Attempts are being made to explain the anti-Semitic slaughter in Pittsburgh as the result of Republican discourse under President Donald Trump and his attitude on immigration and refugees.
Not only is this a despicable exploitation and politicization of trauma and loss, it is also a form of "understanding" the murderer. It makes him out to be a "weak link," someone who supposedly became the victim of the president's xenophobic talk. From there, his actions are no surprise – wasn't he encouraged from the very top?
This is an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of Republican positions. Conservative views on issues of identity, nationalism, citizenship, allocation of resources, and public security are now getting a populist and violent rebrand as something to be ashamed of, because it has been "proved" that they give extremists a green light for mass murder.
What is the difference between this and accusing a rape victim of having dressed provocatively or led a loose lifestyle? It is the same losing gambit: It labels the man a victim of aesthetic-erotic circumstances and sends the message to women and society that a culture of promiscuity and liberal media are the reasons for a rise in sexual assault.
That is how we should respond to claims that the Republic discourse is responsible for the Pittsburgh slaughter. Rape has nothing to do with sexual attraction; it is about violence and control. It is carried out privately in cars, in bathroom stalls, in bedrooms, the same way it is used as a weapon of war, to humiliate and defeat an enemy on the battlefields of Africa and eastern Europe.
Similarly, an anti-Semite did not set out to kill Jews because of the legitimate views of the current president. There was a problem of security or intelligence, and it's possible that the shooting could not have been prevented. But the claim that the position of the White House – in other words, that of American voters – abandoned and endangered the worshippers in an American synagogue is close to delusional.
There were those in Israel who jumped on the bandwagon and offered interpretations of the attack through local eyes. The killing took place just after the anniversary of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination.
Haaretz columnist Hemi Shalev said the Pittsburgh killer had called Trump "soft" and expressed dissatisfaction with him, but also said that both the shooter and the man who sent envelopes containing explosives to Democratic leaders last week had been "fed on the same atmosphere of fear, loathing and xenophobia that is flourishing in the polarized age of Trump."
Shalev said that just as Israeli elements denied their part in Rabin's murder, the Trump regime would also deny any culpability for the killings on Saturday. And to complete the twisted analogy, he expressed his sorrow that the Jews of Pittsburgh would have to be consoled by the government of Israel, "whose values, at the end of the day, are closer to that of the killer than the Jews he killed."
This is beyond demented populism – it's anti-Semitism: The Jews are responsible for their own deaths, and, more specifically, the government that represents them is responsible. What can the abandoned Jews of the world do in the face of anti-Semitic killers, Shalev hints, if the government of their own nation-state encourages racism and xenophobia?
In recent years, the Israeli government has been accused of being responsible for many horrible phenomena. The latest round of terrorism marks a new low, when it is said that a lot of the terrorists decided to kill Jews because of their "understandable" frustration at the "lack of a peace process." That accusation, like the liberal voices in the U.S. that blame Trump for the Pittsburgh murders, has brought populism to new levels. After Rabin was assassinated, people claimed that the assassin had been inspired by the opposition. If not directly, than by marginal figures who opposed the Oslo Accords but had not done enough to criticize them.
Now it is being claimed that murderous violence is erupting because of the discourse from the official leadership that was elected by democratic vote. Therefore, every voter who supported the legally elected government, whether in Israel or the U.S., is tainted, as if the blood of the dead were on his own hands. If so, voters should draw conclusions at the U.S. midterm elections or at the next election in Israel.
Luckily, there is no need to remind Israelis that political violence, like rape, is not the fault of the victim. We can only hope that in the United States, people will reject this shallow, dangerous explanation.
