What do they want from my people?

Unionist wrote:

11 Killed in Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting; Gunman Yelled 'All Jews Must Die'

Saying "I am so sorry" is useless.  I am fucking enraged that this is happening, and will do whatever I can, as will millions more than yesterday, to make sure that this never happens anymore, that we will somehow, finally, make this a world where this can never happene again to any group of people.

To those who fell Saturday, "Rest in Power!"

I regularly see people sharing memes about the world "Zionist Occupation Government", Jewish bankers controlling the Federal  Reserve, Rothschild lies, and there was the conviction in Germany yesterday of two Canadian holocaust denial propagandists.

And these same people don't see any connection between their words and this. Of course it is getting worse now. Trump and others like him have built their careers on attacking a supposed cabal while entrenching their own power - shorthand for everything is controlled by the Jews.

The lies have always been there. Recent politics have given people the feeling they are free to act on them.

The 11 murdered people: including two brothers and a married couple. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/28/pittsburgh-shooting-vict...

Those who commit these acts are merely tools. To answer the question, the powers that be feed the rage that the white working class is being left behind offering up multiple targets for that rage (other than themselves). 

If we were all the same sex, religion, colour, language and culture another differenciating feature would be used to turn us against one another rather than the authors of our misfortune. 

The only solution is to direct the rage at the the correct target. Occupy got close but got distracted. I think the left has political adhd. 

people's hate needs to be gone.

in solidarity with love. 

Jews in Argentina certainly experienced this under the murderous dictatorship. The percentage of Jews murdered by the dictators was completely disproportional to their numbers among the citizens of the country. Yes, many were involved in leftist political movements, but some apolitical or moderately liberal Jews were tortured and killed as well (not that this bothered a certain Henry Kissinger).

There was also a full-fledged pogrom during the Semana Tragica in January 1919, when the authorities clamped down on striking workers, communists, socialists and anarchists but also murdered many among recent Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire. Not to mention the AMIA bombing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragic_Week_(Argentina)

This was pretty much exactly the same time that Rosa Luxemburg and her companions were being hunted down in Berlin.

Pondering wrote:

Those who commit these acts are merely tools. To answer the question, the powers that be feed the rage that the white working class is being left behind offering up multiple targets for that rage (other than themselves). 

Who are "the powers that be"?

I’m sorry to hear about this tragedy. 

But let’s get real here. It wasn’t hate that killed anyone. It was bullets fired from a firearm.

Hi lagatta4. Yes that may be correct? Maybe not?

In order to want to kill someone I’m pretty sure something more than just hate is going on in your head. 

I believe using the term hate is just too easy and does nothing to resolve

WWWTT wrote:

Hi lagatta4. Yes that may be correct? Maybe not?

In order to want to kill someone I’m pretty sure something more than just hate is going on in your head. 

I believe using the term hate is just too easy and does nothing to resolve

Many terms are easier than the solutions but it does not set us forward to deny them -- it sets us back.

Denying motives interferes with addressing a problem with real solutions needed. Sure labels don't fix things but they gide to the solutions that may mitigate at least.

Hatred is something that is like a disease, it is contagious. One person, or more, broadcasting it can bring it to another person who may not understand it but will adopt it and bring it to extreme actions the other participants might even condemn, even as they hold some responsibility. The rationality of the individual firing the gun is relevant but so is the hatred being spread in the community by others that take root in minds that are not functioning properly. The hatred that reached a person who you suggest maybe crazy is planted and enforced by others who, apart from their hatred may appear rational. Hatred is a collective thing and many participate in it beyond the one whose illness might be blamed for the act. And so you have the guns, you have the mental illness (perhaps) and you have the hatred -- three seperate things that each are relevant to why people die. There are other elements to -- like the level of violence in society perhaps. However, ignoring the element of hatred to focus on another element will not lead to solutions any more than ignoring a different element to focus on this alone.

Letter from Pittsburgh Jewish Leaders telling Trump he is not welcome in their community unless he changes.

Yesterday, a gunman slaughtered 11 Americans during Shabbat morning services. We mourn with the victims’ families and pray for the wounded. Here in Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, we express gratitude for the first responders and for the outpouring of support from our neighbors near and far. We are committed to healing as a community while we recommit ourselves to repairing our nation.

For the past three years your words and your policies have emboldened a growing white nationalist movement. You yourself called the murderer evil, but yesterday’s violence is the direct culmination of your influence. 

https://www.bendthearc.us/open_letter_to_president_trump?fbclid=IwAR3ztA...

Happy people who are fairly satisfied with their lives, even if they are mentally ill, usually don't go murder strangers for no reason. They believe that they do have a valid reason. They believe that the group they are attacking has harmed them and others so profoundly that attention must be brought to identify them as the enemy and to "wake people up". There is frequently reference to beginning a war to "take back" America. "America" standing for "the way things were" no matter what country it is. Incels are the same.  

Asking "why jews" is like asking why women or why black people or why muslims or why christians. The answer is because angry people need a target. 

Trump and his ilk nurture anger against anyone other than themselves and their class. As long as we aren't looking at them it doesn't matter who the target is. 

Nor is blaming Trump for this atrocity "looking at them" because Trump isn't the origin of the anger. He just feeds it. 

NDPP wrote:

Members of Netanyahu's Likud Blame Victims of Pittsburgh Pogrom and Echo the Killer's Rhetoric

https://t.co/dTHu4qPpp5

"As Israeli Minister of Education Naftali Bennett sets out to Pittsburgh, prominent members of the governing Likud Party have blamed the Jewish victims of the neo-Nazi massacre for inspiring the killer and 'causing anti-Semitism..."

Doesn't Israel exist to protect Jewish people from anti-Semitism?

Glenn Greenwald: Violence Like Pittsburgh Shooting Is “Inevitable Outcome” of Racist Scapegoating

quote:

GLENN GREENWALD: So, if you look at the social media history of the murderer who entered the synagogue in Pittsburgh, you see something much different than the social media history of the individual accused of sending pipe bombs to various Democratic politicians and media newsrooms. That person, the pipe bomber, seems to clearly have been directly inspired by and formed by Trump and the Trump movement, whereas the killer who slaughtered Jews in the Pittsburgh synagogue is much more of this kind of traditional, neo-Nazi, hardcore KKK white supremacist who sees Donald Trump not as an ally, but as a tool of the Jews and of Zionism. I think he’s much more kind of out on the fringes of American political life. So I think the attempt to try and blame Trump’s or Trump’s rhetoric for this attack is a much harder case to make than for the pipe bomber, who clearly was motivated by Trump’s enemy list.

Nonetheless, once you start creating this atmosphere in a country where scapegoating becomes the norm and where you start encouraging people to look at marginalized and vulnerable minorities as the source of their woes, history teaches that violence against those groups are the inevitable outcome. And so, while I think it would be a mistake, I would be personally cautious, to draw too many lessons about the synagogue shooter—he seems to me to be a very familiar kind of outlier in American history—I nonetheless do think that the climate, not just in the U.S., but throughout the West and democracies generally, has become one where these kinds of—this kind of rage against marginalized groups is becoming increasingly pervasive.

WWWTT wrote:

I still don’t think That blaming “hate” or Trump is really going to get any positive results. 

There’s always a freekin mass murder shooting in the US. Same shit different pile. The only thing difference is the venue 

The last big one in the US That I actually noticed was that Las Vegas one at a country Western concert.  I guess that guy that was responsible hated country music 

Heres what I’m thinking, it’s the fuckin bullets coming out of all those guns. 

Really?  It's THAT important to you to make the deaths of these people meaningless?  

And what Ken is saying is "why Jews?".

It's a fair question, isn't it?  We like to say "oh, in America, it's easy for ANYONE to buy a gun".  So, guns are a given.

But why do people who can buy a gun use it to kill people, and why those people?

To say it's just "bullets from a gun" is the same kind of reductio ad absurdum as telling you that every one of your ancestors died of the same thing you're going to die of -- lack of oxygen to the brain.  Totally true, but not very meaningful or informative.

Unionist wrote:

Mr. Magoo wrote:

And what Ken is saying is "why Jews?".

It's a fair question, isn't it?  We like to say "oh, in America, it's easy for ANYONE to buy a gun".  So, guns are a given.

But why do people who can buy a gun use it to kill people, and why those people?

To say it's just "bullets from a gun" is the same kind of reductio ad absurdum as telling you that every one of your ancestors died of the same thing you're going to die of -- lack of oxygen to the brain.  Totally true, but not very meaningful or informative.

For perhaps the first time, I am able to agree in full with Mr. Magoo. Thank you for bringing the discussion back where it belongs.

Me too.  Go figure.  Yes, there's an issue with guns and bullets and the way they too easily interact with anger-especially white male anger-in the US.  But to say that these people were just killed by the bullets from the guns sounds not that far, as phrase, from just saying "hey, shit happens".  I hope that's not what WWWTT meant, but it's what it sounded like and that matters.

Hitchens was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right about calling out antisemitism as the template for all other kinds of discrimination that followed, and a standard tool of authoritarianism. Never mind this whataboutism; there is a reason why they keep coming back to that lie; because it has been told for so long that plenty of otherwise reasonable people believe it, and aren't even ashamed about it.

“And I'll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I'm talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this—this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you.”

― Christopher Hitchens

Actually there is a very specific reason why it is Jewish people.

No other culture is targetted with lies about controlling world finance, governments, media, and dominating elite professions, along with many more insidious lies and stereotypes. There is no other kind of racism that is quite like it.

If you haven't read Will Eisner's book The Plot, you might want to to bring yourself up to speed with what is happening here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plot:_The_Secret_Story_of_The_Protocol...

My father fought in the Canadian army during WWII. Following the war, the Canadian army prosecuted only one war criminal, Kurt Meyer of the Waffen SS Hitlerjugend (mostly made up of troops who had been in the Hitler Youth) 12th Panzer division, who had shot 50 Canadians, 35 of them from my father's regiment - the Winnipeg Rifles, shortly after D-Day. Following the war, my father was a guard in a denazification camp. Unfortunately, according to him, they denazified almost no one. As a result of this, he always warned that the seductiveness of Nazism-fascism on those indoctrinated in it when young would allow it to make a comeback. Because for several decades even mentioning that it would make a comeback would invite ridicule of what were then extremely marginal far-right groups in society, I came to think that these extreme groups would never amount to more than a very tiny sector of society.

However, these far-rights groups have been growing in strength for at least a decade. Recently this has been abetted by politicians like Trump. In 2016 as Trump ran in the election, there was a 34% increase in anti-semetic attacks in the US, followed by a 57% increase in 2017 as Trump became President (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/us/anti-semitism-adl-report.html). Similar waves of hatred against Jews and "the others" of all types, are now being fueled by far-right politicians and governments around the world. Nothing more illustrates the linking of  anti-semitism and other forms of discrimination than the tying of the caravan of Central American asylum seekers to its alleged funding by Jewish billionaire George Soros that will result in an "invasion" of leprosy carrying brown people that will spread the disease in the US.

The presumptive next Speaker (Kevin McCarthy), should the Republicans win the House of Representatives next week, tweeted that George Soros, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg (all Jewish) were trying to "buy" the election. (https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/28/politics/tom-steyer-mccarthy-tweet/index....) 

When the Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was asked what the US troops now being sent to the border, her answer was chilling: “We do not have any intention right now to shoot at people,” Nielsen told Fox News. (http://time.com/5435748/border-patrol-wont-shoot-caravan-kirstjen-nielsen/)

The alleged MAGA bomber Cesar Sayoc who sent at least 15 bombs to critics repeatedly named by Trump was radicalized by Fox News, right-wing talk radio and websites, and, of course, Trump himself. 

The Pittsburgh synagogue killer, Robert Bowers, "claimed Jews were helping transport members of the migrant caravans. He shared a video that another Gab.com user posted, purportedly of a Jewish refugee advocacy group HIAS on the US-Mexico border." (https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/27/us/synagogue-attack-suspect-robert-bowers...) His hatred was fueled the same kind of propaganda produced by the Hitler's Nazis. 

Bowers had a particular hatred of  HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. He had posted “Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us?” Another post that most likely referred to HIAS read, “Open you Eyes! It’s the filthy evil jews Bringing the Filthy evil Muslims into the Country!!” (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-the-tree-of-life-shoot...)

Unfortunately, I was wrong. My father was right. 

While the Guardian and ADL report record levels of anti-Semitic incidents in USA, the rabidly anti-Putin, pro Western propaganda mouthpiece Moscow Times reports Russia has the lowest level of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe.

Anti-Semitism at Historic Lows in Russia, Jewish Congress Leader Says

https://t.co/D3JZa7KNsn

"Russia is currently experiencing its lowest level of anti-Semitism in history and has the lowest level of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, according to Yuri Kanner, the president of the Russian Jewish Congress. Meanwhile Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov issued a statement warning about 'the spread of anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism in European countries,' the state-run Tass news agency reported."

[quote=Ken Burch]

  Obviously everyone here would grieven equally for any other group this had happened to.  On this board 

[quote=NDPP]

I'm not at all sure that's true. It's definitely not true in the wider world. There are great disparities in how homicide of one group is treated as opposed to another. And this  becomes even more obvious when one compares the media coverage. Look who gets lots of it and who doesn't. 

Pondering wrote:

Ken Burch wrote:

OK.  Guns are part of it.   I can't believe anyone here would even ask if there'd be any difference had it been a group other than Jews.  Obviously everyone here would grieven equally for any other group this had happened to.  On this board,  we have grieved and raged against, with the same levels of pain and truth, massacres of LGBTQ people, Muslims, women, Palestinians, Indigenous people, leftists and trade unionists.  None here, to my knowledge, has treated the loss of any of those groups of massacre victims as if they were any less important than any other.

 You immediately jump to ugly conclusions. I suggest you think about that.  The point is that the cause remains the same regardless of the target. It isn't specific to being Jewish. There isn't anything any of the targets could do to avoid being targets because they didn't do anything to become targets. To ask why any particular group is a target is to suggest the target has done something to invite the violence. What I am saying is that the rage is created disconnected from any target. The right provides a list of suggestions to direct the rage away from themsleves. 

It can happen to any group and has happened to many groups.  Fine.  We have all grieved the loss of people of many other groups.  The cause remains the same.  Fine.  Why does it matter to you that people are noting that these people were, in fact, killed solely because they were Jewish?  The killer said he was going to kill Jews.  He did so.  Nobody here, including the author of this thread, came even close to believing that it would have been less of a loss or less of a crime if it had been-as it has been before, as it likely will be again-people of another group being massacred.  Nobody here was saying that hatred in general isn't lethal.  Could you please explain what, in whatever anyone posted in this thread, bothers you?  What it is you are seem to be taking issue with?  Why you appear-and please explain what you are actually feeling about this if this is not the case-not to be able to just go with the grief and pain the original poster was expressing?