There’s no point in describing again the horror of what happened in Squirrel Hill Saturday morning. Every brutal detail has been documented. We’ll refrain even from the intellectual dishonesty of referring to Robert Bowers as the “alleged gunman,” as if there was any doubt about who killed 11 of our neighbors at the Tree of Life Congregation.
Bowers’ motives are as clear as the slurs he shouted as he wielded for 20 minutes his Colt AR-15 — a weapon of war in a house of worship. “I just want to kill Jews,” he said, as if a pogrom was a birthright too long denied.
The officers who stopped Bowers weren’t as helpless as the elderly worshipers he ambushed at the beginning of the Shabbat service. Like a partially squashed cockroach dragging itself across the floor, Bowers managed to repeat an all-too familiar curse as he crawled bleeding toward the officers who shot him: “All these Jews need to die.”
Bowers may have stormed the Tree of Life synagogue alone, but like the demoniac who confronted Jesus in the region of the Gerasenes, his name — and number — are Legion. In his racist fury, Bowers represents many potentially lethal losers in America.
On Friday, Cesar Sayoc, a fellow American demon, was arrested after mailing 15 pipe bombs (and counting) to prominent Democrats and one cable news operation. Two former presidents, a vice president, two U.S. senators, a prominent House member, two billionaires, a former U.S. attorney general and a former U.S. secretary of state would be dead if Sayoc, a strip club DJ and pizza delivery man, had been a more competent bomb maker.
Unlike Bowers whose social media posts made his contempt for President Donald Trump clear — he considers the president insufficiently anti-Semitic — the “MAGA Bomber” has made a fetish of Mr. Trump’s political brand, bordering on satire.
Like the failed assassin who shot President Ronald Reagan to impress actress Jodie Foster, Sayoc has done everything in his power to promote his homicidal devotion to Mr. Trump’s nationalist ideology. Like Bowers, Sayoc considers the caravan of “Mexicans, Middle Easterners and Muslims” Mr. Trump says are about to overrun the country an existential threat.
Had Sayoc been as efficient at killing as Bowers, the most horrendous act of anti-Semitism in American history would have been only the second or third biggest story in the country following the assassination of two former presidents and the top tier of the Democratic party.
On Thursday, Greg Bush, another demoniac in Louisville, Ky., split the difference between Sayoc and Bowers by killing two elderly African-Americans at a Kroger supermarket in suburban Jeffersontown. Bush’s intention had been to murder worshippers at a predominantly black church, but he couldn’t gain entry to it. In frustration, he slithered to a nearby grocery store and shot the first two black people he saw.
While fleeing the scene, Bush told a startled witness, “Whites don’t shoot whites.” He was quickly caught and now faces hate-crime charges that will put him behind bars for life. All three demoniacs arrested last week are likely to die in prison of capital punishment or old age.
Still, Mr. Trump’s supporters insist that his rhetoric has not contributed to an increase in white nationalism, racism, xenophobia or anti-Semitism and that to say this is itself a slur. Mr. Trump is trying to “heal” the country, after all.
Just because the president jokes about having a “bad hair day” at a campaign rally the same day 11 American Jews were slaughtered by a Nazi from Baldwin doesn’t mean he lacks empathy or is unacquainted with human decency. Give him a chance to prove his compassion with a Squirrel Hill presidential photo-op with survivors. He’ll even bring Jared and Ivanka along so that their combined glamour will help a city in agony forget about the demons who whisper “We are Legion” in dark places.
A letter and a petition to Mr. Trump from many Pittsburgh Jewish leaders has extended a prophetic rebuke to a man who receives only praise and supine compliance from many of America’s Christian leaders:
President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you fully denounce white nationalism. Our Jewish community is not the only group you have targeted. You have also deliberately undermined the safety of people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities. Yesterday’s massacre is not the first act of terror incited against a minority group in our country.
President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you stop targeting and endangering all minorities. The murderer’s last public statement invoked the compassionate work of the Jewish refugee service HIAS at the end of a week in which you spread lies and sowed fear about migrant families in Central America. He killed Jews in order to undermine the efforts of all those who find shared humanity with immigrants and refugees.
After making several more points about every human being made in the image of God, the letter ends with this:
President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you commit yourself to compassionate democratic policies that recognize the dignity of all of us.
And the people all say — Amen!
Tony Norman: tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631.
First Published: October 30, 2018, 4:00 a.m.
