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Defamation Kills: The True Authors of Religious Violence
On October 27, 2018, a gunman shot and killed 11 worshippers during a baby-naming ceremony at Pittsburgh’s oldest synagogue, the Tree of Life.
The suspect, Robert Bowers, had a history of making anti-Semitic statements online. And according to the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic incidents are on a sharp rise.
Of course, Jews have been demonized ever since the Diaspora that turned them into a minority in every country of the world.
A majority will inevitably tyrannize a minority. The United States was carefully designed as a representative republic to prevent such tyranny.
But there is a special kind of tyranny for religious minorities, perhaps because they are so easily identified.
Who can forget the recent “erasure” carried out by the self-styled ISIS caliphate against Iraqi Christian sects?
And you don’t have to be a Muslim in America to know that Muslims in America are often reviled and attacked, and their mosques desecrated.
And then we have the civil rights attacks of the 1960s which, along with ordinary violence, targeted black worshippers in Christian churches.
Who controls the hand that pulls the trigger? The slanderers? The vested interests behind the slanderers? It’s time that we looked at the sponsors of defamation.
Reaching further back, the Mormons of the 19th century endured persecution and death before they found their own safe harbor in Utah.
And in the 18th century, our own Founding Fathers, fresh from violent persecution in England, wrote our First Amendment, which guarantees the free exercise of religion.
I have written before on the Jewish blood libel, the whole idea that Jews sacrificed Christian children and used their blood for religious rituals—a savage myth. And yet, it was useful to successive regimes starting in the 12th and 13th centuries all the way through World War II. And they survive on the lunatic fringe.
The lunatic fringe. Can it be that governments and commercial interests have knowingly used the lunatics who reside at the fringe of our society to do their dirty work?
Doesn’t that make them just as criminally insane as their stooges? Only psychotics would use psychotics to do their dirty work.
For years, Disney and Hearst’s A&E has happily used the lunatic, Leah Remini, for a hyped-up hate show against minority religions—first Scientology, and now Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Both movements have experienced violent attacks as a result. The executives behind this farce, Nancy Dubuc and Paul Buccieri, bear personal responsibility for a show they know spreads hateful and false lies, just as surely as neo-Nazi online hate sites encouraged Robert Bowers to go to the Tree of Life on the 27th of October in a state of righteous lunacy.
A&E’s motive appears to be purely commercial. But isn’t it the same kind of commercial motive that led Germany’s banks to invest in the arch-criminal, Adolf Hitler?
Who controls the hand that pulls the trigger? The slanderers? The vested interests behind the slanderers?
It’s time that we looked at the sponsors of defamation: the political and commercial interests that exploit the insane.
My love and sincerest regrets to the victims of the Tree of Life massacre, their families, the Jewish congregation, and all who were touched on October 11th.
And let us recognize the puppetmasters who don’t hesitate to disseminate the defamatory propaganda that knowingly drives psychotics like Robert Bowers to murder innocent people.
They are the truly insane.
