10/27/18: At 9:50 a.m. a heavily-armed man enters a Pittsburgh synagogue and opens fire on worshippers. Four minutes later the first 911 call goes out and police are seen rushing to the scene.
Ten minutes later an officer sends out warning: “We’re under fire, we’re under fire. He’s got an automatic weapon, he’s firing at us from the synagogue.”
At 10:01 a second officer radios, “We are pinned down by gunfire. He is firing out the front the building with an automatic weapon.”
“Suspect is talking about all these Jews need to die.”
Not until 10:47 are police able to enter, retrieve the wounded, and count 11 bodies. On the third floor they encounter the shooter. A second gun battle erupts. Two SWAT team members are hit multiple times. One is critically injured. Nine minutes later the suspect, also wounded, gives his name to police, Robert Bowers, 46. He agrees to surrender. At 11:08, he crawls from the room where he has been hiding. “Suspect is talking about all these Jews need to die,” one officer reports.
What allows the killer to be so “successful?” In part, he’s a successful mass murderer because he’s carrying the weapon of choice in domestic terror attacks: an AR-15. The local paper will note this fact prominently.
So will police reports.
Right-wingers will immediately deny the man had an AR-15, or quibble about exactly what kind of assault rifle he carried. Some will call this story a “false flag,” and blame globalists or unicorns.
Asked to comment, Trump says gun laws aren’t the issue. “This has little to do with it if you take a look,” he assures reporters. “If they had protection inside the results would have been far better [emphasis added], maybe it could have been a very much different situation.”
Yes, this is true. If every church and synagogue and mosque in America would hire guards, dress them like SWAT team members, and provide AR-15s, we could attend places of worship in full confidence that right-wing psychos wouldn’t wipe us out. See, for example: the Oak Ridge, Wisconsin shooting in 2012; the Charleston, S.C. shooting in 2015; and the 2017 bombings in Illinois and Minnesota.
Also, you have the generic heavily-armed psychos, as per the Sutherland Springs, Texas slaughter in 2017.
Otherwise, according to Trump, there’s nothing the government can do. For that reason, we need to arm teachers. And movie patrons. And people at concerts. And patrons dancing in gay bars. And sitting at desks at work.
And people shopping at Kroger.
This Trump policy will create jobs, jobs, jobs. More guns made, more jobs for arms manufacturers!
Plus, there will be jobs for armed guards! Christianity Today estimates there are 384,000 congregations in this country. There are an additional 84,000 non-denominational churches. You will need guards for 4,000 synagogues and Jewish community centers. We will really need guards at the nation’s 2,100 mosques and 250 gurdwaras (Sikh places of worship), because right-wing psychos hate Muslims with a special hatred and are usually too dumb to tell the difference between Muslims and Sikhs, because to right-wingers they all look the same.
Dark-skinned.
Throw in Buddhist and Hindu temples, and maybe Zoroastrians, and you have 400,000 new guard jobs.
Then we need to guard an estimated 120,000 U.S. schools, and
6,000 theaters, and 2,400 Kroger stores.
*
“He is putting targets on the back of people.”
THERE IS IMMEDIATE TALK after the Pittsburgh shooting, about how the hateful rhetoric of the president might be fueling the actions of Bowers and his ilk. A story in The Forward, a leading Jewish newspaper the same day, carries the title: “The Straight Line from 5,000 Trump Lies to 11 Jews Murdered in Pittsburgh.”
Trump might hide from reality, the author warns. The rest of us cannot. For all of us, words matter, especially from the man who occupies the Bully Pulpit (of Twitter) every day.
The Forward explains:
When Trump says someone is “evil,” rather than disagreeable, or that someone is “fake news,” rather than a critic, or that someone is a “globalist,” rather than someone is a Jew, he is putting targets on the back of people for whom he is supposed to work. The 5,000 lies he’s told in office from the middle of his reality TV fantasy don’t matter to him, but they can be, and have been, fatal to others. Words don’t matter to fantasists. But – at least in America – ballots do.
In other words, turn out on Tuesday and vote.
*
NATURALLY, ONE MAN who doesn’t want anyone blaming the president for the actions of assorted shooters and bombers is the president himself. At a rally Saturday night, just hours after the Pittsburgh massacre, Trump tells fans he gave serious thought to cancelling the rally.
Then he remembered how Americans stood strong after the 9/11 attacks.
“And then I said to myself, I remember Dick Grasso, a friend of mine, great guy,” Trump claimed. “He headed up the New York Stock Exchange on Sept. 11. And the New York Stock Exchange was open the following day.”
So, Trump was standing strong – and his cheering supporters lapped up his words and roared.
Of course, the president was lying – if I may say so – like a Muslim prayer rug.
The simplest check shows the New York Stock Exchange closed immediately on September 11 and did not reopen until September
17, to avoid a market panic. When it did reopen six days later, shares fell 684 points, a 7.1% decline.
Should we be surprised that the president lied again? This is the same liar who claimed in November 2015 to have seen “thousands and thousands” of Muslim Americans celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers. Trump saw the video. Trump saw it with his two peepers. At a rally in Birmingham, Alabama during the 2016 campaign, he told a crowd, “I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”
The next day, when reporters tried to pin him down, Trump repeated his assertion. In an interview on ABC’s This Week, he claimed: “It was on television. I saw it,” he insisted, like a kid swearing he had seen the Tooth Fairy slipping a dollar under his pillow. “It was well covered at the time,” he told George Stephanopoulos. “Now, I know they don’t like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time. There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.”
Yes, it is true. “They” don’t like to talk about it, whomever
“they” are, probably because this is complete fiction.
No one, not even Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter has ever seen that video again.
Yet, Trump still managed to stir the anti-Muslim hate.
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