How much responsibility does Trump bear for the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh?

WTF's Avatar
  • WTF
  • 10-28-2018, 12:29 PM
Trump's words created an atmosphere. . Originally Posted by the_real_Barleycorn
Yes, that was the point of the article.
I B Hankering's Avatar
Yes and Louis Farrakhan has nothing to do with black resistance! Originally Posted by WTF
Odumbo and Keith Ellison's buddy, Louis Farrakhan, was in the press recently for preaching words this shooter already believed. Just maybe it was Farrahakan's message -- repeated in the press -- that pushed the shooter to attack.

That's a more valid possibility than what the WaPo reporter in the OP has.

The shooter definitively said he was anti-Trump, which makes the shooter just like, Odumbo, Biden, hildebeest, Schumer, etc., are anti-Trump.
Yssup Rider's Avatar
Don't blame Hillary or her people. Originally Posted by the_real_Barleycorn
Nobody is.
Yssup Rider's Avatar
Odumbo and Keith Ellison's buddy, Louis Farrakhan, was in the press recently for preaching words this shooter already believed. Just maybe it was Farrahakan's message -- repeated in the press -- that pushed the shooter to attack.

That's a more valid possibility than what the WaPo reporter in the OP has.

The shooter definitively said he was anti-Trump, which makes the shooter just like, Odumbo, Biden, hildebeest, Schumer, etc., are anti-Trump.
Originally Posted by I B Hankering
Farrakhan has always been an avowed anti-Semite.

However, in all the years of him preaching hatred, nobody had done what this guy did yesterday. The theory you espouse in your post is pretty far-fetched.

I'm pretty sure there aren't a lot of Farrakhan/Obama/Biden, (add IBH nicknames here), supporters on Gab, but I wouldn't know.

Would you?
I B Hankering's Avatar
Farrakhan has always been an avowed anti-Semite.

However, in all the years of him preaching hatred, nobody had done what this guy did yesterday. The theory you espouse in your post is pretty far-fetched.

I'm pretty sure there aren't a lot of Farrakhan/Obama/Biden, (add IBH nicknames here), supporters on Gab, but I wouldn't know.

Would you?
Originally Posted by Yssup Rider
I just pointed out that the shooter hated Trump every bit as much as Odumbo, hildebeest, Biden, Schumer, etc., making him their bedfellow, not Trump's.

And Farrakhan still has his Twitter account to broadcast his hateful antisemitism. Twitter, etc., shut down the White Supremacy groups, hence it could only be Farrakhan's message that's reaching a large audience. Farrakhan, Odumbo and Keith Ellison are all good buddies, as you'll recall.

Did you see the half-shekel coin issued by Temple organizations in Israel in honor of Trump? You don't get that by trying to use someone's Jewish heritage against a campaign opponent like hildebeest did Bernie.



dilbert firestorm's Avatar

Did you see the half-shekel coin issued by Temple organizations in Israel in honor of Trump?


Originally Posted by I B Hankering

nice coin of Cyrus and Trump. wouldn't mind getting one of those.



why did they link Cyrus to Trump?
I B Hankering's Avatar
nice coin of Cyrus and Trump. wouldn't mind getting one of those.



why did they link Cyrus to Trump? Originally Posted by dilbert firestorm
An honorific hildebeest would never receive, and a reason, per the shooter, Trump was not the stimulus or motive behind the synagogue shooting as represented by the reporter cited in the OP.

The Mikdash Educational Center said the "Temple Coin" features Trump alongside King Cyrus, who 2,500 years ago allowed Jews to return to Jerusalem from their exile in Babylon.

Rabbi Mordechai Persoff said that Trump, like Cyrus, made a "big declaration that Jerusalem is the capital of the holy people."

(USNEWS)
Trump is within his rights to exercise free speech, and in fact doesn't need to be cowed into doing what liberals want, whether in response to the horrible tragedy in Pittsburgh, or any other act of an insane individual.

He is no more responsible for violence in Pettsburgh than Obama is for the horrible violence in Chicago he and his cronies have been completely unable to quell.

America is a land that requires personal responsibility, not group guilt and second class status for not thinking the way the leftist assholes think.
Yssup Rider's Avatar
Remember that the next time you insult an entire group of private citizens for the rhetoric of their leader, Fred. Ooops. You just did again.

Thanks for proving my point.
Absolutely zero. Originally Posted by Budman

Agreed. Since i've seen a # of folk who said Bernie bore no responsibility for the Scalice shooting WHY SHOULD trump bare any here?


Odumbo and Keith Ellison's buddy, Louis Farrakhan, was in the press recently for preaching words this shooter already believed. Just maybe it was Farrahakan's message -- repeated in the press -- that pushed the shooter to attack.

That's a more valid possibility than what the WaPo reporter in the OP has.

The shooter definitively said he was anti-Trump, which makes the shooter just like, Odumbo, Biden, hildebeest, Schumer, etc., are anti-Trump.
Originally Posted by I B Hankering

Good point Hankering. Farrakhan has been RAILING against jews, whites and others for years. SO many this shooter, was doing this Because of HIS Rhetoric.
zero
This is the discussion people wanted to have while the shooter was still on the grounds.

Now that we know who did what and why, it’s appropriate to have this discussion. For the second time this week.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.was...ng-pittsburgh/

How much responsibility does Trump bear for the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh?

Political rhetoric matters, and he has had some unfortunate things to say about Jews.

By Julia Ioffe
October 28, 2018 at 10:06 AM

In the hours after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, President Trump’s allies were at pains to point out that Robert Bowers, the alleged shooter, was in fact anti-Trump. Never mind that the Bowers disliked Trump because he felt he was too soft on “the k--- infestation,” he wrote online, using a slur for Jews. “Trump is a globalist, not a nationalist,” Bowers wrote on one of his social media accounts. But to the president’s defenders, this was a hopeful moment, one they could use to separate Trump from the carnage at Squirrel Hill. There was an important difference between “a shooter who hates Trump,” wrote conservative writer David French, and the man who loved Trump who sent Trump’s critics all those pipe bombs. Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt pointed out that anti-Semitism “transcends the left/right divide.” In these defenders’ minds, this absolves Trump of any guilt.

It doesn’t.

Trump has had enough to say about the Jews that his supporters may easily make certain pernicious inferences. During the campaign, he joked at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition that it wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money.” A campaign-era tweet about Hillary Clinton superimposed a Star of David over dollar bills. He said the white-supremacist marchers at Charlottesville last year were “fine people.” After I published a profile of Trump’s third wife, Melania, that displeased her — and his supporters — the alt-right deluged me with anti-Semitic insults and imagery, culminating in clear death threats — such as an image of a Jew being shot execution-style or people ordering coffins in my name. When Trump was asked to condemn these attacks by his supporters, he said “I don’t have a message” for them. That day, my terrified father called me and pointed out that it was the 26th anniversary of our family’s arrival in America.

Why had we come from the Soviet Union in the first place? My mother tells the story this way: “The decision came one summer when my little daughter was 6 months old and my older one was 5,” she said in a recent interview. “There were these persistent rumors of pogroms, because it was the upcoming 1,000th anniversary of the Orthodox Church in Russia. … People were saying that the police had lists of Jews and their addresses, and they would give them out.” She began to talk about her maternal grandmother, Riva, a pediatrician who had to care for all her siblings after a pogrom had riven their Ukrainian town in the early years of the 20th century. “Her parents,” my mother recalled matter-of-factly, were slaughtered “in front of nine children. All of them were there, forced to watch how their parents were brutally murdered.”


Related: Trump doesn’t understand how anti-Semitism works. Neither do most Americans.

My mother had been deeply resistant to the idea of emigrating, but that day she gave my father dispensation to start the process: She understood, suddenly, that she lived in a political climate so tolerant of anti-Semitism that, by 1988, a pogrom was truly plausible. The nation was steeped in anti-Semitism. In the years after the nation lost 1.5 million of its Jews to the Nazis, Joseph Stalin had ushered in a campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans,” including Jewish doctors who were supposedly poisoning their Gentile patients. Suddenly, Riva’s patients believed the government propaganda that she was trying to poison their children. Her daughter, my grandmother, told me recently that, even after watching her parents’ execution, surviving two world wars and a civil war, “this was the closest I’ve ever seen her to suicide.”

The campaign continued for decades, with Jewish quotas at universities, informal bans on Jews serving in certain politically sensitive professions, and constant anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic propaganda. In 1988, the year of my mother’s panic, ultranationalist, anti-Semitic groups such as Pamyat (“Memory”) emerged. They were curated and controlled by the KGB to galvanize the patriotic Soviet masses against the pernicious influences of the pro-Western — and heavily Jewish — intelligentsia. All of this gave license to casual anti-Semitism in daily life. The state didn’t have to tell everyday commuters to call my grandmother a “k---” in a crowded Moscow subway car. It didn’t have to. It had made its preferences perfectly clear.

Culpability is a tricky thing, and politicians, especially of the demagogic variety, know this very well. Unless they go as far as organized, documented, state-implemented slaughter, they don’t give specific directions. They don’t have to. They simply set the tone. In the end, someone else does the dirty work, and they never have to lift a finger — let alone stain it with blood. I saw it while reporting on Russia, where, after unexpected pro-democracy protests and the annexation of Crimea, Putin created an environment so vicious, so toxic (he called his critics “national traitors” and “a fifth column”) that, when assassins killed opposition leader Boris Nemtsov at the foot of the Kremlin walls in 2015, it was easy for people to blame the divisive political rhetoric as if it were a spontaneous weather pattern, rather than Putin himself for creating it. And everyone understood immediately the message it sent: Dissent is a deadly business. Putin may not have ordered Nemtsov’s assassination, but Russia’s elite could clearly see he wasn’t too upset about the outcome.

Related: Conspiracy theories about Soros aren’t just false. They’re anti-Semitic.

When I was faced with the anti-Semitic rage of Trump supporters defending “Empress Melania,” I saw it clearly: Should Trump win the election, his followers — some of whom threw the word “k---” around as happily as they use the n-word — would be heartened and empowered, and they would quickly surpass the gas-chamber Twitter memes they were then deploying.

In the 2½ years that followed, Trump’s tune has become a deafening roar. The closing ad of his campaign reprised the kind of anti-Semitic tropes that populated “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”: “It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities,” Trump’s voice said, as pictures appeared of then-Federal Reserve Board chair Janet Yellen (a Jew), billionaire progressive donor George Soros (a Jew), and then-Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (also a Jew). The ad was called “Donald Trump’s Argument for America.”

In fact, Trump had so much to say about the Jews that his Jewish son-in-law has had to publicly defend him as “not an anti-Semite.”


Related: Don't compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. It belittles Hitler.

But the anti-Semites have not been convinced. A month after he had ordered his trolls to attack me, white supremacist Andrew Anglin told the HuffPost what he thought of Trump’s refusal to denounce them. “We interpret that as an endorsement,” he said. To his readers, he wrote, “Glorious Leader Donald Trump Refuses to Denounce Stormer Troll Army.” When President Trump blamed “both sides” for Charlottesville, his supporters heard him loud and clear: “I knew Trump was eventually going to be like, meh, whatever,” Anglin said. “Trump only disavowed us at the point of a Jewish weapon. So I’m not disavowing him.” Many others in the alt-right praised Trump’s statement as moral equivocation on Charlottesville. To them, this, rather than the forced, obligatory condemnation, was the important signal. (According to the Anti-Defamation League, the incidence of anti-Semitic hate crimes jumped nearly 60 percent in 2017, the biggest increase since it started keeping track in 1979. What made 2017 so different? It was Trump’s first year in office.)

When Trump called himself a nationalist in Houston last week, the alt-right knew exactly what he meant. One alt-right commenter was elated because nationalism “is inherently connected to race.” Another wrote that he was “literally shaking” with glee. Still another wrote “THE FIRE RISES.”

The president did not tell a deranged man to send pipe bombs to the people he regularly lambastes on Twitter and lampoons in his rallies, so he’s not at fault. Trump didn’t cause another deranged man to tweet that the caravan of refugees moving toward America’s southern border (the one Trump has complained about endlessly) is paid for by the Jews before he shot up a synagogue. Trump certainly never told him, “Go kill some Jews on a rainy Shabbat morning.”

Related: It’s not wrong to compare Trump’s America to the Holocaust. Here’s why.

But this definition of culpability is too narrow, too legalistic — and ultimately too dishonest. The pipe-bomb makers and synagogue shooters and racists who mowed a woman down in Charlottesville were never even looking for Trump’s explicit blessing, because they knew the president had allowed bigots like them to go about their business, secure in the knowledge that, like Nemtsov’s killers, they don’t really bother the president, at least not too much. His role is just to set the tone. Their role is to do the rest. Originally Posted by Yssup Rider
Both the question you asked and the article you quoted are idiotic.

Trump makes it PLAIN and OBVIOUS that he supports the Jews and actually moves the US embassy to Jerusalem, which all previous Presidents were to chicken shit to do AND IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE to the left.

Trump's own daughter converts to Judaism without any negative impact from Trump AND IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE to the left.

The Pittsburgh shooter hates Trump because he thinks Trump is some kind of "Jew lover" AND IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE to the left.

The left, particularly the media, started out with a narrative and they refuse to budge from it when the evidence doesn't support it.

Cesar Soyac is a native American and - judging by the first name - may be part hispanic, too. But, the media was hoping and praying for a white guy from the mid-West named "Billy Ray Johnson".

Instead, they get a minority from Florida who appears to be gay as well.

CNN even posts picture of him with his skin lightened.

Trump has NO responsibility for the Pittsburgh shooter.
Yssup Rider's Avatar
So if there is no failure in leadership, it must be a failure in policy.

Right?
I B Hankering's Avatar
So if there is no failure in leadership, it must be a failure in policy.

Right? Originally Posted by Yssup Rider
Didn't see where you posted anything like that when 16 people were shot in Dallas and when they threw Molotov Cocktails -- actually, functioning bombs -- in Ferguson.

Oh! That's right! You couldn't blame Trump, he wasn't the president.

And of course, Odumbo was all up in the face of those anti-semetic racists, wasn't he?


lustylad's Avatar
This is the discussion people wanted to have while the shooter was still on the grounds. Originally Posted by Yssup Rider
Wtf does that mean? You wanted to politicize this tragedy while the 11 dying bodies were still warm? Have you no shame or decency?

As a Pittsburgher, I find this thread to be extremely offensive. I visit the Squirrel hill neighborhood often and have many friends there. Luckily no one I know personally was hurt, but it could have been otherwise. When I ask myself how anyone could be so filled with hate they would walk into a house of worship and murder innocent people they don't even know, I am mystified and deeply angered. But then I read something like this - and see that there are people who are so filled with hate for the POTUS that they would outrageously and derangedly seek to lay this atrocity at his doorstep.

I pray for the haters everywhere, even those in this forum, that they may find a way to free themselves from this kind of hate before it consumes them.