These Exploitations Of The Pittsburgh Attack Deride Its Victims
Yesterday's terror attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh was committed by a man with extremely anti-Jewish and anti-immigration views. It is third attack on houses of worship in three years.
Like the earlier incidents it is a heinous crime for ignominious reasons.
But there is little sound reason to blame the incident on Trump. It does not justify to falsely claim "increased anti-semitism". To exploit it for a racist driven colonial cause makes a mockery of its victims.
The New York Times reports:
Armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and at least three handguns, a man shouting anti-Semitic slurs opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday morning, killing at least 11 congregants and wounding four police officers and two others, the authorities said.
...
The assailant, identified by law enforcement officials as Robert D. Bowers, fired for several minutes and was leaving the synagogue when officers, dressed in tactical gear and armed with rifles, met him at the door. According to the police, Mr. Bowers exchanged gunfire with officers before retreating back inside and barricading himself inside a third-floor room. He eventually surrendered.
From reading between the lines we learn that the killer is not a Muslim. Otherwise he would be called a 'terrorist'. We can also conclude that the killer was white. Otherwise the police would have killed him.
The murderer was extremely anti-Jewish. He was a white supremacist who had the delusion that people of Jewish belief caused all the problems he perceived:
The suspect in the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue told officers that Jews were committing genocide and that he wanted them all to die, according to a charging document made public early Sunday.
...
Worshippers “were brutally murdered by a gunman targeting them simply because of their faith,” said Bob Jones, head of the FBI’s Pittsburgh office, though he cautioned the shooter’s full motive was not yet known.
Social network posts by Robert Bowers show that the immediate reason for attacking the synagogue was last week's National Refugee Shabbat ceremony by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS):
Hours before Saturday morning's shooting, the account posted again, "HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in."
HIAS is 137 years old organization founded by and for Jews who were fleeing pogroms in Russia. It nowadays supports all refugees. The killers hate for HIAS points to the ideological closeness of white supremacists and Zionists:
On the Jewish far right, the Zionist Organization of America has attacked HIAS and other Jewish organizations for lobbying to admit Syrian refugees to the U.S. and has accused HIAS of doing so for profit.
The NYT tries to connect the incident with Trump:
[The assault] also took place in the wake of the arrest Friday morning of a man who the authorities said sent more than a dozen pipe bombs to critics of Mr. Trump, including several high-profile Democrats.
The pipe bombs, which could not have killed anyone, were sent by a Trump supporting loon in Florida. All were detect before they reached their intended target.
The Pittsburgh killer hated Trump. He rallied against him on social networks as being controlled by Jews. He wrote that he did not vote for him. From his archived tweets (part 1, part 2):
Trump is a globalist, not a nationalist. There is no #MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation.
But the NYT report ignores the killer's anti-Trump stand. It goes on to blame the incident on Trump's rhetoric:
The anguish of Saturday’s massacre heightened a sense of national unease over increasingly hostile political rhetoric. Critics of President Trump have argued that he is partly to blame for recent acts of violence because he has been stirring the pot of nationalism, on Twitter and at his rallies, charges that Mr. Trump has denied.
This ignores that Trump uses the same nationalistic rhetoric that all U.S. presidents use:
At the U.S. Military Academy last year, Obama pronounced unequivocally: “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.”
Nor are anti-immigration positions a Trump phenomenon. It was Obama who was called the "deporter-in-chief":
More than 2.8 million undocumented immigrants have been deported over the last eight years, ...
Extreme nationalism and anti-immigration positions are as American as apple-pie. Hostile political rhetoric in the U.S. is certainly not a one-sided issue. It was Hillary Clinton who spoke of citizens as "deplorable" people. It is only Trump's style, not the content, that differentiates his "stirring the pot" from that of other politicians. To blame this incident on Trump is an attempt to avert that insight.
The NYT also conflates the killers anti-immigration motive with 'anti-semitism' when it cites the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) with a false statistic:
[The massacre] came amid rising anxiety about illegal immigration and in a decade that has seen an uptick in hate crimes. According to an annual report by the Anti-Defamation League issued earlier this year, the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in the United States surged 57 percent in 2017, the largest rise in a single year since the A.D.L. began tracking such crimes in 1979.
The ADL does not track "such crimes", but any incident its perceives as harassment or threat or "anti-semitic". The extreme rise in the 2017 ADL statistics only appeared because the ADL fudged the numbers, as other Jewish organizations criticized, by including hundreds of threats a unstable Jewish teen made against Jewish institutions:
A 19-year-old American-Israeli man was convicted of making hundreds of bomb threats to Jewish community centers and Jewish schools in the United States, as well as airlines.
...
The hoax threats to the JCCs and other Jewish institutions in the first three months of 2017 forced widespread evacuations and raised fears of a resurgence in anti-Semitism. Kadar’s parents and lawyer have not disputed his involvement in the bomb threats but asserted in his defense that he has a brain tumor and a low IQ.
The ADL not only fudge its numbers but notoriously conflates hate against people of Jewish belief with anti-Zionist activism like the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
The alleged increase in anti-semitism ADL claims is a 'shark story':
The Brandeis Center’s Marcus said some recent reports of anti-Semitic incidents “are what one might call ‘shark stories,’” referring to media reports about shark attacks several summers ago. Many people, he said, “feared that shark attacks were spiking, and experts struggled to identify the reason. At the end of the day, it turned out that such attacks were not increasing at all—there were more stories about them because the shark narrative had caught the attention of influential editors and media outlets.”
Robert D. Bowers was active on the social media platforms Facebook and Gab, a Twitter like service with a minimum of censorship. He posted and reposted lots of anti-Jewish slander. Gab, which is often used by people who are censored elsewhere, reacted immediately after the incident. It archived and closed the account and informed the police. Nonetheless it was immediately censored itself. Paypal, which Gab used to collect donations, shut down its account without giving any specific reason. Such unreasonable reaction will only reinforce the extreme right feeling of being persecuted.
The Israeli government will send its probably most racist member, education minister Naftali Bennet, to exploit the incident for its colonization of Palestine. Bennet boasted about killing Arabs:
“I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there’s no problem with that.”
He calls refugees who came to Israel "infiltrators". He would have applauded the killer if the target had been some other religious group:
Education Minister Naftali Bennett won the backing of a leading anti-illegal immigration activist Thursday, after he vowed to block plans to legalize hundreds of Sudanese infiltrators.
...
On Thursday, [..], the Jewish Home party, led by Education Minister Naftali Bennett, announced that it would block implementation of the Interior Ministry’s plan to grant residency permits to the 300 Sudanese.
...
"There's no justification for absorbing those infiltrators in Israel."
Israel declared itself an Apartheid state. Its government holds the same extreme rightwing views against 'others' as the attacker in Pittsburgh. Like him it confuses people of Jewish belief with a race. Like him it rallies against immigration. Sending Bennet to exploit the terror attack is a mockery of its victims.
Posted by b on October 28, 2018 at 17:22 UTC | Permalink
« previous page@75 psychohistorian
Yes, I know, the Caitlin article was not as deep as we would like it to go. But I have a thought about this.
The rabbit hole, as we know, goes really deep. I perceive that everyone chooses a ledge somewhere down that hole, in order to live their life and make sense of their world. Caitlin chooses to stand on a certain ledge and fight her corner from there. Any deeper, she's not going to go, unless a higher-up world situation throws some of the deeper material into play.
I, along with you, am glad she's around and fighting her fight. She makes plenty good sense with the things she tackles. But she's not going to go any deeper, today. I can live with it. Some articles you can only agree with 80% of.
Then there's Ron Unz, who reached such a point of dismay with the injustice of the world that he finally started to examine some of the long-standing claims from the fringes, and he looked further down the rabbit hole, and brought out material to examine in the most profound and diligent way. We found that he was making some very bullet-proof statements, highly articulate proofs of things. I don't think he could have done it any earlier in his career.
One has to be ready to go down there, and feel secure on the ledge one settles to, in order to fight one's corner.
Posted by: Grieved | Oct 29 2018 14:54 utc | 102
I wanted to add, further to my earlier comment about Zionism using the Jews as human shields, that there are of course also the powers behind the Zionists, those who created Zionism as a useful tool to operate in the material world. They, in turn, use Zionism as a shield against discovery and attack.
That rabbit hole is so deep that if we were to talk only of its uttermost depths we would never get any analysis done of the world's daily events.
Posted by: Grieved | Oct 29 2018 15:10 utc | 103
Posted by: NemesisCalling | Oct 29, 2018 1:05:55 AM | 77:
The sub-prime mortgage issue wasn't predatory against minorities.... The loan officers and traders of MBS were going for volume of sales. A sucker was a sucker ...This is blaming the victim. The suckers had no clue that the system was corrupted and would crash.
No bankers went to jail. Do you think that might've been different if >95% of the senior bank credit officers were black instead of white?
Posted by: Jackrabbit | Oct 29 2018 15:12 utc | 104
folks here might want to read the past couple of articles ar mondoweiss and the comment section too..
Posted by: james | Oct 29 2018 16:24 utc | 105
Grieved @101&102--
Liked your Rabbit Hole analogy. I also highly suggest Alan Hart's two-volume examination of Zionism. That Zionists attack the victims is no surprise--they are/were the sorts of Jews who aren't sympathetic to Zionism. I rarely invoke his description, but Saker's Anglo-Zionist Empire is very close to the mark and demands a very critical reexamination of history from the French Revolution forward as there are events that need to be learned and descriptions of events that must be unlearned.
Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 29 2018 16:24 utc | 106
@103 jr
I don't think I am blaming the victim when I say that hud was pressuring for more home ownership which translates to riskier loans which meant banks and traders tried to get theirs through mbs trade. Sure low incomes weren't too bright in their condemning themselves to be victims of Murphy's law. But the responsibility lies at the feet of the good intentions of government and the enabling of these business sectors.
It reminds me of the painting Christina's wworld that they of course would be the eventual victims.
Posted by: Nemesiscalling | Oct 29 2018 16:36 utc | 107
@ Grieved and karlof1 with the follow up about the Catlin Johnstone posting.
Thanks for that. I agree with all but Grieved's last sentence:
"
That rabbit hole is so deep that if we were to talk only of its uttermost depths we would never get any analysis done of the world's daily events.
"
The rabbit hole is myth and hence only as deep as you want to make it.
The rabbit hole is the myth covering behind the world's daily events.
I refuse to believe that humanity cannot move forward without the rabbit hole myth of private finance.
It gets back to my reason over faith argument. The underpinning of public finance is supported by the myth that some humans are better than others, just like monotheistic religions. If you are a faith breather then it is easy to extend that faith and belief in exceptionalism to private finance......Humanity needs to evolve entirely through the Enlightenment period to put reason above faith as the underpinning of an evolved form of social organization, IMO
Posted by: psychohistorian | Oct 29 2018 16:46 utc | 108
I will also say Obama made a huge miscalculation in trying to maintain an expansive role of governing for all the people when McConnell came right out and stated at the outset the GOP would oppose everything Obama wanted to do with the sole purpose of limiting him to a single term.
Obama stupidly continued to pitch the ideal of compromise for far too long after it became apparent the opposition was thoroughly intransigent. And now we see Trump's MO is to reverse whatever Obama accomplished, so it follows as a result of Obama's weakness.
Obama also made an even huger error in not immediately filing lawsuit when McConnell refused the advise and consent role in appointing Scalia's replacement. The resulting constitutional furor over the abdication of responsibility by the GOP controlled Senate may have made a difference in the election result, although maybe not given Hillary's gigantic political ineptitude.
Now we see McConnell even putting forth that if the same thing happens in Trump's final year he will not wait for the election.....although at least one other GOP Senator (Grassley I believe, who is the Judicial chair) have stated they will follow McConnell's precedent and not allow hearings on any nominee during the year prior to 2020 election.
Posted by: donkeytale | Oct 29 2018 17:18 utc | 109
Posted by: Nemesiscalling | Oct 29, 2018 12:36:48 PM | 107
No. What cause the financial crisis was not HUD or HUD initiatives but the nearly unlimited appetite for yield. That appetite was satisfied via complex financial structuring and a complacent ratings system.
Banks began a race to the bottom in search for product to push into the pipeline. They lowered their underwriting standards and ramped up marketing to susceptible demographics: minorities and the elderly.
Warnings about the systemic fraud were ignored. And after the market went bust, the government protected banks, not the people that had been "suckered" - and especially not the minorities that had "benefited" from HUD programs.
HUD was formed in 1965 and always had a mandate to promoted home-ownership. They are used as a scapegoat for the fraud that began independently of them.
Posted by: Jackrabbit | Oct 29 2018 17:24 utc | 110
donkeytale:
Obama stupidly continued to pitch the ideal of compromise ...
Like the good establishment-oriented, Obama-loving donkey that you are, you are assuming that Obama wanted to "DO THE RIGHT THING". But the rest of us can see that Obama was a faux populist huckster that served the establishment NOT THE PEOPLE.
Posted by: Jackrabbit | Oct 29 2018 17:34 utc | 111
Jackrabbit says:
HUD was formed in 1965 and always had a mandate to promoted home-ownership. They are used as a scapegoat for the fraud that began independently of them
yeah, and just from 1998 to 2015 that fraud amounts to an eye-popping 21 trillion dolllars!
Posted by: john | Oct 29 2018 17:51 utc | 112
@101
When Anders Breivik slaughtered about 70 children in Norway, one of the most terrible crimes of our lifetime, did people immediately start talking about a rise in hatred for children?
Not to excuse killings, on the contrary, but they were not children. Innocent victims, but not children. They were youth members of the ruling labour party (also ruling after the scheduled election a few weeks later). The second point is that there were several reports/interviews the day after about multiple shooters on the island. Those reports were not mentioned in the trial that followed. The events in Oslo a couple of hours before were also "interesting".
Posted by: Norwegian | Oct 29 2018 17:59 utc | 114
@ jr 110
Why does it always follow that a department of the government can never be found culpable?
Pushing home ownership is only good if the loans are good. But it seems to me that builders were reaping a windfall at the behest of poor regulation and even unsustainable loan granting which constituted this vicious cycle which could have been prevented had hud not been pushing unsustainable practices and mbs exchange been regulated properly. Government failed. Banks are always gonna try to get theirs. Did government just serendipitously forget this? No! And that's why blame lies at their feet.
Posted by: Nemesiscalling | Oct 29 2018 18:22 utc | 115
Posted by: Nemesiscalling | Oct 29, 2018 2:22:36 PM | 115:
Why does it always follow that a department of the government can never be found culpable?
You are trying to side-step the point that the fraud began without any support or encouragement of HUD/government.
... builders were reaping a windfall ... Government failed. Banks are always gonna try to get theirs.
And so we come full circle.
Banks, home builders, and realtors employ expensive LOBBYISTS. Government FAILED TO PROTECT THE PEOPLE before and after the crisis because Government doesn't really work for the people but for the corporations. That was proven when Tim Geihtner, Obama's Treasury Secretary famously talked about "foaming the runway for the banks".
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
The effects of 2008GFC were felt for years and is estimated to have had a total cost of one-year's global GDP - approximately 50 trillion dollars.
Posted by: Jackrabbit | Oct 29 2018 19:31 utc | 116
gov’t is at the beckon call of the corporation nemesis calling.... this has been obvious for a long time... who got bailed out? the little guy or the banks? 2008 wasas clear as it gets for anyone paying attention..
Posted by: james | Oct 29 2018 19:49 utc | 117
James and jackrabbit
We are all saying the same thing but in fact have diverted too far from what got this conversation rolling.
Jackrabbit, I don't see any discrimination against minorities that precipitated the housing crisis. On the contrary, too much impetus was put on the cycle to accommodate low income subprime. It follows that we can all conclude that the economy is fake. Has been for quite some time. Government has failed to strike the balance. They violated one of the core tenants of leadership by peddling desire and deemphasizing restraint.
Looking at the current gravy train that is our economy, it is just as hard to predict the next fall.
Posted by: Nemesiscalling | Oct 29 2018 20:14 utc | 118
FYI
NY Times (January 2014) Recession’s True Cost Is Still Being Tallied:
More than five years later, there is still no answer to perhaps the most critical question raised by the man-made disaster: How much did it all cost?This analysis only deals with the costs in USA. A rough estimate would say that the rest of the world had a cost that matches that of the USA.In July, three economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Tyler Atkinson, David Luttrell and Harvey Rosenblum, gave it a shot, at least as far as the United States economy goes.
. . .
To start, the economists at the Dallas Fed modeled how much economic activity would be lost by the time the nation returned to its growth path before the crisis. In their study, they initially assumed that the economy would return to its previous path by 2023, and concluded that the total loss would amount to 40 percent to 90 percent of a year’s worth of economic output. That’s about $6 trillion to $14 trillion in today’s money — or $19,000 to $45,000 per person.
Others have used different methods and come up with similar estimates. Better Markets estimated that the crisis cost $12.8 trillion in lost output. Last year, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the price tag could range from a few trillion dollars to over $10 trillion.
But what if the path is not recovered so quickly? So far, the economy has made up little if any of the ground it lost. Perhaps the shock from the crisis slowed the nation’s growth rate for good.
Under a more pessimistic assumption, the Dallas Fed economists estimated that the cost could be 65 percent to 165 percent of annual output. The upper limit amounts to about $25 trillion, almost $80,000 per American.
But even that might be an underestimate. Using a different method of analysis, the economists also looked at how Americans cut back on purchases of consumer goods. They concluded that the expectations of the lifetime income of working age adults fell by almost $150,000, on average.
Most tallies stop there. But that is not because this covers the entire fallout from the crisis. Rather, it is because the rest is even harder to measure.
Consider joblessness, which damages physical and mental health and breeds poverty, which contributes to crime. It affects the structure of families. Only about 500,000 new households were formed each year from 2007 to 2010, a third of the average pace during the previous decade.
It is impossible to put an accurate dollar sign on these social costs. Still, the economists at the Dallas Fed tried.... simply adding the cost from the drop in well-being of the unemployed to the impact on G.D.P. would take the price tag to up to $120,000 a person [$37.5 trillion] . And that still leaves out many other measures of loss.
Posted by: Jackrabbit | Oct 29 2018 21:34 utc | 119
".......The killers hate for HIAS points to the ideological closeness of white supremacists and Zionists......."
I'm not quite sure how an article about the murder of 11 Jewish people worshipping in a synogogue by an antisemitic killer devolved into an anti-Israel/anti-Zionist bashing session. That seems little more than exploiting a hate crime for political reasons. There are plenty of opportunities to criticize Israel without having to use a hate crime as an excuse.
Additionally, it's a little ridiculous to call white supremacists idologically close to "Zionists". Are there some Zionists that are white supremacist? No doubt, but the text lacks the correct qualifiers. After all, Zionists cross the political spectrum from far left to far right. The New Yorker article distinguished the Zionist Organization of America as "far right". This also seems a litle close to the classic far left lie that Zionism equals racism (originally passed by the UN in 1975).
Posted by: craigsummers | Oct 29 2018 21:51 utc | 120
@119
Hasbara alert. I had a hard time getting through all that denial.
You don't like the Zionist/racist equivalency? Israel is designated the Jewish state. You don't believe Zionism is supremacist? So then you don't think Israel's an Apartheid state either. How about this?: Zionism abuses power on a global scale to sustain its legitimacy despite it being racist and supremacist and represented by an Apartheid state with a sham democracy and two-time legal system.
Posted by: Circe | Oct 30 2018 1:06 utc | 121
First…..Matt Drudge lashes out at Fox News for not being sad enough about the Pittsburgh shooting
However the Drudge Report (like the rest of the MainStreamMedia) barely mentioned last year’s Church shooting in Antioch, Tennessee or Gavin Long, Micah Johnson, Frederick Scott, or Emanuel Samson, all murderers whose names have been forgotten if they were ever known
Indeed, some of these incidents never even entered into the local consciousness in the places where they occurred
Just like everyone in France has heard of the Pittsburg shootings, but no one has heard of Adrien Perez, stabbed to death on July 27, or Dorian Guémené, beaten to death or July 5, or the 29 year old Frenchman who was fatally stabbed on August 6, while trying to help a woman who cried out as she was being assaulted
Or back to the US, who remembers Channon Christian, 21, and her boyfriend Christopher Newsom, 23, who were carjacked, kidnapped, raped and beheaded
No one remembers them
But you can be certain that Robert Bowers will become a household name
Posted by: Decapitated Channon | Oct 30 2018 4:39 utc | 123
The Pittsburgh attack was conveniently timed to distract US media from another murderous onslaught by Israel on Gaza. The IDF targets included a Gaza hospital.
Pittsburgh - qui bono?
Posted by: Yonatan | Oct 28, 2018 4:04:53 PM | 23
This is false in several ways. First, in Eretz Israel, West Bank is mostly for contact sports and Gaza is mostly used as a shooting gallery, national sports so to speaks, so bloody incidents in Gaza are so frequent that they can "conveniently time" anything. And diverting the attention of our media from those incidents is as simple as finding a cute dog or cat story.
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Oct 30 2018 21:57 utc | 124
The comments to this entry are closed.
Well said, indeed.
The inconsistencies and the effort at cheap exploitation of a terrible crime are simply appalling.
I am always distressed by senseless killings.
We have far too many, a sad reflection on the human condition.
I think it unwarranted and unfair for anyone to chime in with "a resurgence of anti-Semitism."
Just because an obviously sick man said something about Jewish people has nothing to do with that assertion.
When Anders Breivik slaughtered about 70 children in Norway, one of the most terrible crimes of our lifetime, did people immediately start talking about a rise in hatred for children?
I could cite many instances of hideous crimes by sick people - Columbine, Las Vegas concert shooting - but making generalizations from them about classes of people is completely wrong.
And when it is done, as I am sure is the case here, to exploit the event and gain cover and support for other gruesome matters such as Israel's terrible slaughters of Palestinians, it is just unethical.
Posted by: JOHN CHUCKMAN | Oct 29 2018 14:45 utc | 101