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The Pittsburgh Shooter Hated Jews. We Should Say So.
(Washington Post) Yair Rosenberg - There is an urge to universalize specifically Jewish tragedies in ways that ignore their actual victims. In 2017, Canada had to replace the plaque on a new $8.9 million Holocaust monument when officials belatedly realized that it did not mention Jews. British Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn co-sponsored a 2010 motion in Britain's Parliament to rename Holocaust Memorial Day as Genocide Memorial Day, which would have abolished the one day devoted solely to commemorating Europe's murdered Jews in favor of lumping together all victims of all genocides into one undifferentiated group. Well-meaning non-Jews often seek to draw universal lessons against intolerance from acts of anti-Semitic violence. Others want to make the incidents accessible and relevant for a broader, non-Jewish audience in an attempt to evoke empathy for the victims, and do so by trying to equate anti-Jewish oppression with forms of oppression faced by non-Jews. After deadly anti-Semitism strikes, Jews are expunged as inconvenient accessories to their own execution. Their persecution is but a pivot to subjects of greater importance. Any serious effort to combat anti-Semitism must begin with understanding the hatred: its sources, symptoms and manifestations. That cannot happen if anti-Jewish prejudice is collapsed into a milquetoast mishmash of all bigotries.