With anti-Semitism and hate crimes on the rise, U.S. voters must check Donald Trump’s power

In the wake of the massacre of 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, considerable attention was paid to the fact that the shooter openly advertised his murderous intentions on a recently founded media platform called Gab, favoured by the extreme right.

Gab and similar platforms may be new, but the hard truth is that the attack was just a horrific example of an ancient evil — anti-Semitic hatred. The man who gunned down worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue may have used 21st-century tools to carry out his mission, but his hatred of Jews has echoes that go back many centuries.

Tragically, there is ample evidence that hate crimes against Jews are on the rise in the United States, in Canada, and in Europe as well. The Pittsburgh attack was the deadliest single incident targeting Jews in American history, according to the Anti-Defamation League, but it’s part of a deeply disturbing trend.

The numbers speak for themselves. The ADL says the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. is up by a shocking 57 per cent just since 2017, including the infamous neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., when marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us.” Here in Canada, B’Nai Brith says similar incidents are up by more than a quarter since 2015.

In Europe, far-right parties are on the rise and anti-Jewish rhetoric is sneaking back into the mainstream. Jews there also feel targeted by Islamist groups, and sometimes by those who take opposition to Israeli government policies to the point of calling for the destruction of the Jewish state.

This is tragic, coming after decades when it seemed that, in North America at least, antiSemitism had been banished to the far fringes of society and Jews had become more accepted and successful than ever before.

Now we see that anti-Semitism, along with hate crimes directed at other vulnerable groups, is becoming more, not less, common. Even worse, some mainstream politicians in the U.S. are fanning those flames, playing on old tropes that portray Jews as rootless “globalists” conspiring behind the scenes against ordinary Americans.

These are stereotypes that should long ago have been erased, but are spreading faster and further than before with the connivance or at least the quiet compliance of too many in authority who should know better.

Then, of course, there is Donald Trump himself. It can be no coincidence that his rise to the White House coincided with a marked uptick in hate crimes of all sorts, including anti-Semitic acts. The president has played his well-documented part in giving oxygen to those on the extreme right, as when he notoriously blamed “both sides” for violence around the Charlottesville riot.

And as the political atmosphere in the U.S. becomes more heated a week from mid-term elections, Trump has done nothing to calm the waters. Instead, he has gone out of his way to stir up fear and hatred, evidently calculating that will rouse his so-called “base” to get out and vote next Tuesday. He has, for example, demonized the “caravan” of Central Americans attempting to reach the U.S. border, portraying a group of desperate migrants hundreds of kilometres from American territory as an imminent threat to national security.

Is it possible to draw a line between that kind of rhetoric and what happened in Pittsburgh? No. But neither is it possible to deny that the political leader with the loudest public voice of all can escape responsibility for creating a climate of intolerance and hatred in which the worst types of extremists feel emboldened and empowered.

It is too much to hope at this point that Trump will reverse course and truly act like a leader. He has chosen his path. And given that, it becomes more important than ever for American voters to demonstrate their decency next week and check his power. The stakes could hardly be greater. — Toronto Star