We are stronger than hate
On Saturday, Oct. 27, 11 people were murdered in the Tree of Life Synagogue (Etz Chaim) in Pittsburgh. According to friends and relatives of Squirrel Hill community members, the historical Jewish neighbourhood the synagogue belongs to, a baby naming service was being held at the time of the attack.
Robert Bowers, a 46-year-old white man from Baldwin, a suburb of Pittsburgh, has been charged with the murders.
For someone to walk into a place of worship and interrupt any religious ceremony is horribly offensive. For someone to walk into a place of worship, scream for the annihilation of the people there, and open fire on their congregation… that’s another story.
As a Jew, I feel connected to the victims of the attack. I could have been at temple, peacefully practicing Judaism and rejoicing over new life with my family and friends. The congregation of Etz Chaim fell victim to the brutality of a white nationalist.
Bowers’s guilt is for the courts to decide, but what we do know is that he demonstrated his anti-semitic views online. His horrific social media posts are critical to the investigation of the attack, as they are indicative of his anti-semitic motives. On a social media website called Gab, his profile includes several xenophobic and anti-semitic posts. One post in particular refers to illegal immigrants as “invaders” of the United States. This was a term he also used to describe Jews. Bowers further used a hateful word historically used to denigrate Jewish people in a couple of his Gab posts.
“Trump is surrounded by [them],” wrote Bowers, “[t]here is no #MAGA as long as there is a[n] infestation.”
Just 11 minutes before the first shots were fired, Bowers wrote that he could no longer be a bystander to his people getting “slaughtered.”
I am shocked by the atrocity of the event, but I am not surprised.
As long as nationalism and white supremacy have existed, so has anti-semitism. White nationalists are equal opportunity haters. Even if Jews are of eastern European descent (Ashkinazi is the Jewish term) and racially white, we are different. In an episode of United Shades of America on CNN, a Klansman called the Jews a “dirty race,” a view that is not limited to the Ku Klux Klan. It is an opinion held by many Americans and Canadians alike. It is seen in Europe with the rise of the alt-right as well. For a Jew in North America, hate is almost inescapable.
Even though we, too, are white racially, white nationalists will demonize Jewish people time and time again. This hypocrisy and lack of logic is a common occurrence among white nationalists, which it makes them all the more dangerous to citizens who do not conform to their arbitrarily designated ideals.
Down the street from my house in Thornhill, a suburb of Toronto densely populated by Jews, an Orthodox synagogue (Chabad Flamingo) had the windows and front doors smashed with rocks. After that, not only were my eyes opened to hate, my heart was ripped open to it as well. This happened just seven-and-a-half months ago.
According to research published in University of Guelph professor William O’Grady’s 2014 textbook, Crime in Canadian Context: Debates and Controversies, Jewish people are the most targeted minority group in Canada when it comes to hate crimes. Yet every time we are targeted, non-Jewish North Americans are surprised. This is not to diminish the tragedy of last week’s atrocities in any way. Although we are so often portrayed as the enemy in the stories of white nationalists, the Jewish people always rally together. Gila Cotler, the director of Guelph Hillel — the University of Guelph’s chapter of a continent-wide, on-campus Jewish education and culture club — organized a vigil for the 11 people who died during the Pittsburgh shootings. No matter where we are, Jewish people all over the world will come together as one community in support of our brothers and sisters.
Intra-faith compassion is not the only support the Etz Chaim congregation is getting; there is much interfaith dialogue happening all over the continent. A preacher for the mostly black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. — a church that experienced a vicious shooting by a white nationalist in 2015 — held up a sign that read “Jewish Lives Matter.” Donations from various mosques in Pittsburgh were made out to Etz Chaim. Several members of the Muslim faith from Thornhill visited Temple Har Zion in support of the local Jewish community, paying homage to those who lost their lives in Pittsburgh.
In a toxic political climate such as the one in which we currently live, it is important for everyone to come together in support of each other. Black Lives Matter, Muslim Lives Matter, Jewish Lives Matter. White nationalists are so threatened by these statements, even though they don’t mean white lives don’t matter. They mean the lives of minorities matter, too. We all matter. Let’s take this on together.
Photo obtained via LA Times