By John Cox, Nov. 3, 2018:
On this very date in 1979, two miles from my home in Greensboro, NC, white supremacist terrorists ambushed a group of anti-racist demonstrators, shooting and killing five of them. Like the other perpetrators, Glenn Miller — a long-time, notorious Klan organizer — never spent a day in jail.
Thirty-five years later Miller walked into a Jewish community center and retirement home in Overland Park, KS. and killed three people. Like the victims last weekend’s massacre in Pittsburgh, they were all elderly. No matter: To radical antisemites, “all Jews must die,” as Robert Bowers declared.
Survivors, family, and community members gathered on May 24, 2015, for the dedication of a marker near the site of the 1979 Greensboro massacre. Photo by Lynn Hey/ News & Record
In the imaginations of such people, the Jews not only control the world through their devious machinations: They also abet the decline of the “white race” through “race-mixing” (a more prominent talking point of earlier generations of racists & antisemites) or, these days, by funding “invasions” of immigrants and refugees. When you hear wild, outlandish denunciations of George Soros, you’re hearing the voice of Nazi-like antisemitism. As a wealthy financier who contributes to liberal causes, he embodies the paranoid, conspiracy-ridden, racialized worldview of fascists and of many right-wingers. Chief among his latest sins: presumably financing the “caravan” of destitute migrants that has provoked reckless, racist hysteria from politicians and white-supremacist media outlets.
The morning of his October 27 attack on the Tree of Life / L’Simcha synagogue in Pittsburgh, Robert Bowers posted on a far-right website “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.” Earlier in October he had posted: “Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us?”
Originally named the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS is one of this country’s most valuable and effective immigrant- and refugee-support organizations.
“The people killed on Saturday were killed for trying to make the world a better place, as their faith exhorts them to do,” wrote Adam Serwer in The Atlantic the next day. “The history of the Jewish people is one of displacement, statelessness, and persecution. What groups like HIAS do in helping refugees, they do with the knowledge that comes from a history of being the targets of demagogues who persecute minorities in pursuit of power.”
In an article titled “The Pittsburgh massacre was about refugees,” Mark Silk wrote: “Yes, Robert Bowers, the alleged killer, seems to be a classic anti-Semite, seeing a malignant Jewish conspiracy behind everything he doesn’t like. But the evidence indicates that it was Jewish support for migrants that caused him to take up his guns on Saturday.
Protests and rallies in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles last year, in response to President Trump’s declaration of a ban on refugees from Muslim countries, which he announced on Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27, 2017)
Silk continued:
“He had been railing on the social media site Gab against HIAS, the Jewish agency that works on behalf of refugees of all kinds. He specifically mentioned HIAS’ National Refugee Shabbat, which synagogues across the country celebrated a week before the massacre.
“In fact, no one should be surprised that a large segment of the Jewish community stood up to oppose the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from parents at the southern border.
“As Jews, we know what it is like to leave one’s country of origin in search of peace and freedom from oppression,” declared a statement from the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford last June. “Our Torah reminds us again and again that we should not wrong or oppress a stranger, because we too were once strangers in a new land.” The statement concluded: “We stand with dozens of national organizations from across the spectrum of Jewish tradition in condemning this immoral policy and demanding that the administration rescind it.”
January 2017
Not first (or last) time that white supremacists target Jews for their solidarity with other oppressed peoples
Dr. Willie Griffin, the Staff Historian at the Levine Museum of the New South, drew my attention to this fascinating article, which I excerpt below. [Here is the full text.]
Summary of article: Clive Webb revisits the 1958 bombing of the Atlanta Reform Temple, when militant white supremacists expressed their resistance to segregation and civil rights by dynamiting the most prominent symbol of Jewish life and culture in Atlanta. While members of white radical groups like the National States Rights Party hoped the blast would ignite a full-scale race war against Jews and blacks in the South, it instead served to underscore support for Jews and liberal racial attitudes….
“Christian Anti-Jewish Party” flyer, circa 1950
“On the morning of Sunday, October 12, 1958, shortly after 3:30 a.m., an explosion ripped through the Reform Temple on Peachtree Street in Atlanta. Although no one was hurt, the blast, which woke people from their sleep several blocks away, caused almost $200,000 of damage.
“Within fifteen minutes of the blast, staff at United Press International received a call from an individual identifying himself as “General Gordon of the Confederate Underground.” “We bombed a temple in Atlanta,” intoned the voice. “This is the last empty building we will bomb . . . Negroes and Jews are hereby declared aliens.
“The bombing of the Reform Temple was the culmination of an orchestrated terrorist campaign against southern Jews. Since the colonial era, Jews and Gentiles had lived in relatively peaceful coexistence in the South. Latent prejudice toward Jews nonetheless surfaced in times of social and economic upheaval, such as the Civil War, the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century, and the transition from a rural to an urban and industrialized economy. In each of these instances, Jews were blamed for the problems that beset the southern people.
Webb’s article continues:
The desegregation crises of the 1950s and 1960s were the catalyst for renewed outbursts of anti-Semitism. Although Jews could trace their roots in the region back to its colonial settlement, their ethnic and religious identity set them apart from their fellow southerners. The conflict over black civil rights gave renewed focus to traditional southern hostilities toward outsiders. Although the more moderate segregationists tended to eschew anti-Semitism, among militant white supremacists there was widespread suspicion of Jews as fifth columnists working to subvert the southern racial order from within.”
Charlotte Observer headline following 1957 attempted bombing of Temple Beth El. The larger headline is also distressing: “Slum-clearance” was a euphemism for the destruction of the Brooklyn community and the displacement of its African-American residents.
My next post will discuss a much more edifying topic: solidarity between African Americans and Jews in the US over the last century.
Photos from a beautiful event that took place last week: interfaith service in solidarity with the Jewish community held at Charlotte’s First Baptist Church-West.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies Statement on Pittsburgh Terrorist Attack
Southern Poverty Law Center July 2018 report, “Terror from the Right“
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette special coverage and its tribute, with biographies, “Remembering the Victims“
Members of the Islamic Institute of Toronto gather in a “ring of peace” at Beth Sholom in York, Ont. on Nov. 3, 2018. “Muslims Surround Toronto Synagogues With Protective ‘Rings Of Peace’
“We want them to know that we will always be there for them.” Full text of article