LAKEWOOD, NJ – Lakewood Township Chief of Police Gregory Meyer said his department will be increasing police patrols in the community in the aftermath of the Buffalo mass shooting. After the shooting, it was learned that the shooter referenced the greater Lakewood area and criticized Orthodox Jews living in the towns of Toms River and Lakewood.
A gunman shot and killed ten people and in his 180-page manifesto, mentioned the Orthodox Jewish community.
Related: Did Buffalo Mass Shooter Reference Ocean County’s Orthodox Jewish Community in Manifesto?
In that manifesto Payton Gendron quoted a January 2020 article entitled Wave of Antisemitism Exaggerated, penned by AFP author Phil Girardi.
Indeed, the whole story of Hasidic community growth and its impact on some established neighborhoods has been pretty much ignored by the mainstream press. Hasidic activities in Brooklyn, in Jersey City, in New York ex-urb Bloomingburg and Lakewood and Toms River, New Jersey are deplorable, and attempts by local communities to fight back are regularly met with claims that the locals are anti-Semites. Hasidim routinely register their homes as places of worship to avoid property taxes, making other local residents pay for police and fire services as well as maintenance of infrastructure. When sufficient Hasidim become residents to get elected to the public school board, they divert the funding of state provided education to support their own private schools. As Hasidim get married within their community and do not register with the state, the women routinely file as single mothers to get public childcare subsidy checks. The men often do not work at all so they can study the Talmud so they are able to engage in wholesale welfare fraud, claiming poverty, to get food stamps, social security, and other money services.
Hasidim also do not consider the judicial system applicable to themselves. They have private courts that have served to hide criminals including even child molesters in their community. Once they achieve a certain presence in a town or city neighborhood, they buy up buildings and force long-term residents out. They ignore building codes and zoning to bring in co-religionists with their large families, and, once established, they create enclaves that are hostile to outsiders
AFP author Phil Girardi – Quoted by Payton Gendron
“In response to Saturday’s events in Buffalo the Lakewood Police Department has added extra patrols and we are working with our law enforcement partners in providing extra security for our community,” Chief Meyer said Tuesday night.
Last night, Ocean County Prosecutor Bradley Billhimer said he did not believe Gendron had any intentions to inflict mass casualties in Lakewood, but simply copied and pasted the Girardi rant as his own in his manifesto.
Billhimer confirmed an early breaking news report by Shore News Network that revealed most of the gunman’s manifesto was a copy and paste work that sourced large portions of the document from other authors.
“At this time, we could not confirm the authenticity of the manifesto, but the information within it provides a clear and present link to the gunman who live-streamed his rampage on Twitch,” Billhimer said.
The referenced quote echoes passages that are frequent on many social media pages in the communities of Toms River, Jackson Lakewood, and the surrounding communities. There are several social media pages and groups dedicated solely to reporting the misdeeds and perceived misdeeds of the Ocean County Jewish community which serve as an incubator for the anti-Jewish sentiment that fills those pages.
Some in the community have radicalized to become ‘watchdogs’ of the alleged misdeeds of Orthdox Jews in Ocean County.
Some pages have been removed from Facebook and Twitter and condemned by the Ocean County Board of Commissioners, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, and local politicians.