October 28, 2018
Yesterday’s massacre of eleven people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue was truly unspeakable. Armed with an AR-15, the assailant burst in on Saturday morning, shouted anti-Semitic slurs and started firing indiscriminately. It was the most deadly act of anti-Semitic violence in American history, capping a week which saw assassination attempts targeting two progressive Jewish philanthropists, along with most of the prominent leaders of the Democratic Party.
The murderer was allegedly enraged that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was assisting Central American refugees attempting to flee horrible conditions (Source: “11 Killed in Pittsburgh Massacre; Suspect Charged With 29 Counts,” by Campbell Robertson, Christopher Mele and Sabrina Tavernise, The New York Times, 10/27/18). Of course, Trump has been demagoguing this issue for two weeks, aided by outlets as disparate as The New York Times and Fox News, all of whom treated a desperate group of women and children currently 1100 miles from the U.S. border and traveling on foot, as front page news.
Trump has depicted the caravan as a threatening horde of marauding terrorists and right wing media has dutifully echoed the charge. Among the conspiracy theories floated by the bottom feeding Klan sympathizers at Fox News was the accusation that George Soros was funding the caravan to coincide with the midterms, presumably on the addle-brained theory that impoverished refugees were being bused in to commit “voter fraud,” the non-existent crime used to legitimate unconstitutional voter suppression.
The truth is that these dog whistles about George Soros, or “globalists” or “coastal elites” are dog whistles meant to evoke century old anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish people as malevolent outsiders manipulating Black and Brown people that white supremacists think are too stupid to fight for our own freedom and equality. As Talia Lavin eloquently lays out in this piece, casting Jewish people as the villainous puppet masters in the fight against white supremacy has a long and ignominious history in this country.
This week has made it crystal clear—white supremacy is a dire internal threat to our national security and to the very life of far too many of us. Those who fan the flames of ignorant hatred, who engage in false equivalence, or who amplify the voices of those who obfuscate or downplay the challenges facing us, are complicit and should not be excused or rewarded.
Our challenge now is how to resist spending our days in a defensive crouch, on edge from the legitimate sense that we are under siege for something as essential as who we are— Jewish, Black, Transgender, Latino, Muslim. It would be easy to let our fear reduce us to targets whose only choice is to fortify ourselves behind barricades, real and imagined. That is of course, what those who attack us want, for us to take up as little space as possible, our freedoms circumscribed by thoughts of bitter, white men with 21 gun arsenals or mobile bomb factories. That is what they want, because that is what all terrorists want, to occupy the minds of those they irrationally hate, so that we will do their work for them and render ourselves invisible. Now is the time to be defiantly visible, to reach out to one another with love, and pledge to work together to defeat the scourge of white supremacy. Our fear is understandable, but we must remember the words of Nelson Mandela that “courage [is] not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”
#TREEOFLIFE
#FIGHTANTISEMITISM
#ENDRACISM
#VOTE