The Times of Israel draws on an AP report to home in on the attack on Chabad Rabbi Shlomo Noginski, stabbed 8 times outside a Jewish day school in Boston by one Khaled Awad. Of course, “Police said the motive for the stabbing was unclear as the investigation is underway.”
We wish the Boston police working the case Godspeed. Until they unravel the mystery, readers may draw their inferences from the facts of the story:
Rabbi Shlomo Noginski was speaking on the phone on the steps outside a Jewish day school in Boston’s Brighton neighborhood at around 1 p.m. on Thursday, when he was approached by a suspect brandishing a gun and knife. The perpetrator drew the gun and told Noginski to take him to his car. When he tried to force him inside, Noginski started to flee and the suspect chased him and stabbed him several times.
Noginski was taken to the hospital for treatment and was released on Friday. Police arrested Khaled Awad, 24, for the attack and charged him with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
“It hurts. I was stabbed eight times, mainly in the arm, some in the stomach [area],” Noginski told Channel 12 news on Friday from his home where he was recovering from his injuries. The attacker, he said, “tried to hurt me dozens of times. I thank God for this big miracle, thank God it ended this way.”
Police said the motive for the stabbing was unclear as the investigation is underway. District Attorney Rachael Rollins said at a vigil in support of Noginksi on Friday that her office has opened a civil rights investigation to determine whether the stabbing is a hate crime.
“We have to recognize that antisemitism is on the rise, and we need to hold people accountable when they do this, so that they are made an example of,” Rollins said at the vigil not far from the stabbing site, attended by several hundred people.
Rabbi Noginski has drawn his own inferences from the facts as he saw them at first-hand:
“Unequivocally, it was an antisemitic incident,” Noginski told Channel 12 on Friday. “This is how I feel, I felt in that moment that he was trying to kill me, not [trying] to steal my car. He wanted to capture me and kill me.”
The rabbi said he offered the attacker the keys to his car. “He didn’t want the car, he didn’t ask for my wallet, or for money, or anything. He didn’t want anything. He really tried to aim for my heart, my body, which is significant.”
Noginski shot down the possibility that the attack was a botched robbery. “I think that if something goes wrong in a robbery, there’s no sense in pursuing the person and stabbing them for long moments. I don’t see another possibility, that it was something else. There’s nothing else it could be,” he said.
I’m thinking we would likely have heard a bit more about all this if the roles were reversed or the identities shuffled to introduce a preferred victim group on Rabbi Noginski’s side of the transaction.
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