October 28, 2018

These Exploitations Of The Pittsburgh Attack Deride Its Victims

Yesterday's terror attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh was committed by a man with extremely anti-Jewish and anti-immigration views. It is third attack on houses of worship in three years.

Like the earlier incidents it is a heinous crime for ignominious reasons.

But there is little sound reason to blame the incident on Trump. It does not justify to falsely claim "increased anti-semitism". To exploit it for a racist driven colonial cause makes a mockery of its victims.

The New York Times reports:

Armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and at least three handguns, a man shouting anti-Semitic slurs opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday morning, killing at least 11 congregants and wounding four police officers and two others, the authorities said.

...

The assailant, identified by law enforcement officials as Robert D. Bowers, fired for several minutes and was leaving the synagogue when officers, dressed in tactical gear and armed with rifles, met him at the door. According to the police, Mr. Bowers exchanged gunfire with officers before retreating back inside and barricading himself inside a third-floor room. He eventually surrendered.

From reading between the lines we learn that the killer is not a Muslim. Otherwise he would be called a 'terrorist'. We can also conclude that the killer was white. Otherwise the police would have killed him.

The murderer was extremely anti-Jewish. He was a white supremacist who had the delusion that people of Jewish belief caused all the problems he perceived:

The suspect in the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue told officers that Jews were committing genocide and that he wanted them all to die, according to a charging document made public early Sunday.

...

Worshippers “were brutally murdered by a gunman targeting them simply because of their faith,” said Bob Jones, head of the FBI’s Pittsburgh office, though he cautioned the shooter’s full motive was not yet known.

Social network posts by Robert Bowers show that the immediate reason for attacking the synagogue was last week's National Refugee Shabbat ceremony by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS):

Hours before Saturday morning's shooting, the account posted again, "HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in."

HIAS is 137 years old organization founded by and for Jews who were fleeing pogroms in Russia. It nowadays supports all refugees. The killers hate for HIAS points to the ideological closeness of white supremacists and Zionists:

On the Jewish far right, the Zionist Organization of America has attacked HIAS and other Jewish organizations for lobbying to admit Syrian refugees to the U.S. and has accused HIAS of doing so for profit.



The NYT tries to connect the incident with Trump:

[The assault] also took place in the wake of the arrest Friday morning of a man who the authorities said sent more than a dozen pipe bombs to critics of Mr. Trump, including several high-profile Democrats.

The pipe bombs, which could not have killed anyone, were sent by a Trump supporting loon in Florida. All were detect before they reached their intended target.

The Pittsburgh killer hated Trump. He rallied against him on social networks as being controlled by Jews. He wrote that he did not vote for him. From his archived tweets (part 1, part 2):

Trump is a globalist, not a nationalist. There is no #MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation.

But the NYT report ignores the killer's anti-Trump stand. It goes on to blame the incident on Trump's rhetoric:

The anguish of Saturday’s massacre heightened a sense of national unease over increasingly hostile political rhetoric. Critics of President Trump have argued that he is partly to blame for recent acts of violence because he has been stirring the pot of nationalism, on Twitter and at his rallies, charges that Mr. Trump has denied.

This ignores that Trump uses the same nationalistic rhetoric that all U.S. presidents use:

At the U.S. Military Academy last year, Obama pronounced unequivocally: “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.”

Nor are anti-immigration positions a Trump phenomenon. It was Obama who was called the "deporter-in-chief":

More than 2.8 million undocumented immigrants have been deported over the last eight years, ...

Extreme nationalism and anti-immigration positions are as American as apple-pie. Hostile political rhetoric in the U.S. is certainly not a one-sided issue. It was Hillary Clinton who spoke of citizens as "deplorable" people. It is only Trump's style, not the content, that differentiates his "stirring the pot" from that of other politicians. To blame this incident on Trump is an attempt to avert that insight.



The NYT also conflates the killers anti-immigration motive with 'anti-semitism' when it cites the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) with a false statistic:

[The massacre] came amid rising anxiety about illegal immigration and in a decade that has seen an uptick in hate crimes. According to an annual report by the Anti-Defamation League issued earlier this year, the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in the United States surged 57 percent in 2017, the largest rise in a single year since the A.D.L. began tracking such crimes in 1979.

The ADL does not track "such crimes", but any incident its perceives as harassment or threat or "anti-semitic". The extreme rise in the 2017 ADL statistics only appeared because the ADL fudged the numbers, as other Jewish organizations criticized, by including hundreds of threats a unstable Jewish teen made against Jewish institutions:

A 19-year-old American-Israeli man was convicted of making hundreds of bomb threats to Jewish community centers and Jewish schools in the United States, as well as airlines.

...

The hoax threats to the JCCs and other Jewish institutions in the first three months of 2017 forced widespread evacuations and raised fears of a resurgence in anti-Semitism. Kadar’s parents and lawyer have not disputed his involvement in the bomb threats but asserted in his defense that he has a brain tumor and a low IQ.

The ADL not only fudge its numbers but notoriously conflates hate against people of Jewish belief with anti-Zionist activism like the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The alleged increase in anti-semitism ADL claims is a 'shark story':

The Brandeis Center’s Marcus said some recent reports of anti-Semitic incidents “are what one might call ‘shark stories,’” referring to media reports about shark attacks several summers ago. Many people, he said, “feared that shark attacks were spiking, and experts struggled to identify the reason. At the end of the day, it turned out that such attacks were not increasing at all—there were more stories about them because the shark narrative had caught the attention of influential editors and media outlets.”



Robert D. Bowers was active on the social media platforms Facebook and Gab, a Twitter like service with a minimum of censorship. He posted and reposted lots of anti-Jewish slander. Gab, which is often used by people who are censored elsewhere, reacted immediately after the incident. It archived and closed the account and informed the police. Nonetheless it was immediately censored itself. Paypal, which Gab used to collect donations, shut down its account without giving any specific reason. Such unreasonable reaction will only reinforce the extreme right feeling of being persecuted.



The Israeli government will send its probably most racist member, education minister Naftali Bennet, to exploit the incident for its colonization of Palestine. Bennet boasted about killing Arabs:

“I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there’s no problem with that.”

He calls refugees who came to Israel "infiltrators". He would have applauded the killer if the target had been some other religious group:

Education Minister Naftali Bennett won the backing of a leading anti-illegal immigration activist Thursday, after he vowed to block plans to legalize hundreds of Sudanese infiltrators.

...

On Thursday, [..], the Jewish Home party, led by Education Minister Naftali Bennett, announced that it would block implementation of the Interior Ministry’s plan to grant residency permits to the 300 Sudanese.

...

"There's no justification for absorbing those infiltrators in Israel."

Israel declared itself an Apartheid state. Its government holds the same extreme rightwing views against 'others' as the attacker in Pittsburgh. Like him it confuses people of Jewish belief with a race. Like him it rallies against immigration. Sending Bennet to exploit the terror attack is a mockery of its victims.

Posted by b on October 28, 2018 at 17:22 UTC | Permalink

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