We must stop normalizing hatred
In the lovely Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, members of Tree of Life Congregation gathered for Shabbat services, as was their practice, their sustenance, their abiding joy.
This was what Saturday mornings were for: prayer on the weekly Sabbath, which had begun Friday just before sundown and would end that evening. It was as much a part of their lives as eating, as breathing.
Also in the synagogue that day, new life was being celebrated in a baby-naming and circumcision ceremony. It was meant to be a day of pure happiness, an exercise in great love and deep faith and hope for a future in which that faith would thrive and bless generations to come.
Tears would be shed. But they were to be tears of gratitude and gladness.
Then, into that sacred space, came a gunman wielding an assault-style
AR-15 rifle and three Glock
.357 handguns. The gunman said he “wanted all Jews to die” — horribly ugly words, but ones not unfamiliar to every Jewish person who has grown up fending off anti-Semitic slurs.
Journalist Howard Fineman grew up in Tree of Life synagogue. As he wrote in The New York Times, Pittsburgh was where he developed faith in the United States.
Now, what the Anti-Defamation League believes was the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in this nation’s history has shaken that faith.
“I was taught in Squirrel Hill that we were in the one country that was an exception to the history of the human race in general and the Jews in particular,” Fineman wrote. “Founded on Enlightenment principles of individuality, freedom, tolerance and justice, the United States was the only place besides Israel where Jews could live at one with their nation, unburdened by fear or confusion about identity.
“Now I must wonder: If Pittsburgh isn’t safe for Jews, if Squirrel Hill isn’t safe, if the Tree of Life isn’t safe, what place is?”
At a rally in Indianapolis on Saturday, President Donald Trump said, “This wicked act of mass murder is pure evil, hard to believe, and frankly, something that is unimaginable. ... This was an anti-Semitic act. You wouldn’t think this would be possible in this day and age.”
He cannot have been paying attention.
An audit by the Anti-Defamation League found that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. rose 57 percent in 2017. The incidents included harassment, vandalism and assault.
It was the largest singleyear increase on record and the second-highest number reported since the ADL started tracking such data in 1979.
Alarmingly, the coded language of anti-Semites and white nationalists has been creeping into our political and everyday discourse.
Consider the terms “globalist” and “globalism.”
They’re often used when discussing trade and other economic issues. But they’re rooted in Nazi propaganda.
According to an analysis in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the word “globalist” “echoes the ideology of Adolf Hitler,” who portrayed the Jews as “international elements that ‘conduct their business everywhere,’ thus harming and undermining good people who are ‘bounded to their soil, to the Fatherland.’”
“It has been a cornerstone of conspiracy theories featuring George Soros and a fantastical Jewish conspiracy designed to destroy ‘white’ or ‘Western’ society by flooding it with thirdworld hordes.”
At a White House event Friday, Trump invoked the term “globalists” when he said foreign countries are “cheating our workers.” When someone in the audience shouted, “Soros,” and “Lock him up,” Trump laughed and echoed the phrase “Lock him up.”
Soros is a Democratic donor and philanthropist. He’s also Jewish. He was the first recipient of the pipe bombs mailed to Trump critics last week.
Just before his attack, the Pittsburgh shooter expressed on social media a hatred for HIAS, a Jewish nonprofit that protects refugees. He wrote: “HIAS likes to bring invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I’m going in.”
The credo of HIAS is “Welcome the stranger. Protect the refugee.”
A statement on its website explains the organization’s mission: “Founded in 1881 as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS stands for a world in which refugees find welcome, safety, and freedom. Guided by Jewish values and history, HIAS rescues people whose lives are in danger for being who they are.”
People like the men, women and children fleeing violence and poverty in the caravan that began in Honduras and is making its way toward the United States.
Those are the people the Pittsburgh shooter hated.
President Trump has described the caravan on Twitter as an “invasion.”
Why is this worrying? Because when we start seeing people as faceless hordes, and describe them as if they were intent on our destruction, we begin to dehumanize them. And that’s when racism and anti-Semitism take firmer hold.
People of goodwill may differ on immigration policy. But refugees and immigrants should be accorded the same human dignity and decency we expect for ourselves.
A gunman who killed two people at a supermarket in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, tried first to enter a predominantly black church but found it locked. He shot two African-Americans at a Kroger supermarket instead.
Three days later, a gunman fueled by anti-Semitic rage and a twisted sense of mission killed 11 people at Tree of Life — among them Jews old enough to have lived through the Holocaust, only to be slain in their synagogue on the holy Sabbath.
Tom Ridge, a Republican, served as governor of Pennsylvania from 1995 until 2001, when he joined the administration of President George W. Bush as this nation’s first secretary of homeland security.
On Twitter, Ridge noted that the “violence, bigotry and hate of the last few days has me distraught and upset, with my country and our leaders.”
He called last week’s pipe bomb campaign and the Tree of Life massacre “assaults not only against humanity, but also our Constitution. It is a tragic manifestation of divisive, mean and intolerant civic leadership.”
“Too many of our civic leaders no longer speak to the better angels of our nation . ... We must demand more than simply condemning these actions with empty rhetoric.”
Ridge is right, of course. Empty rhetoric no longer is enough.
We stand with victims of racist and religious hatred. We stand with the Jewish community in Squirrel Hill and elsewhere.
We thank the police officers who risked their lives to keep a tragedy from becoming even more horrific.
This hatred has to stop. Let it stop with each of us.