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Illness. That attack is just the latest in a string of violent antisemitic incidents across the area. Moments ago, i spoke to the rabbi from the pittsburgh synagogue where a gunman killed 11 jews last year. This was his sobering assessment. It made me sort of wonder, i dont recall them selling licensings to have open hunting season on jews but it can make jews feel that way. Do you feel that way now . Thats quite a statement. It sure makes you pause and wonder whats going on in our society that people feel that they have a godgiven right to attack any human being for whatever reason they choose to. It makes you pause and wonder whats going on, indeed. It does. Moments ago i spoke with joseph, an orthodox jew who survived a stabbing attack at the rabbis home and he spoke about how he fought back to stop the attacker. I was sitting in the rabbis dining room when the rabbi finished the candle Lighting Ceremony and when the attacker came in. He first stood in the entry room, started hitting people right and left with his big machete knife, i dont know what it was, and then thats when i started to run together with the people in the dining room. We ran out through the back of the house, the back door outside. I ran back to the front door to see if i could help anyone from the other side. Thats when i when i came back the other guy who had the fracture, was Still Standing there and bleeding i said come out, come out, the guy is still in the kitchen, lets go out. He said i cant. Im bleeding, i cant. Thats when i saw him coming back towards me. I ran out and i saw that he went to the old guy. I came back in, grabbed the coffee table that was on the floor hit him in his face and thats when he came back outside after me. He told me hey, you, ill get you. He started walking towards me and i was running, i was going before him like a few feet, screaming hes coming, hes coming so everybody in the synagogue should runaway. He went almost to the door of the synagogue, reached for the door, it was locked, went to the next door it was locked too. Thats when he walked down a side street towards his car. I didnt know where he was walking. I walked with him slowly. I looked at his plate number. Called 911. I came back up the street. The Police Officers were already there. I wonder what your message is to the governor of new york who has called this clearly an act of domestic terrorism. What is your message to him . What do you believe authorities, lawmakers should do in response . Condemn acts of violence always in the hardest way possible and our local officials should also condemn every time there is an act of violence and shouldnt be calling out differences between races and to try to ignite hate between races and communities with one another. Do gods work. As a hasidic jew, do you feel that you specifically are being targeted because of the fact that faith is so much a part of your life and part of how you dress, your appearance . Do you feel unsafe daily now as a result and like you are even more of a target now . No, i dont feel like i am the target. There might be some here and there, but i dont feel like a target. Somebody who wants to attack a jew he is not going to look for a liberal jew who doesnt look like a jew. He will first go around to find the first one dressed to the nines, as they call it, and try to attack him. It doesnt mean that im not safe here, less safe now than i was last month, last year, that im going to be next month. I believe we are all in gods hands. Nothing we can do will change it, besides prayers and doing good deeds, thats the only thing thats going to change anything from evil to good. Do you feel like a hero this morning . Because that is certainly how it appears to all of us. I dont feel like a hero. I feel god is the hero. He sent me in the right place, right time and gave me the right set of mind. I dont know if i would have done it tomorrow or yesterday. In that exact moment thats what god gave me and thats how i reacted. Before you go, could you tell us a bit more about the children in the home and their reaction . Obviously there were infants, but i assume also toddlers, some younger children. What was it like going through this and seeing their faces in the middle of it . Ill tell you that my kids didnt sleep saturday night. They came into my bed to try to they couldnt fall asleep until yesterday late afternoon. This night they were all in my bed. They couldnt fall asleep until 2 00 a. M. They were not even there. They hear about it for me, two hours later they were traumatized. There were a lot of kids there i saw shaking and vomiting blood hours later from fear. There was one kid hiding in the entry room behinds the coats, threw coats on his head to hide. I believe he didnt come out from his home until now. Theres a lot of adults traumatized. Kids, adults, traumatized, feeling like theyre under attack because the evidence is lately they are. Monsey is not alone. 20 days ago three Orthodox Jews were killed in jersey city, jersey, when two people armed with guns targeted a kosher supermarket. Joining me is the mayor of jersey city, he called that an act of domestic terrorism. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for having me. The same question we asked you not just two weeks ago when you were here. Yeah. Whats going on . Well, i think theres an undercurrent of antisemitism that existed for some time and youre seeing it more out in the open and its scary and very sad. Is it in some way the mainstreaming of antisemitism . You have to have an honest conversation about antisemitism still existing today and people used to think of antisemites as the neo nazi skinhead, today it seems different and percolating in a lot of different communities and we need to understand why. Its not limited to one place. It seems to be pretty widespread. Yep. You hear things from Public Officials sometimes that sound like antisemitism, thats one thing, you see these attacks, thats another thing, but all under the broad umbrella. I think that language plays a part into it and once you see one attack, likely you see more and more following. Unfortunately, you see that happening. I mean i do think that theres always a relationship when you see some close together like monsey and jersey city and the Media Coverage that is and you see Mental Illness and one thing leads to another. Mental illness may have existed in the case in monsey or not, but that in and of itself doesnt separate it from antisemitism, because sometimes hate is something that can be susceptible to those. Yes. I think that Mental Illness is not an excuse for it but Mental Illness can certainly lead more lick i likely to the type of violence were seeing in these communities. What can you do . Certainly education components in school and children. You need to be aggressive around calling out hate crimes early and i think that you need to work on bringing communities together. In the last three weeks thats what weve been working on in jersey city, trying to bring communities together that maybe didnt get together as frequently as they should have. I want to point out we didnt see any of the indicators in jersey city that you would likely see prior to an antisemitic attack. We didnt see swastikas or fights with children or any of those instances. Its been challenging for us to get arms around it. How is it going, when youre putting these communities together . At the leadership level there are conversations that are productive and people talk about differences. We need to get that more into the community because you can still see on social media some language around hate and divisiveness which is coming we want to get in the core community. I want to put on the screen so people can see, between 2015 and 2018, the adl says attacks on jews incidents have gone up 99 in that time if we have that graphic that would be great. You can see this is a national problem. For sure. Its happening around the country. Do you think that a federal domestic terror law would be helpful here . We have to think about how we classify and look at those for sure. As i said its not the typical neo nazi white skinhead antisemite when people think of racism or antisemitic actions. Its in every Different Community and were calling out frequently and aggressively as we can but looking at the laws would be helpful. Having gone through what you went through weeks ago, what was it like when you heard the news saturday night . Look, its personal for me. Im a grandson of Holocaust Survivors who em grated to this country. It makes us work harder on pushing down on it and being aggressive and calling it out. We appreciate you being with us this morning. Good luck on the work youre doing in your city. Appreciate fight it is tough to see, but it has to be dealt with and you have to have the discussions out in the open for sure, bringing the communities together is one way of doing it. Well talk to Governor Cuomo ahead about his push for a statewide domestic terrorism law, but youre bringing up on a federal level, lawmakers are going to have to address this. Its just i think people dont realize it doesnt exist. I agree. Something they want to exist, something that congress will have to deal with. Thats true. Well be right back. Most people think of verizon as a reliable phone company. But to businesses, were a reliable partner. We Keep Companies ready for whats next. man we weave security into their business. second man virtualize their operations. woman and build ai customer experiences. second woman we also keep them ready for the next big opportunity. Like 5g. Almost all of the fortune 500 partner with us. woman when it comes to digital transformation. Verizon keeps business ready. All right. Welcome back. The New York Times with a really important piece of reporting on the 84 days of the ukraine saga if you will, reporting former National Security adviser john bolton, secretary of defense mark esper and the secretary of state mike pompeo around the president s desk tried to convince him in august to reverse course on freezing that aid to ukraine. Political commentator Scott Jennings is here, a contributing columnist for the l. A. Times, Bakari Sellers also joins us. Good morning one and all. Happy holidays, merry christmas. Hope you had a good one. The fact that, bakari, we have this now newly undisclosed, now disclosed, meeting because of the New York Times reporting with the three key people so high up in this administration pleading with the president in august to stop, stop holding this funding from ukraine, people who could testify to this, people in the room, how significant is that . Well, i think what it shows is that this investigation still has some hallways and some doors to go through. Theres no reason that john bolton doesnt come testify, theres no reason that pompeo doesnt have to at least answer written questions, mick mulvaney, of course, if you read the piece he seems to be a central figure in this. It was dual tracks. I think that people are forgetting that sometimes. It wasnt just Rudy Giuliani and his campaign to solicit information against joe biden, but it was also this track of withholding the information. I mean i read the piece and i could just think about this is an amazing tom clancy novel. It just goes and meanders from one side to another, but the fact is that the person at the center of this, the person at the center of all of this who is the puppeteer for both of these tracks is donald trump. You know, its behavior thats impeachable and the behavior that got him impeached. What did you find compelling in this story . Couple of things. Number one, i did is think it was interesting that several senior officials in the u. S. Government tried to talk the president out of it. The president , another issue i thought was interesting, has a longstanding distrust for all u. S. Foreign aid and i suspect thats going to become a part of their defense when they get to the senate. Senior officials around the u. S. Government were trying to convince the president this foreign aid is a good thing, we get good results from it, and i disagree with the president on that and agree with the senior officials. Foreign aid appropriated by congress should be released. That was interesting to me. The other thing that was interesting as bakari said, theres a lot of things that have to be discovered which makes me wonder why didnt the house of representatives wait and continue its discovery and bring people in. He mentioned john bolton. They never subpoenaed john bolton but now theyre asking the senate to do that homework for them. Those are the things that stood out to me in the piece. Scott, if i could ask you to turn to the senate trial if were going to have one, you have worked closely with mcconnell over the years. Youve advised him. Whats he going to do here . Well, what he has said he wants to do is pretty simple, he would like to have the rules package they used during the clinton impeachment of 199 8 in which the senate heard presentations from both sides and then the senators decided that they needed to hear from some witnesses at that point. What he has said here, lets hear presentations and then well let the senators decide if they need more information. Seems like a reasonable way to do it given thats how we did the last one and given that the democratic leader of the senate today Chuck Schumer supported that rules package last time around. He doesnt know, i dont think, when nancy pelosi is going to stop the shenanigans and send the articles of impeachment over. His preference would be to do this like they handled the clinton situation. John kennedy was on with jake yesterday, senator kennedy from louisiana, had things assessment, senator kennedys view, hes just trying to be fair to the democrats here by not calling witnesses. If we tomorrow agreed with senator schumer, who i think is speaking for speaker pelosi, to call all of the witnesses that he wants, i fully expect the president to do two things, claim executive privilege, which is his right, and number two, demand his own list of witnesses. Right. Now, if the president does that, we could end up with a scenario where chuck caught the car. The president s witnesses dont testify, ifs the senate doesnt want to pursue it in court, but senator schumers witnesses dont testify but the president s witnesses do. I dont think senator schumer would think thats fair. Looking out for senator Chuck Schumer there. Bigger picture, if you have House Speaker nancy pelosi and Senate Majority leader Mitch Mcconnell in this high stakes legislative faceoff, who wins . How does this end, bakari . Well, the American People dont win because what Mitch Mcconnell said and what senator kennedy just said is that i mean theyre rigging the game. This is patently unfair. You talk about Mitch Mcconnell saying that hes working hand and glove with the white house, there will be no daylight in between. Thats fine, thats his prerogative because there are no rules. You see what senator kennedy said. They know the president will claim executive privilege and claim that and what he told jake yesterday, theyre not going to go to court to force his hand. Meaning that there will be no witnesses for anybody other than the president of the United States. If you are nancy pelosi or anybody who believes in any sort of fairness, why would you why would you allow or enable the United States senate and those two senators who have simply said that they dont have any intentions of making this fair and just, why would you allow it to go forward . Until you get some concessions for it to go forward, that is the most absurd thing for kennedy to say that, but theres no way i was going to allow them, if i was nancy pelosi, to trample on the constitution and every notion of fairness. Before you go, if you could weigh in on the sad news we learned overnight, that is the fact that civil rights icon, congressman john lieu wish has been diagnosed with stage four pan attic cancer and he talked about fighting his whole life but called this the biggest fight of his life, what has he meant for this country . He is a lion, someone who comes from the generation of my father, the generation of freedom fighters. We dont truly understand the struggle, the courage they had to display when they were on freedom rides down in mississippi and alabama when they were registering voters, when people like emmett till and others would go miss and their bodies would be thrown and lynched in the mississippi. These men and women gave up so much and so while he is sick and while this sickness is ravaging his body, his mind is still extremely clear and because his mind is still extremely clear we need to make sure we give him his flowers while hes living and let everyone know and let john lewis know how much we love him and how much we, as we go through impeachment and everything else, we try to believe in the better angels of our nature and congressman know from the sellers family we love you and lift you up in prayer. Thanks so much for being with us. Scott jennings, pleasure to see you as well. Merry christmas to both of you and happy new year. Developing overnight iranian backed militia in iraq calling for u. S. Forces to be pushed out of that country after a series of u. S. Air strikes in iraq and syria that have targeted the militias there. Ryan brown is live at the pentagon with the latest in what is the latest here and what does the u. S. Anticipate the next move to be . Thats the key question right now. The u. S. Taking this action to strike these five targets three in iraq, a headquarters, operation center, weapons storage facility, u. S. Dispatching fighters to strike all five targets, as part of a retaliation against a deadly attack that the u. S. Blames this iranian backed militia for. There had been a series of militia iranian backed militia attacks against u. S. Iraqi facilities that did not result in american casualties but fridays attack did. The u. S. Taking a retaliatory response. We got new video showing one of these strikes in western iraq. You see that here. The department of defense released this video showing that strike. The u. S. Hoping this stops these iranian ba