Under fire, America needs to regroup
The 11 deaths at a place of worship Saturday seemed to combine the worst aspects of modern American life in one horrific event. First, the mass shooting, cementing once again the United States’ unique role as a place where gun violence never ends. It invades schools, malls, movie theaters and places where people gather to pray. Eleven people were shot dead in Pittsburgh on what should have been a pleasant Saturday morning.
Then there was the vile motivation of the shooter — to kill Jews, not simply to cause mayhem, but to go to a synagogue where people were praying and celebrating the naming of a baby, and to mow them down. He later told law enforcement officers that, “I just want to kill Jews.”
Finally, there is the reality that our latest mass murder occurred beneath the shadow of our country’s ugly partisan divide, with strains of anti-Semitism being used as a tool to motivate voters. It is not just stoking the fear of Jews, of course, that has threaded through our political discourse but the blanket condemnation of the “other” — the suspect group seeking to supplant the “real” Americans.
The conspiracy theory that has preyed on the minds of the weak and disturbed united anti-Semitism and the targeting of the “other.” All of that vitriol became focused at the refugee caravan heading to the United States from Honduras through Mexico.
President Donald Trump, who began his campaign for president by stigmatizing Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers, saw the caravan as a way to mobilize his base just before the midterm election.
According to the theory — propagated by politicians, business executives and even Fox News — billionaire George Soros (Jew) was paying for the caravan (the other) to reach America so that the unwashed hordes could work to destroy the country from within. There is not one bit of evidence that the 88-year-old Soros actually paid for the caravan, or protests by Democrats for that matter, as some in the right have claimed so often.
This relentless beat of conspiracy, however, has helped pushed the already unhinged over the edge. Even before the deadly shooting at the synagogue, last week had been infused with violence.
Critics of Trump were receiving pipe bombs; the FBI quickly tracked down a Florida man through a fingerprint and arrested him. The man’s social media profile showed him to be enmeshed in the conspiracy world, a believer that George Soros was a villain — he received one of the bombs — and that the U.S. was under siege. The synagogue shooter described the refugees in the caravan as “invaders.”
Anti-Semitism, sadly, is hardly new to the United States. As the Washington Post pointed out in its article by Joel Achenbach, historical figures such as auto magnate Henry Ford held anti-Semitic views. He used his Michigan newspaper in the 1920s to translate and publish the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian hoax that outlined a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.
There is a certain language of the antiSemite, at least the ones who move in polite society, that informed citizens must be able to identify. One word is “globalist,” often used to describe Soros, who was born in Hungary. For the conspiracy-minded antiSemites, “globalist” is a code word for Jewish. Sadly, such ideas seem to have staying power. Even before the pipe bombs were sent or the weapons fired in the synagogue, incidents of anti-Semitisim were increasing in the United States. The Anti-Defamation League had identified 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in 2017, up from 1,267 in 2016. The surge of 57 percent is the single largest since the league began tracking such occurrences in 1979. This is evil among us, a virulent hatred not worthy of our vision of what the United States is and should be. We must unite to push back against bigotry and fear — whether that ugliness is happening in Pittsburgh, Florida or right here in Santa Fe.
On Sunday night, Santa Fe residents gathered at Temple Beth Shalom for an Interfaith Alliance service to pray for the dead and to ask for a less violent world — we’re sure they were among the tens of thousands of Americans holding vigils. We also are holding vigil for ourselves, grieving for what our nation has lost — precious lives, a sense of safety and our belief that in the United States, our diversity brings us strength.