Unspeakable is the only word to describe tone deaf actions such as Mike Pence and Donald Trump have taken in the past two days. The last time Mike Pence outraged the Jewish community was in January, when he traveled to Jerusalem to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day. At that time it was said, “The Jerusalem that Pence visited does not exist, but rather [Pence visited] an ‘end-of-days’ Biblical theme park.” And of course that’s how Pence sees the Middle East, through the lens of his limited perspective of being an American evangelical. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Pence doubled down and further inflamed an already heated visit by reframing the Holocaust in blatantly Christian terms, talking about the “resurrection” of the Jews.
A few days ago, Karen & I paid our respects at Yad Vashem to honor the 6 million Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust who 3 years after walking beneath the shadow of death, rose up from the ashes to resurrect themselves to reclaim a Jewish future. #HolocaustRemembranceDay #NeverAgain pic.twitter.com/67UuC1cYI2
— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) January 27, 2018
There was a great hew and cry over that unfortunate tweet. One would think the man would have learned something. But no. On Monday, Pence again excited the ire of the Jewish community by asking a “rabbi” to say a few words of prayer for the victims of Neo-Nazi terrorism in Pittsburgh. The only problem is that the rabbi, Loren Jacobs, is a Messianic Jew, who believes that Jews that don’t accept Christ as their savior — such as the 11 who were murdered — are going to go to Hell. There was immediate fallout from that faux pas, needless to say.
Dear Pence, please give up the pretense of Jewish presence. You are a Christian supremacist. We know that, you know that.
Also we will defeat you.
But in the meantime, just stop pretending and appropriating my people. https://t.co/dJGc62DmBM
— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@TheRaDR) October 30, 2018
But that was just the warm up act for Donald Trump, who even though he was politely asked to stay away from Pittsburgh, simply would not. Washington Post:
A mourning family doesn’t want to meet him. Leaders of his own party declined to join him. The mayor has explicitly asked him not to come. Protesters have mobilized. And yet President Trump visited this grief-stricken city Tuesday, amid accusations that he and his administration continue to fuel the anti-Semitism that inspired Saturday’s massacre inside a synagogue.
“This didn’t happen in a vacuum,”Ardon Shorr said. “There is a growing trend of white nationalism. And that has been enabled by Trump, who traffics in the kind of conspiracy theories that we know were foremost in the mind of the shooter last Saturday.”
Shorr added about Trump’s visit. “He’s not tolerated here, and we didn’t consent to him coming.”
“He’s done nothing but stoke the type of fear and hatred that led to this,” said Ben Case, 34. “And he’s coming here for a photo op and to check it off his list. But we know he’s not part of the solution.”
Marchers in Squirrel Hill sat down in the middle of a street near the synagogue while Trump was in the area, purposely facing away from him so as to turn their backs on the president.
The message from the families of the slain and the people of Pittsburgh could not be more clear, but Trump is devoid of basic human decency, so he cannot hear the message, evidently. And Pence’s way of dealing with the world is to spin and reinterpret everything in terms of his evangelical wing nut philosophies. When he was in Israel in January, Rabbi Ron Kronish said, “It would have been better for him to have said nothing about the Holocaust on this occasion if he or his advisers can’t figure out a sensitive and serious way to say it.” It would indeed be better for both Pence and Trump to simply stand down in situations which are beyond their depth. It’s sad that the Pittsburgh tragedy falls into that category, but clearly it does. What other way is there to interpret it?
