A group of Jewish leaders in Pittsburgh does not want President Trump to visit their Tree of Life Synagogue to show support for the Jewish community in the wake of Saturday's attack that left 11 dead.
https://www.bendthearc.us/open_letter_to_president_trump
I hate to engage in criticism while people are trying to deal with this tragedy, but this is highly misguided and unfair to the President. We should all remember that this gunman had nothing to do with Trump and was not even a supporter. Any charge of anti-semitism directed to Trump is misguided. His own daughter is a Jewish convert, and no president-no president- has been as supportive of Israel as President Trump. The previous president (Obama) was the polar opposite.
To me, this is all part of the narrative that Trump's ascension to the presidency has unleashed a wave of anti-semitism. I saw this narrative repeated first-hand in 2017 when I attended an event at Temple Bat Yahm in Newport Beach. As I witnessed a collection of Jewish and Islamic leaders decry an increase in anti-semitism and Islamophobia respectively and tie it to the election of Trump, any discussion of Islamic anti-semitism-including anti-semitism on the UC Irvine campus was silenced. At a follow up event at UC Irvine, I was able to address a question to local imam Muzammil Siddiqi as to whether he thought allowing pro-Palestinian students to use his mosque to assemble their mock Apartheid Wall for their annual week of bashing Israel events was helpful to Jewish-Muslim relations. Naturally, he completely danced around the question.
But the Pittsburgh attack was not carried out by a Muslim. It seems at this point that Robert Bowers was some sort of white supremacist though not a Trump supporter. While we must equally condemn acts of violence against Jews no matter who is responsible, it is wrong to blame Trump for this latest outrage. I hope that Pittsburgh's Jewish leaders will reconsider their position. It has been a struggle to bring real public awareness to the resurgence in anti-semitism in this country. We finally have a president who cares deeply about it. It would be wrong to push him away.
I believe that their problem with Trump in relation to the shooter is that the shooter's motivation was that he wanted to stop their support of the "invading caravan" of immigrants coming toward the border.
ReplyDeleteHe might not have been a Trump supporter, but he was using the same talking points as Trump.
I don't blame them. Even if you said that aside, Trump has unambiguously called for violence, even offering to pay lawyer's fees for people who assaulted protesters.
They feel as though Trump's toxic rhetoric is inappropriate for the tone they want to convey, no matter how much he supports Israel.
Fair point. Trump has said many things I wish he had not.
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