The following article was written by ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin.

Synagogue slayings not a shot in the culture wars

Alex Ryvchin
Herald Sun
October 30, 2018
The partisan advantage-taking began before the bodies had even been iden­ti­fied.

To opponents of the US President, the massacre of 11 Jews during a baby naming ceremony at a synagogue in Pitt­s­burgh, was the logical endpoint of President Trump’s refusal to expressly reject an endorse­ment from former Grand Wizard of the KKK, David Duke; the President’s drawing of moral equi­val­ence between clashing Antifa extrem­ists and white nation­al­ists in Char­lottes­ville; and his incen­di­ary talk on migration and refugees.
To those calling for tougher gun laws, Pitt­s­burgh was another mass shooting event made possible by the easy avail­ab­il­ity of high-powered assault rifles.
And to those who never miss an oppor­tun­ity to direct our attention to the sup­posedly boundless evil of that little Jewish state on the edge of the Medi­ter­ranean Sea, the massacre of Jewish civilians in the US was the result of rage against Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank, or poetic justice for Trump’s recog­ni­tion of Jerusalem as the State’s capital.
The ideo­logues simply picked their cause of choice, selected their preferred villain and placed the 11 corpses at their feet.
Hardly mentioned are the facts.
This is not the first mass shooting targeting a Jewish community in the US. In 2014, three people were murdered at a Jewish community centre in Overland Park, Kansas. Barack Obama was president then.
Mass shootings of Jews are common through­out the western world, in countries without the Second Amendment and with low gun ownership. Jews were massacred in a kosher super­mar­ket in Paris in 2015; in a Jewish museum in Brussels in 2014; in a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012; and at a synagogue in Copen­ha­gen in 2015.
Far from acting out of frus­tra­tion at Middle East politics, the Pitt­s­burgh killer didn’t care a jot for the Palestini­ans or Israel’s foreign policy. The existence of the State of Israel and its absorp­tion of millions of Jewish refugees from through­out the world has saved countless Jewish lives, not imperiled them.
The common factor in every attack of this sort is not the weapon of choice, the religion of the per­pet­rat­or or the commander-in-chief at the time of the attack. It is antisemitism – the irra­tion­al, irre­press­ible, con­sumptive hatred of the Jewish people that pervades elements of every political ideology and every faith.
It is what shatters grave­stones in Jewish cemeter­ies through­out the United States and Europe with appalling reg­u­lar­ity. It is what led Louis Farrakhan, a US Muslim leader embraced by major figures in the Demo­crat­ic Party, to liken Jews to termites, just weeks ago. It is what lodges knives in the backs of Jews standing at bus-stops in Jerusalem. It is what has prompted 40% of British Jews to consider leaving Britain, as Jeremy Corbyn – a man who hosts Holocaust deniers at West­min­ster and lays wreaths at the graves of ter­ror­ists who have spilled Jewish blood – nears the threshold of No.10 Downing Street.
Antisemitism is a remark­ably robust and versatile form of hatred. It finds favour in the political left where the Jews are seen as too priv­ileged, too com­fort­able, too estab­lish­ment to be seen as a vul­ner­able minority or as allies in solid­ar­ity. To religious extrem­ists, the Jews are too stiff-necked in their rejection of the later mono­the­ist­ic teachings of Chris­tian­ity and Islam, too content with their own beliefs and customs, and therefore deserving of scorn and hatred. While to the hard-right, the speed with which the Jews seem to bounce back from each calamity inflicted upon them, through a com­bin­a­tion of resi­li­ence and bitter exper­i­ence, only feeds the paranoid con­spir­acy theories about Jews secretly con­trolling everything and sowing our mis­for­tune.
The appro­pri­ation of the Pitt­s­burgh dead to fight the latest round of the cultural wars is an affront to the memories of the eleven people murdered as Jews in their place of worship.
Con­dem­na­tions of Trump’s jingoism and dubious asso­ci­ations, right and necessary as they are, ring hollow unless one is equally reviled by the racism of Farrakhan and the asso­ci­ations of Jeremy Corbyn. The con­dem­na­tion of antisemitism must be a matter of basic decency and not partisan politics. Otherwise, we will merely entrench the discord and polar­iz­a­tion in which violent extremism lives and thrives and await the next bout of violence and the next mass burial of the Jewish dead.