An Act of Racist Terrorism

Doing her best to offer Republican spin on the horrific October 27 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, Counselor to President Donald Trump Kellyanne Conway commented on Fox & Friends that the 11 Jews murdered there were victims of rampant hostility to religion.

“The anti-religiosity in this country—that it’s somehow in vogue and funny to make fun of anybody of faith, to constantly be making fun of people who express religion, the late-night comedians, the unfunny people on TV shows, it’s always anti-religious,” she said. “And remember, these people were gunned down in their place of worship, as were the people in South Carolina several years ago. And they were there because they’re people of faith, and it’s that faith that needs to bring us together.”

Conway told John Berman on CNN’s New Day program that this was an example of “people … being gunned down and murdered because of their faith.”

This view is dangerously wrong, on many levels. It’s as wrong about the slaughter in Pittsburgh as it is about the nine African Americans who were gunned down on June 17, 2015 by Dylann Roof at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. It prevents us from recognizing and calling this atrocity what it was: an act of racist terrorism.

Conway’s claim that violence against Jews is an attack on religion is either colossally ignorant or colossally dishonest. Jews were victims of religiously motivated violence for centuries, and not just in the Muslim world. Prominent Christian leaders, of both Catholic and Protestant denominations, regularly fomented terror against the Jewish population, who weren’t persecuted because they were religious, but rather because their persecutors saw it as their religious duty to dehumanize, harass, and butcher them.

The lethal religious zeal of past centuries isn’t relevant to the most recent atrocity, however, because modern anti-Semitism is more about race than about religion. Consider what occurred in Germany during the Third Reich. To the Nazis, a person’s religion had no bearing on whether or not they were Jewish. Being a Christian—a sincere, practicing Christian—was no obstacle to being sent to Auschwitz. All that mattered was race.

Like their Nazi forebears, present-day white supremacists see Jews as a dangerous and despicable race who are hell-bent on destroying white civilization and deserve to be exterminated. This is clear and explicit in the rantings on their websites dealing what they call the “JQ”—the “Jewish question.”

The language of Pittsburgh shooter Robert Bowers betrayed his White nationalist affiliation. In the aftermath of the carnage, he told a police officer, “They’re committing genocide to my people. I just want to kill Jews.” Anyone who’s even moderately acquainted with the conceptual landscape of the so-called alt-right will recognize this as a reference to the notion white genocide—the idea central to their deformed worldview that Jews are masterminding the extermination of the white race by promoting immigration and multiculturalism. And the expression “our people” is likewise the used in these circles for white people.

But hold on: Aren’t Jews white too?  Not to the white supremacists.

Americans have a hard time understanding that anti-Semitism is a form of racism because they’re fixated on the idea that races are color-coded. This parochial notion of race doesn’t even do justice to our own racial history. It wasn’t all that long ago that immigrants from Ireland, Southern Europe, and the Slavic countries of Eastern Europe—not to mention the despised Jews—were all considered as racially alien and inferior to those who prided themselves on being of pure Anglo-Saxon or Nordic stock.  It was hostility to these European races that prompted the Immigration Act of 1924, which clamped down on them because they were deemed inferior.

And it was precisely because many Jews were outwardly indistinguishable from ordinary Germans that Nazi scientists tried to locate a fool-proof marker of Jewishness in the blood, and resorted to examining family trees to determine who was Jewish and who wasn’t.

The fact is, beliefs about race aren’t exclusively or even primarily about skin color. In the eyes of white supremacists, a person’s color is just a symptom of something deeper—something in their “blood” or in their genes that fixes what race they are. From this perspective, not everyone who looks white is white, just as (pushing racism to its dehumanizing limits) not everyone who looks human is human. As the old German proverb put it, “Yes the Jew has the form of the human. However, it lacks the human’s inner being.”

Describing the mass shooting in Pittsburgh as an attack on religion isn’t just a pitch to conservative evangelicals. It’s a distraction from the fact that Trump’s rhetoric and the complacency of his Republican enablers has emboldened the rapidly proliferating phalanx of racists and neo-Nazis in this country, with predictably tragic results.

Those who call the shooting as an attack on the Jewish faith throw sand in our eyes while sounding plausibly compassionate. They make it harder for us to connect the dots and to recognize that this horrific act is of a piece with, and was empowered by, the sort of racist propaganda that has become Trump’s trademark. And in doing so, they are making it harder for us to recognize and roll back the darkness that is enveloping this country.

David Livingstone Smith

David Livingstone Smith is professor of philosophy at the University Of New England, in Maine. He is author of three books on dehumanization, the most recent of which, Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization, was published last year by Harvard University Press.