Jewish Worshippers Massacred by Hitler Lover

Pittsburgh

Shouting “all Jews must die,” Nazi lover Robert Bowers stormed through the Tree of Life synagogue in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill on October 27. As worshippers gathered for religious services, they were mowed down by the killer, who continued firing his semiautomatic weapon in the temple for some 20 minutes. Eight men and three women, between the ages of 54 and 97, were slaughtered in what is reportedly the largest single massacre of Jewish people in U.S. history. Three days before, a white-supremacist, who had earlier tried to force his way into a black church, shot and killed a black man and woman at a Kroger grocery store in Jeffersontown, Kentucky. Echoing in the background of these murders are the chants of “Jews will not replace us” by the marauding fascist gangs who mobilized in Charlottesville last year in defense of monuments to the slaveowners of the Confederacy.

After the Tree of Life massacre, Democrats and the bourgeois media cynically raised a collective cry against the Trump administration for unleashing a “climate of hate.” There is no question that Trump’s anti-immigrant vitriol fanned the flames of Bowers’ anti-Jewish rage. His social media postings are riddled with diatribes against HIAS, a Jewish organization that aids refugees, and filthy lies of a Jewish “genocide” against white people. But what Trump lets loose is simply the unvarnished reality of the U.S. capitalist order. Democrat and Republican alike, the rulers of the depraved American empire have tilled the soil in which resurgent racist terror and fascist murder are growing.

This is America—a country rooted in near-complete genocide of American Indians, black chattel slavery, brutal exploitation and the mass murder of millions around the world. This will always be America until the whole rotting edifice of capitalist rule in this country is swept away through a socialist revolution carried out by the multiracial working class. The tears shed by a wing of the U.S. ruling class and their politicians over the criminal murder of Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh are, in the words of black abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass, “a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”