20 MINUTES OF TERROR
Jew-hating gunman kills 11 worshippers in synagogue rampage
TWO brothers and a woman of 97 are among the 11 victims of the worst anti-Semitic shooting in US history.
Cecil and David Rosenthal, 59 and 54, were killed at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh along with Rose Mallinger.
A married couple – Bernice and Sylvan Simon, 84 and 86 – were also slaughtered by Robert Bowers. The Jew-hating fanatic wounded four police officers and two more worshippers in his 20-minute rampage with an assault rifle and three handguns.
He has been charged with 29 federal hate crimes and violence and firearms offences which could lead to the death penalty.
As he was arrested on Saturday morning he is alleged to have said ‘All Jews must die’ for committing ‘genocide to his people’.
Bowers, 46, has a disturbing history on social media. He praised Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust on Gab, an alternative to Twitter used by white supremacists.
An hour before the atrocity he posted a chilling message saying Jews like to ‘ bring invaders in that kill our people’.
He wrote: ‘I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.’
The shooting took place in Squirrel Hill, a Pittsburgh neighbourhood which is home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the US. Three services marking the day of rest were taking place at the synagogue.
Chuck Diamond, a former rabbi there, told ABC News: ‘The gunman came in through the door where people enter. The door is not locked on Sabbath. He came in, went downstairs first, a few people were killed down there.’
Police audio has officers calling for backup from ‘every unit in the city’ as they announced they were ‘being attacked’. An officer can be heard saying: ‘We’re under fire. He’s got an automatic weapon and firing at us from the synagogue.’
The Rosenthal brothers worshipped at the synagogue without fail every Saturday, according to their friend Chris Schopf. Another friend, David DeFelice, said: ‘Cecil
and David had a love for life and for those around them. They loved their community.’ Another of the victims, Jerry Rabinowitz, 66, was a family doctor. His patient Susan Blackman said: ‘I can’t imagine the world without him. He was like a member of the family, a member of the extended family. Dr Jerry was just somebody who, when you see him, your eyes light up.’ Daniel Stein, 71, who was also shot dead, was a little league baseball coach who had recently
become a grandfather. Investigators found bodies in three different locations in the synagogue and there were no signs that Bowers had accomplices. Two survivors are in a critical condition in hospital. agent Robert in charge Jones, of the the FBI Pittsburgh special field office, said the initial shots were fired at 9.45am and paramedics were called at 9.54am. He said police engaged Bowers as he was leaving the building – without which there was ‘a strong possibility that additional violence may have occurred’.
Bowers suffered multiple gunshot wounds but was said to be in a stable condition in hospital.
Donald Trump said the suspect should face the death penalty. When asked about gun laws, he said the shooting had ‘little to do with it’ and claimed the worshippers could have stopped Bowers had they been armed. Last night Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto disagreed with the President.
He said: ‘The approach that we need to be looking at is how to take the guns – which is the common denominator of every mass shooting in America – out of the hands of those that are looking to express hatred through murder.’
Bowers is due to appear in court today. On his social media profile a banner image included a radar gun showing the numbers 1488, a white supremacist numeric symbol.
The 14 stands for the 14-word slogan: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’. The 88 refers to Heil Hitler, referring to the eighth letter of the alphabet.
In one post online, Bowers showed off his collection of guns in cases, calling them ‘my Glock family’. In another post he wrote: ‘Daily Reminder: Diversity means chasing down the last white person.’
The other victims were named as: Joyce Fienberg, 75, Richard Gottfried, 65, Melvin Wax, 88, and Irving Younger, 69.
Amid the general revulsion at the murderous assault on Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue, one organisation was chirpily broadcasting how this horror was good for business.
The social media site Gab had been rapidly identified as the platform used by Robert Bowers, the virulent antiSemite arrested for the killings.
And so, on its Twitter account, Gab boasted yesterday: ‘We have been getting 1 million hits an hour all day.’
There could be no clearer illustration of the way in which the social media monetise the propagation of vile abuse. Gab is a minnow compared with Facebook and Twitter, but its business model is the same. it is just a bit more honest in admitting it.
Cesar Sayoc, the man who last week allegedly posted a dozen pipe bombs to the addresses of prominent critics of President donald Trump, had himself used Twitter to communicate violent threats. Yet the social media platform had cursorily brushed aside complaints about his account.
A fortnight before the pipe bombs were mailed, Rochelle Ritchie, a former press secretary for the democrats who appears frequently on television, had complained to Twitter that the account now known to be that of Sayoc had been sending deeply menacing messages to her.
Complaint
They included images of human body parts, and one of his tweets to her read: ‘We will see you 4 sure, Hug your loved ones real close every time you leave home.’
But when Ritchie reported this to Twitter, the company that same day rebuffed her, insisting that his tweets did not breach their guidelines.
Naturally, now that Sayoc has been arrested, Twitter has taken down his account and has told Ritchie that its previous assessment of her complaint was ‘made in error’. it wasn’t an error: it was policy. The big social media companies are not merely disinterested providers of a platform to allow humanity to meet online, as they like to portray it, but hardheaded businesses whose revenues derive from accumulating the largest number of users and targeting advertising at them.
So they have a profound reluctance to close accounts — partly because they fear that those shut down will move to a rival social media company instead.
indeed, it seems that Gab had promoted itself as being even less fastidious than Twitter (which is saying something).
This might be described as the media version of Gresham’s Law, which states that ‘bad money drives out good’. The social media behemoths, notably Facebook, are taking the overwhelming proportion of advertising revenues at the expense, mostly, of the newspaper industry. it is the principal reason for the extinction of so many local newspapers, both in the U.S. and this country.
As someone who has spent the past 40 years in the newspaper business, i can be accused of commercial sour grapes. But even those without a vested interest can surely see there is a trick being pulled by social media companies.
They claim that they are not publishers at all, but just ‘ tech’ businesses. Governments have accepted this, and that means these firms are exempt from all the responsibilities and liabilities that the law imposes on traditional publishers.
if the daily mail publishes defamatory articles, it is liable to be sued for libel. And, under the Press regulator IPSO, it can be fined up to £1million and made to publish retractions in full — even on the front page if that is deemed necessary by the regulator.
None of this applies to those whose platforms are used by the likes of Robert Bowers and Cesar Sayoc.
Facebook, for example, likes to argue that it is akin to the Post Office, which is not liable in law for any poison pen or blackmail letter that’s sent via its service.
But there are two essential differences. The Post Office does not attach advertisements to any poison pen letters that it sends across the country, so does not seek to monetise threats of violence. Secondly, short of steaming all its customers’ letters open, it has no way of knowing what is being communicated in the mail it enables.
Humiliate
But the social media companies can and do know. Or at least their algorithms do.
After all, if those programs didn’t have a way of determining the nature of what is being transmitted, the social media business model of individually targeted advertisements wouldn’t work.
in fact, Facebook’s policy director Simon milner gave the game away when he told a House of Commons Select Committee investigating the social media: ‘We use photo DNA, a piece of technology created by microsoft, and we use that to scan every photo uploaded to Facebook.’
This admission was seized on by Edward Fitzgerald QC, when he was acting two years ago for an unnamed Northern irish child whose nude image was repeatedly being posted on Facebook by someone who had groomed her and was now trying to humiliate her. Facebook repeatedly claimed that it could take the image down only if a complaint was made, but could not do so of its own accord.
Yet if it has the ‘thumbprint’ of every image posted on its site, then its system clearly ‘knows’ when that nude image of the 14-year- old child was reposted. it wasn’t that Facebook couldn’t block the image permanently — and save the girl and her parents huge distress — but that it couldn’t be bothered. Or perhaps it was terrified of being seen to exercise such an ‘editorial’ decision, as this would identify it as a publisher, with all the legal consequences that implies in terms of liability.
its argument against this, if pushed, is to say that it would be punitively time- consuming to check all the billions of images and messages that it doesn’t ‘really’ publish. But if it is too big (that is, too successful) to moderate satisfactorily what goes out under its logo, then it is too big, full stop.
And Facebook does seem to fail the most basic tests. A few months ago, the mail revealed how islamic State propaganda videos had been left on its site for up to three years, until this newspaper raised a stink. These videos included a ‘bomb-making tutorial’ used by the manchester Arena mass-murderer Salman Abedi.
The former Foreign Office counterterrorism director Sir ivor Roberts said that the failure to take down the videos was ‘chilling and inexcusable’, and that ‘Facebook’s recent series of apologies and assurances they will take action is clearly fake news’.
Murderous
‘Fake news’, of course, is the term popularised by donald Trump to describe the traditional media — specifically the newspapers who hold him to account in the way that my trade has always done to those in positions of power.
And so, bizarrely, after the mail bombs posted by one of his supporters to various of his political opponents were discovered, the President blamed the Press for whipping up the hatred that resulted in such murderous intent.
donald Trump tweeted: ‘it has gotten so bad and hateful it is beyond description. mainstream media must clean up its act FAST!’
As the former CIA director, John Brennan, who was the recipient of one of the mailed pipe bombs, responded: ‘Look in the mirror. Your inflammatory rhetoric, insults, lies and encouragement of physical violence are disgraceful.’
At least Trump — a man with the biggest ego known to medical science — does not hide behind the protection of anonymity or a fake name. Both Robert Bowers and Cesar Sayoc issued their vile threats under such cover.
And while they are among the tiny minority who actually have carried out their threats, it is also the case that the filthiest and most disgusting personal attacks to be found on Twitter are issued under pseudonyms — thus protecting the person making them from being identified by their targets; or indeed by their own friends and family, who might, if they knew, be able to do something about it.
What should be renamed the anti-social media has not just become a cess-pit of hatred, it’s also become a haven for malevolent cowards, who would never dare to express such threats in plain sight.
it is time that their mask, and that of the social media owners, was stripped away.