Sanders: Trump ‘helped inspire’ Pittsburgh synagogue attack

“We will confront this hatred, do exactly the opposite of what Trump is doing,” the presidential contender writes in a left-wing magazine.  

By World Israel News Staff 

U.S. presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is charging that President Donald Trump bears responsibility for the October 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh by a white supremacist in which 11 people were murdered and six others were hurt.

Writing in Jewish Currents, a left-wing Jewish quarterly magazine, after commemorations had taken place marking the first anniversary of the massacre, Sanders writes that “the murderer acted on a twisted belief that Jews were part of a nefarious plot to undermine white America.”

The presidential candidate adds that the killer also believed in “a plot to assist in the ‘invasion’ of the United States by a caravan of migrants from Latin America,” and that “this vicious lie about an ‘invasion’ had been repeated endlessly in right-wing media, on Fox News, across the internet, and, most disgracefully, by the president of the United States.”

Therefore, Sanders writes: “Yes, Trump’s own words helped inspire the worst act of anti-Semitic violence in American history.”

Sanders, who has cited his Jewishness on various occasions to try to prove that his criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic, takes the opportunity in his Jewish Currents essay to inject his family’s murder at the hands of the Nazis in the Holocaust to draw a comparison to the current phenomenon in the United States.

“My father emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1921 at the age of 17 to escape the poverty and widespread anti-Semitism of his home country,” writes Sanders.

“Those in his family who remained in Poland after Hitler came to power were murdered by the Nazis. I know very well where white supremacist politics leads, and what can happen when people do not speak up against it,” adds the U.S. presidential contender.

“This wave of violence is the result of a dangerous political ideology that targets Jews and anyone who does not fit a narrow vision of a whites-only America. We have to be clear that while anti-Semitism is a threat to Jews everywhere, it is also a threat to democratic governance itself,” says Sanders.

He says, in the Jewish Currents article, that anti-Semitism is a “conspiracy theory that a secretly powerful minority exercises control over society…We will confront this hatred, do exactly the opposite of what Trump is doing and embrace our differences to bring people together.”