North Carolina: At Meeting in a Public Library, Anti-Israel Thugs Beat and Drag Out Three Visitors

In West Asheville, North Carolina, a group of pro-Hamas activists were having a meeting at the public library. That meeting, please note, was held on public property, and should have been open to all. But those taking part didn’t see things that way. When they discovered their meeting had three visitors, they beat those visitors and dragged them out of the room. One of their victims was an 80-year-old man with cancer and a heart stent. More on the violent assault can be found here: “Four Plead Guilty in 2024 Assault of Pro-Israel Attendees at North Carolina Library Event,” by Peter Reitzes, Algemeiner, March 13, 2026:

In 2024, two Jewish residents and an 80-year-old senior citizen were beaten and dragged out of a public event in North Carolina which celebrated Hamas and was organized by an anarchist bookfair. Now, almost two years later, four people have pleaded guilty in relation to those attacks at the West Asheville Library.

On Tuesday, three individuals entered a guilty plea for simple assault in Buncombe Superior Court, while a fourth pleaded guilty to resisting a public officer.

According to a local news report, “All four persons were placed on supervised probation for one year. As conditions of their probation, each must complete 30 hours of community service, have no contact with the victims, and refrain from posting about the event on social media.”

One of the Jewish victims, David Moritz, was in the courtroom during the proceedings and told me, “I am happy we got some measure of justice.”

Another person beaten that day in 2024 was Bob Campbell, an 80-year-old military veteran with cancer and a stent in his heart. Campbell was stomped, assaulted, and pushed to the ground, a footprint clearly visible on his shorts. Local police encouraged Campbell to see a doctor….

Take that in. A crowd of between four and twelve people (four were caught and convicted, the others are yet to be identified) surrounded and the pushed to the ground an 80-year-old man, a cancer and heart patient, and they they repeatedly stomped on him. What punishment would be fitting?

Yael Lerman, director of StandWithUs Saidoff Law, told me that her organization is “tremendously proud of the victims for working tirelessly to help identify their attackers, despite the fact that many of the attackers wore masks to conceal their identities.” Lerman said she is “thrilled” they worked together to help identify the attackers so they could “bring them to justice.”…

Ah yes. The masked bullyboys, with their simian similarity to the Italian fascisti in the 1920s, wearing passemontagne, to the fascistic cagoulards in France in the 1930s, right up to the ski-masked antisemites harassing Jews on the Columbia campus in 2025. Black masks, black thoughts.

“The victims were fearless and persistent,” Lerman continued. “One of them was in his 80s and it did not stop him from fighting back. In this day and age, a lot of people — including Jews — feel fearful. The victims in this case are wonderful role models.”

One caveat: the four malefactors — with several more still to be caught — were given identical sentences that were much too light. They were placed on supervised probation for only one year. During that time, they will have to complete 30 hours of community service. I would have thought six months in jail, at a minimum, would have been appropriate, along with a stiff fine. As the French mordantly say about severe punishments, pour encourager les autres.