Hate unleashed

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

– W.B. Yeats (1916)

President Donald Trump’s provocative white nationalist rhetoric and racist policies have emboldened extremists of every stripe—neo-Nazi, KKK, neo-Confederate, anti-Semite, xenophobe, homophobe, and every other variety.

Last week’s multiple murders and attempted murders are the logical result of the climate Trump has created. Savage words, savage acts. Even before last week’s orgy of violence, there had been a sharp increase in hate crimes in the United States over the last two years. Hate groups have become bigger, more violent, and more brazen.

For a long time now, Donald Trump has been playing with fire in the presence of high explosives. Last week came the detonation: Fourteen pipe bombs sent to kill a who’s who of the president’s critics; the racist killing of two African Americans at a Kroger’s supermarket in Louisville; and the massacre of eleven Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue. These are the fruits of more than two years of Trump’s vitriol and agitation.

I want to focus first on the most heinous, bloody and telling crime of all, the attack against the Tree of Life Congregation. At first blush, it seems hard to understand the targeting of Jews at this historical juncture. This is a crime that is almost incomprehensible, and not only because of its brutality.

It was puzzling when the thugs marched in Charlottesville chanting “the Jews shall not replace us.”

What were they thinking?

What threat were they imagining in their sick minds?

Do we have a Jewish president? No.

Are Jewish immigrants pouring into the country, as they did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? No.

Is the Jewish population growing rapidly? No.

So why?

One reason may be that, historically, Jews have been the archetype of the other and, for those who are infected with the virus of hatred, Jews stand for all “outsiders” collectively, an all-purpose scapegoat.

But there was a more specific and telling motive for the Synagogue rampage. An essay by Albert Einstein written in 1938, “Why Do They Hate the Jews?” provides a key. “The bond that has united the Jews for thousands of years and that unites them today is the democratic ideal of social justice, coupled with the ideal of mutual aid and tolerance among all men,” Einstein wrote.

This Jewish ethic is diametrically opposed to the ideology of white supremacy in all its forms and manifestations. Reflecting that ethic, Jews founded the oldest immigrant aid organization in the country in the late nineteenth century, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). The organization has welcomed people of many nations and religions, and it continues to help today’s refugees.

The murderer, identified as Robert Bowers, could not abide this. He attacked the Tree of Life temple because he is a virulent anti-Semite and an ardent xenophobe. It proved a lethal combination for eleven innocent people and a tragedy for their families and friends, an entire community, a proud city, and a nation that protects freedom of religion through the First Amendment to its Constitution.

And here is where Donald Trump comes in to the equation. From day one to today, the president has whipped up xenophobia to a fever pitch, resorting to vicious lies, outrageous stereotypes, and unwarranted alarmism. The central plank in the administration’s strategy for the midterm election is instilling false fears about a so-called “Caravan” actually composed of poor Central Americans fleeing for their lives and separated by 1,000 hard miles from the border.

To hear the president tell it, however, you might think a Panzer division was on its way to invade Texas. He has even suggested Islamic terrorists were part of the Caravan, only to later admit there is zero evidence for anything of the sort.

This is the kind of inflammatory lie that leads a delusional zealot to see a plot to bring in foreigners bent on murdering “my people,” aka white Americans. And who is facilitating the invasion? The Jews, of course. Depending on the specific lunatic, it’s all part of a Jewish conspiracy being carried out by HIAS, with or without financing by George Soros, another Jew, and worse, one who believes in that crazy Jewish ethic of social justice, mutual aid, and tolerance.

Soros, of course, has had nothing to do with the Caravan but in the toxic atmosphere created by Trump, the haters are liable to believe it and to act on it. Soros was the first target of the pipe bomber, identified as Cesar Sayoc.

In the wake of grief and loss, Trump was Trump to the second power. Zero empathy. Unrepentant. Blaming the murders at Tree of Life on the absence of an armed guard. Sending the Army to the Mexican border supposedly to turn back the caravan but really out of pure electoral demagogy. Signing an unconstitutional executive order to end birthright citizenship.

The pipe bomber and the shooter in Pittsburgh are nut cases but they found inspiration in the biggest nut case of all, the one in the White House.