The Sabbath Shooting: Us, Them, and President Trump
Saturday morning. The holiest day of the year for the Jewish people, holier than the High Holidays. Holier than any of the festivals. The…
Saturday morning. The holiest day of the year for the Jewish people, holier than the High Holidays. Holier than any of the festivals. The sabbath — Shabbat — is the day Jews are commanded to pray, to reflect, to give thanks.
Rabbi Hayim Halevy Downing, in his book To Be a Jew: A Guide to Observance in Everyday Life, calls the sabbath “an island in time.” The sabbath — sundown Friday to sundown on Saturday — “is the only observance which has become personified in the religious poetry of prayers” (61). It is a “glorious release from weekday concerns, routine pressures, and even secular recreation. It is a day of peaceful tranquility, inner joy and spiritual uplift, accompanied by song and cheer” (62).
It is within this context that we must understand what happened this morning in Pittsburgh.
A gunman who’s believed to have spewed anti-Semitic slurs and rhetoric on social media barged into a baby-naming ceremony at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday and opened fire, killing 11 people in one of the deadliest attacks on Jews in U.S. history.
The 20-minute attack at Tree of Life Congregation in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood left at least six others wounded, including four police officers who dashed to the scene, authorities said.
As with Dylann Roof’s deadly assault on Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, S.C., four years ago, an attack that took the lives of nine parishioners, including the pastor, today’s shooting struck at a moment of holiness and joy. Roof targeted a black church and killed nine members after they welcomed him into their prayer meeting, a breach of trust that makes his action especially heinous.
Today’s shooter, identified as Robert Bowers, a right-wing anti-Semite who apparently thought Donald Trump was too much of a globalist, chose this “island in time” to unleash his barrage of bullets. This shooting, we must remember, comes on the heels of the arrest of Cesar Sayoc, who is accused of sending more than a dozen bombs to high-profile critics of Trump, and the assassination in Kentucky of two African Americans by the racist Gregory Bush at a Kroger’s market.
That’s three major hate crimes in six days — if we count the 13 pipe bombs sent as a single act. Earlier this year, the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, issued a report that found an increase in hate crimes in the nation’s largest cities, with the 10 largest reporting the largest number of hate crimes in a decade (taken in the aggregate). The increase is not a new phenomenon — numbers have been rising for the last four years, which encompasses both the Obama and Trump administrations.
I wrote yesterday on Facebook that “Correlation does not equal causation,” but adding that the correlations between Sayec, the failed bomber, and Donald Trump were fairly obvious. I think we can go a step farther and link what we are seeing to an emboldened racist right that has been given breathing room not only by Trump but by much of mainstream conservativism.
I can hear the responses from conservative friends already. They will say I am being unfair, that Trump has denounced this stuff, that they have, as well. But the “Obama is Kenyan” slur was allowed to kick around the ends of the conservative movement, to fester, without much pushback on the right. The “Obama is Kenyan” slur is a version of the anti-Catholic attacks on Al Smith in 1928, the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the anti-Semitic tract used first by Russian leaders to rationalize pogroms and later by the Nazis. The tract has long been debunked, but it reappears regularly and has a history of use in the United States that we should not ignore.
Blacks, Jews, Mexicans and Central Americans, Muslims, Asians, refugees — and in an earlier time, Italians, Poles, Slavs, even the Irish — are too often seen as less American than “purer” ancestries. This is the ideology of white supremacy, which despite our claims to the contrary continues not only to exist but to thrive in the United States. It’s not just David Duke and Richard Spencer, who’s blatant racism and anti-Semitism are easy to identify. It’s the more subtle uses of words like American and nationalism that indicate how much of a hold on our national psyche white supremacy has.
For much of our history, whiteness and Americanness were synonymous. Groups seen as less than white — descendants of slaves, the Chinese and Japanese, obviously, Jews and their strange religion, as well, but also those groups now seen white, like the Irish, Italians, and Easter European Christians — were shunted to slums, their access to education and power restricted. They were seen as less American. Over time, the definitions of whiteness and Americanness were expanded to include many of these groups, but some were left outside and some — like Jews — have long existed in a tenuous relationship to majority white and Christian culture. (There are several books worth reading on this, like Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People and Grace Elizabeth Hale’s Making Whiteness, among them.)
American culture accepts us (Jews) pretty openly, but there remains a subculture that harbors long-held hatred, that traffics in conspiracy theories, and that has felt comfortable enough in recent years to crawl from their dark hole into the sunlight.
The question is why. The answer is politics — or more specifically, the language used by mainstream politicians. When Donald Trump talks about “globalists,” as he does, or proclaims himself a “nationalist,” he sends a message — perhaps an unintended one — that echoes with historical import. When he derides Mexicans, as he did, calling them rapists and gang members, when he refers to those hoping to come to the United States for a better life as an “infestation,” as he did in June, he robs them of their humanity and sends a message about race. When he calls NFL players who are protesting police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem “son of a bitches” and says that “maybe they shouldn’t be in the country” he is sending a message. When he essentially ignores Puerto Rican’s in the wake of a devastating hurricane, turning his visit to the ravaged island into a photo op and then tossing out rolls of paper towels like some kind of demented royal, he is sending a message.
It is a message that reinforces the white supremacist notion of a “true nation,” one that subtly defines who is inside this nation and who is outside. It is why Trump’s use of the word “nationalism” scared so many of us. “Nationalism” is not, in and of itself, a bad word. It means, as Trump said,
As Max Boot explains, there are liberal and illiberal nationalisms. The nationalisms of liberation movements, “a product of the 18th-century Enlightenment and initially was associated with other Enlightenment ideas such as the ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ of the French Revolution and the ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ of the American Revolution” — helped launch freedom struggles and anti-colonialism. This is not the nationalism Trump about which Trump is talking. His is the nationalism of us and them, one that assumes an allegiance not just to the nation-state but makes that allegiance the central tenet of one’s beliefs and that uses that belief to draw a relatively bright line between the nation and the “other.”
There is a “stark contrast” between “a version of nationalism with equality as its goal” and a the kind that places “loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition,” writes Jason Stanley in How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. “(F)ascist nationalism is a repudiation of the liberal democratic ideal; it is a nationalism in the service of domination, with a goal of preserving, maintaining, or gaining a position at the top of a hierarchy of power and status” (Stanley 97).
He further explains that this kind of nationalism — which is at the center of fascism — relies on group identity. This is Trump’s MO.
As Boot writes, “Trump preceded his declaration of nationalism with one of his trademark rants against ‘globalists.’” But
Who are these villains who want America to suffer? Trump didn’t name anyone, but it’s a safe bet that he has in mind someone like George Soros, a Jewish billionaire who Trump supporters blame for everything from the caravan of Central American immigrants to the anti-Kavanaugh demonstrations.
Trump said all the right things today, and he usually, at some point, manages to get in a scripted comment that sounds almost presidential. He also loves to ratchet up the division, loves to bully his opponents, calls them names, demeans them, and recasts them as enemies — as he has with the press, with Hillary Clinton, with Obama, and others.
“Trump’s denials of ill intent are simply not credible,” Boot writes about his use of the word “nationalism.”
They are a convenient ruse allowing him to rouse his base while maintaining semi-plausible deniability. Trump’s followers are in on the joke. They are thrilled by his ‘politically incorrect’ language — code words for racism, misogyny and xenophobia — while publicly denying that he engages in racism, misogyny or xenophobia.
Currently, Republicans and the right are ginning up false equivalencies, tossing out the canard that liberals are as responsible as the right is for the current atmosphere, or that there have been significantly more violent acts committed by the left than the right. It is a line that works on Fox News, but the facts do not bear this out, and no manner of conflating calls by Maxine Waters for the left to engage in the kind of direct action that has a long and glorious history in the United States with Trump’s “joking” promise (not a joke at all) to pay the legal bills of anyone who “knocks the crap out of” protesters has lost all sense of proportion. (See my Facebook page.) There is a distinct difference between protesters harassing a politician at dinner and a president or candidate for president saying a Black Lives Matter protester “should have been roughed up.”
Again, as I wrote the other day, Donald Trump is not directly responsible for this week’s right-wing carnage, but he has created space that allows it to breath and granted permission through his choice of words for it to come out into the open.
The synagogue is central to Jewish life, but only because it is a place that Jews come to worship, to learn, and to take care of each other. It is not Judaism, but it is representative of it as an institution — as Rabbi Donin points out (183 — 206). As such, this attack is an attack on all Jews, just as I would argue the assassination of Maurice Stallard and Vickie Jones in Kentucky earlier this week was an attack on all African Americans.
More importantly, it is an attack on all Americans — not in that bogus, “call for unity” stuff we have been hearing, but in a real and visceral way. The nation has struggled throughout its history to live up to its creed that all are equal. We had to amend the Constitution several times, and we are still fighting to expand the promise the founding documents offered. Trump’s language and the attacks we have witnessed this week are an affront to those efforts.
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