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I spoke with @AnaCabrera this morning about the ongoing trial of the man who killed 11 Jews at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. Five years later, there’s never been a more terrifying time in my lifetime to be Jewish in America. 1/
I know this because I am a) a practicing Jew; b) an occasional TV commentator; and c) a user of this app. And the confluence of those factors means the comments to my posts here are often vile, increasingly anti-Semitic, and sometimes just plain scary. 2/
One of the things that strikes me about the case is that the shooter’s defense is not that he didn’t do it, but that he wasn’t motivated by hatred of Jews, despite shouting evidence of the same during the shooting itself. Instead, his lawyers say, he was simply irrational. 3/
Specifically, they argued yesterday that the shooter irrationally believed that Jews, by facilitating immigration to America, laid the groundwork for a genocide of *his* people. 4/
Legally, if the jury were to buy that line, it might stave off the imposition of the death penalty. But morally and ethically, it’s just trading one hatred of an othered group for another. 5/
Hate does not grow neatly or in isolation; it fester and climbs, like ivy, in twisted vines. For any of us who have been “othered,” our freedom from violence, our ability to just be is wrapped up in one another’s liberation. 6/
I hope if you take anything from the defense’s twisted logic, it is that. And in the meantime, I pray for the 11 victims. May their memories be for a blessing today and always. FIN.
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