead of night in a neighborhood with many children and elderly individuals. This is a life-threatening situation.”

This is what anti-Semitism looks like. If these houses had belonged to a different group of people, I wonder if it would have been considered a hate crime.