NZ Parliament shows solidarity with observant Jews worldwide in the aftermath of the Pittsburgh Massacre.
Jewish nurse: I treated mass shooting suspect out of love | NZ Herald
The Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh, PA.
PITTSBURGH (AP) — A Jewish nurse who treated the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting suspect says that he saw confusion but not evil in the man’s eyes, and that his own actions stemmed from love.
“I’m sure he had no idea I was Jewish,” registered nurse Ari Mahler wrote in a Facebook post Saturday about suspect Robert Bowers, who was taken to Allegheny General Hospital after the Oct. 27 rampage at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood that left 11 people dead.
Mahler described his role as “The Jewish Nurse” who treated the suspect, saying that he felt nervous about sharing his account but that “I just know I feel alone right now, and the irony of the world talking about me doesn’t seem fair without the chance to speak for myself.”
Facebook apologises for ad category targeting ‘white supremacists’ | NZ Herald
Just days after the mass shooting of Jewish congregants in Pittsburg in what has been described as America’s worst-ever an anti-Semitic hate crime, online news publication The Intercept discovered it could place an ad on Facebook appealing to white supremacists.
The publication said it was able to select “white genocide conspiracy theory” as a predefined “detailed targeting” criterion on Facebook to promote two articles to an interest group of 168,000 people “who have expressed an interest [in] or like pages related to White genocide conspiracy theory.”
The paid promotion was approved by Facebook’s advertising department.
The Intercept, which says it follows the protocols of investigative reporting used by ProPublica, a website set up to “expose abuses of power”, contacted the company for comment.
Israel PM praises restoration of US sanctions on Iran | NZ Herald
Benjamin Netanyahu
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Israel’s prime minister has praised the restoration of U.S. sanctions on Iran that were lifted under the 2015 nuclear deal.
Benjamin Netanyahu, a staunch opponent of the agreement concluded by the Obama administration, said Saturday that President Donald Trump had made an “historic” decision by restoring sanctions against “the murderous terror regime in Iran that is endangering the entire world.”
American Jews have feared this kind of attack for years, but still kept their doors open. Here’s why | CNN
The Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh, PA.
(CNN) Like many American Jews, Rabbi Ethan Linden was in a synagogue on Saturday morning, reading a portion of the Torah, when a friend came and interrupted him.
Linden walked out of the synagogue and found a quiet place.
“And I did what I never do — I made a call on Shabbat,” he said, using the Hebrew word for the Sabbath honored by observant Jews.
Linden called his parents, who belong to one of three congregations that meet at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Linden himself is a native son of Squirrel Hill, a friendly neighborhood with a vibrant and historic Jewish community.
Anti-Semitic incidents were on the rise even before shooting | NZ Herald
NEW YORK (AP) — Swastikas scrawled into Jewish students’ notebooks. Headstones toppled and desecrated by vandals at Jewish cemeteries. Jews falsely blamed for challenges facing the nation.
The shooting rampage that killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue on Saturday is being decried as the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, allegedly carried out by a virulently anti-Semitic gunman. The carnage, however unprecedented, is not an aberration.
Year after year, decade after decade, anti-Semitism proves to be among the most entrenched and pervasive forms of hatred and bigotry in the United States.
Jews make up only about 2 percent of the U.S. population, but in annual FBI data they repeatedly account for more than half of the Americans targeted by hate crimes committed due to religious bias. The Anti-Defamation League identified 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. in 2017, up from 1,267 in 2016, and also reported a major increase in anti-Semitic online harassment.
The Futile Search for Meaning in Antisemitic Crimes | Algemeiner
The Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh, PA.
When something terrible happens, we demand explanations. Awful and irrational events spawn conspiracy theories because it’s part of the human condition to need to make sense of the world, even when the world makes no sense.
That is all the more true when an atrocity such as the shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue occurs. The wholesale slaughter at a house of worship on the Sabbath is the sort of act that, almost by definition, defies explanation. What sane person would seek to murder total strangers at prayer? What possible end could be served by the spilling of innocent blood in this manner?
Our sole concern should be to comfort the families of the slain, to honor their memories and to heal a community torn by sorrow. Yet it is almost instinctual to seek explanations that place the incomprehensible in a context we can accept more easily. Doing so enables us to avoid the truth that we live in a world in which irrational prejudice can strike anytime, anywhere, in ways that shake us to our very core. If the real villain is a familiar target of our anger, rather than age-old hatred of Jews or the deranged ravings of an extremist, it helps us channel our rage and sorrow in a direction that seems productive, even if it is nothing of the kind.
So it is hardly surprising that the slaughter at a synagogue in a quiet, leafy neighborhood would provoke reactions that tell us more about the sickening divisions within our society than anything else.
‘All Jews must die’: 11 killed, six injured in US synagogue shooting | NZ Herald
The Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh, PA.
The gunman who opened fire on a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday morning (local time), killing 11 and injuring six more, has been named as 46-year-old Robert Bowers, a Trump-hating antisemite who regularly complained on social media about the president and “the infestation” of Jews.
Bowers, who professed his disdain for President Trump on social media as he spewed vile antisemitism an hour before Saturday’s attack, opened fire at the Tree of Life Congregation Synagogue in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh shortly before 10am.
Less than an hour after posting the threat: “I’m going in” on the social media site Gab.
He was enraged by HIAS, the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society which helps Jewish migrants settle in the US, which he accused of bringing ‘invaders in that kill our people’.
‘Horrendous anti-Semitic brutality’: Israel decries synagogue massacre, sends official to Pittsburgh | NZ Herald
The Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh, PA.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was “heartbroken and appalled by the murderous attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue” after a gunman killed at least 11 people and injured six others during religious services on Saturday morning (local time).
“The entire people of Israel grieve with the families of the dead,” he said in a video message posted to Twitter after the massacre on Saturday.
“We stand together with the Jewish community of Pittsburgh, we stand together with the American people in the face of this horrendous anti-Semitic brutality, and we all pray for the speedy recovery of the wounded.”
Donald Trump Thinks the Jews Aren’t Grateful Enough | Haaretz
Donald Trump
‘But I gave them Jerusalem!’ A recent report warned of a ‘growing frustration’ in the White House for U.S. Jews’ lack of appreciation for his policies toward Israel. Perhaps because they’re too grown up, and informed, to supply such unfounded adulation
The annual assessments of the Jewish People Policy Institute rarely tell us stuff we don’t know. But the latest report, presented to the Israeli government and published on the JPPI’s website earlier this month, did include a paragraph that caught the eye of some journalists.
“Israel and U.S. Jewish organizations should sharpen their awareness,” the report noted – “of a trend of growing frustration within the Trump administration that the president’s pro-Israel moves (especially the transfer of the embassy to Jerusalem) are not sufficiently appreciated by large segments of the American Jewish community.”
