Over the past year or so there have been reports of Knockout Game attacks in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and as far away as London, where video captured one punch flattening a 16-year-old girl. And last week, perhaps in homage to the fact that the game is gaining national attention, there were six such attacks in New Haven, CT over a two-day period. An attack in San Diego last week may herald the Knockout Game’s arrival on the West Coast.

The “experts,” of course, are expertly clueless. Psychology professor Paul Boxer of Rutgers University calls the perps “impressionable kids” who are running around punching people dead “not because they are hoping to hurt somebody, [but] it’s more about risk taking, and new, different and exciting ways of getting into trouble.” Dr. Joel Fein of the Philadelphia Collaborative Violence Prevention Center speaks with near-reverence of the “significant inner rage a lot of these children are expressing.” A spokesman for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Research and Evaluation Center suggests that despite what your eyes tell you, it would be a mistake to see this phenomenon “through the lens of race” and that anyone who views the phenomenon thusly is expressing their own misguided fears and inadequacies. “The root of this Knockout Game,” opines James Clark of Better Family Life in St. Louis, “is the lack of recreational opportunities and neighborhood-based programs for our young people.”

Even little Phoebe Connolly in Washington, DC, who was punched by a black teen that came up to her and said “KA-POW!” before bloodying her nose as his friends laughed, says it only demonstrates “why we need to better support our youth with activities and youth programs…it’s great to see teenagers do incredible things when they’re supported and empowered.”

Seems to me as if they’re plenty empowered. Hell, they might suffer from a surfeit of empowerment.

Even Al Sharpton isn’t as blind as these white enablers and ethnomasochists. He calls the Knockout Game “insane thuggery” and concedes that “We would not be silent if it was the other way around.” Black Atlanta radio host T. J. Sotomayor recorded a 16-minute video where he says white people should counter the Knockout Game with one called Shootout Game.

But it seems this only became a national story when Jewish leaders spoke up and demanded action after a string of attacks in Brooklyn that left multiple Jewish victims. In some cases the victims were Hasidim and thus obviously Jewish, but in others, such as the attack on a 78-year-old woman, it strains belief to think that roving packs of dumb-as-a-stump black teens looking for blood would be able to tell a 78-year-old Jewess from a 78-year-old shiksa. The attackers may not have been able to distinguish one light-skinned person from another. We may all look the same to them”€”pale, easy targets.

New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, Rabbi Yaacov Behrman of the Jewish Future Alliance, and Evan Bernstein of the ADL sprung into action, petitioning everyone from NYC’s Police Commissioner to President Obama to what I will gently suggest is a sympathetic media to publicize and rectify this horrifying trend that had Brooklyn’s Jewish community on edge. In no time at all, an alleged assailant was being charged with a hate crime. These scrappy Tribesmen may not have fought back with their fists, but they used every other available blunt instrument to finally make this a national story. Non-Jewish whites could learn a lesson from such tenacious group solidarity.

Failing that, they could take a tip from the unnamed 40-year-old white man in Michigan who turned the tables on 17-year-old Marvell Weaver and planted two .40-caliber bullets in his ass. Street animals are less likely to pounce on those who haven”€™t been entirely tamed. But any strategy, whether pursued in the courts or on the streets, would be better than taking it on the chin.