We must not make hateful words normal

We stand with victims of racist and religious hatred in Lancaster County, Squirrel Hill and elsewhere.

In the lovely Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh last Saturday morning, 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, it was reported, 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. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 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.

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.’ “

Henceforth, writers of letters to the editor who use the terms “globalism” and “globalist” will be asked to explain clearly what they mean.

We are not accusing those who have used those terms in the past of being anti-Semitic. Those terms have been bandied about so much that some people may be unaware of their anti-Semitic meaning.

This is not a matter of political correctness. This is a matter of precision. We need to be clear about what words mean, and how they’re used. Because the hatemongers know what those words mean. And they’re enjoying the fact that those terms are becoming common currency, because they think that means we approve of their hate.

We do not.

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.

Last Wednesday, police said, 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 on Sunday, 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 Lancaster County, 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.