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Pittsburgh synagogue gunman will be sentenced to death for the nation’s deadliest antisemitic attack
The gunman who stormed a synagogue in the heart of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community and killed 11 worshippers will be sentenced to death. A federal jury recommended Wednesday that 50-year-old Robert Bowers be sent to death row for perpetrating the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. (Aug 2) (AP video by Jessie Wardarski)
BY PETER SMITH AND MICHAEL RUBINKAM
Updated 8:17 PM PDT, August 2, 2023
PITTSBURGH (AP) — The gunman who stormed a synagogue in the heart of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community and killed 11 worshippers will be sentenced to death for perpetrating the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history, a jury decided Wednesday.
Robert Bowers spewed hatred of Jews and espoused white supremacist beliefs online before methodically planning and carrying out the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue, where members of three congregations had gathered for Sabbath worship and study. Bowers, a truck driver from suburban Baldwin, also wounded two worshippers and five responding police officers.
The same federal jury that convicted the 50-year-old Bowers on 63 criminal counts recommended that he be put to death for an attack whose impacts continue to reverberate nearly five years later. He showed little reaction as the sentence was announced, briefly acknowledging his legal team and family as he was led from the courtroom. A judge will formally impose the sentence Thursday.
Jurors were unanimous in finding that Bowers’ attack was motivated by his hatred of Jews, and that he chose Tree of Life for its location in one the largest and most historic Jewish communities in the U.S. so that he could “maximize the devastation, amplify the harm of his crimes, and instill fear within the local, national, and international Jewish communities.” They also found that Bowers lacked remorse.
At a news conference after the verdict, attack survivor Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of the Tree of Life Congregation noted that Wednesday was a “day of love” on the Hebrew calendar.
“I don’t believe in coincidences. Today we received an immense embrace from the halls of justice,” he said, taking the jury’s decision as an affirmation that “we have the right to practice our Judaism and no one will ever take that right away from us.”
The family of 97-year-old Rose Mallinger, who was killed in the attack, and her daughter, Andrea Wedner, who was shot and wounded, thanked the jurors and said “a measure of justice has been served.”
Bowers’ lead defense attorney, Judy Clarke, declined comment.
The verdict came after a lengthy trial in which jurors heard in chilling detail how Bowers reloaded at least twice, stepped over the bloodied bodies of his victims to look for more people to shoot, and surrendered only when he ran out of ammunition. In the sentencing phase, grieving family members told the jury about the lives that Bowers took — elderly people and intellectually disabled brothers among them — and the unrelenting pain of their loss. Survivors testified about their own lasting pain, both physical and emotional.
Thomas Nides Admits He ‘Screwed Up’ in Praying for ‘Both Sides’
After Jihad Massacre of Israelis
AUG 4, 2023 10:00 AM BY HUGH FITZGERALD
The latest American official to admit he was wrong in the comment he made about a recent flare-up of Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorism and the IDF’s response to it is Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides, who has just returned to Washington from his Jerusalem posting, no doubt to return to civilian life as a well-paid member of some think tank, or as a university professor, where he will resume his scolding of Jerusalem. More on Nides can be found here:
Ex-State Department Officials Admit They Were Wrong
by Stephen M. Flatow, JNS.org, August 1, 2023:
On his way out the door, the retiring U.S. ambassador to Israel, Thomas Nides, has belatedly acknowledged that he “screwed up” in one of his last major actions.
In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, Nides was asked about his outrageous tweet commenting on the June 20 massacre of four Israelis by Palestinian-Arab terrorists. The four victims were defenseless civilians in a restaurant; their “crime” was eating lunch while Jewish.
Here is Nides’ tweet: “Deeply concerned about the civilian deaths and injuries that have occurred in the West Bank these past 48 hours, including that of minors,” Nides tweeted several hours after the deadly attack in which two Palestinian terrorists murdered four Israelis.
“Praying for the families as they mourn the loss of loved ones, or tend to those injured.”
The tweet was outrageous on multiple levels. Nides equated the Arab slaughter of innocent civilians with Israel’s anti-terrorist operation in Jenin that week; he failed to acknowledge that the victims of the massacre were Jews or that the killers were Arabs; and he lumped Israeli victims and dead Jenin terrorists together, saying that both deserved prayers and mourning.
Since all four of the Israeli victims of the terror attack at the restaurant were known to be adults, Nides must have been referring, when he mentioned “minors,” to those the IDF had unavoidably wounded in the Jenin attack. He did not differentiate between an attack on four innocent Israeli civilians and the IDF attacks in Jenin on terrorists that resulted in 12 killed, all of them members of the terrorist groups PIJ and Hamas. And why did he say he was “praying for the families” of both sides instead of insisting, in morally correct fashion, that he was “praying for the families of those killed in the latest terrorist attack by PIJ”?
Nine days later, when it was too late to make a difference, Nides acknowledged to Israel Hayom: “I screwed up … it was a stupid thing to do.” Unfortunately, he then trotted out assorted excuses: “I had just returned from Los Angeles when I got word of the attack. I was shown a draft of a tweet, and I signed off on it.” Translation: “I was tired, somebody else wrote it, so it wasn’t totally my fault.” Not a very impressive apology.
His quasi-apology, in which he attempted to suggest that his tweet had been written by someone else, and having just come back from a long flight, too tired to focus, he had signed off on it, will not do. And it was only after nine days of protests by Israelis about his tweet that he was ready to admit that he had “screwed up” — a choice of words that minimizes the gravity of his error.
Nides, who for much of his adult life has been an investment banker, with stints at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, may know all about what the Fed is doing about interest rates, and why the Hang Seng Index is feeling poorly, and no doubt he’s a dab hand at discussing volatility and risk in the bond market, but his job as American Ambassador to Israel required not any of that, but a very different kind of knowledge.
Nides needed to know the history of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel over the last 3500 years, and how the Jews in their land fared under many different conquerors, and how, in exile, they continued to long for “Zion and Jerusalem.” He needed to understand the Treaty of San Remo, the Mandate for Palestine (with special attention to Article 6), Article 80 of the U.N. Charter, and UN Security Council Resolution 242, as glossed by its chief author, British ambassador to the U.N. Lord Caradon. He knew none of these things, but he knew well how to speak when he should have refrained. Perhaps in his Hamptons or Jackson Hole or Chilmark retirement, he will learn – it’s never too late — the fine art of shutting up.
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American Officials Admit Giving ‘Mistaken’ Advice to Israel
AUG 4, 2023 2:00 PM BY HUGH FITZGERALD
For a long time American officials have advised — and often pressured — Israel to make concessions of various kinds to the Arabs. And, upon reflection, some have regretted their advice, or their wrongheaded comments about Israel’s ongoing campaign of self-defense against terror groups, but that hasn’t stopped the flow of advice and comments from Washington. Here is more about officials who have admitted to making “mistaken” comments to, and advice for, Jerusalem:
Ex-State Department Officials Admit They Were Wrong
by Stephen M. Flatow, JNS.org, August 1, 2023:
…Recall, for example, the infamous episode of Dennis Ross and the terror tunnels.
The Israelis, under American pressure that originated with Dennis Ross, had reluctantly agreed to allow much more cement into Gaza where the Israeli fears about the misuse of that building material for military purposes — that Ross had pooh-poohed — proved right. The cement — 600,000 tons of it — was used by Hamas not to build houses and schools, as Ross had said they would, but instead, to construct a vast underground network of tunnels and bunkers, used both to hide weapons and fighters, and to allow them to move undetected throughout the Strip.
Thanks to Ross’s pressure, Hamas built “a labyrinth of underground tunnels, bunkers, command posts and shelters for its leaders, fighters and rockets,” as Ross acknowledged. They built the tunnels with “an estimated 600,000 tons of cement,” some of which was “diverted from construction materials allowed into Gaza” (The Washington Post, Aug. 8, 2014).
600,000 tons of cement were diverted for military purposes by Hamas — that represents quite a whopping error by the egregious Dennis Ross, who was so idiotically certain that cement sent to Gaza would be put only to civilian use.
He also belatedly admitted that he and his colleagues in the Obama administration were wrong to abandon the anti-government protesters in Iran in 2009. It was a chance to undermine and perhaps even topple the most evil regime on earth—and Ross blew it. Writing in the journal Foreign Policy on Jan. 2, 2018, Ross confessed:
“In June 2009, I was serving in President Barack Obama’s administration as the secretary of state’s special advisor on Iran and was part of the decision-making process. Because we feared playing into the hands of the regime and lending credence to its claim that the demonstrations were being instigated from the outside, we adopted a low-key posture. In retrospect, that was a mistake. We should have shined a spotlight on what the regime was doing and mobilized our allies to do the same.”
The 2009 protests nationwide in Iran were the largest since the Iranian Revolution in 1978. The regime’s fate was in the balance. A sign of American and other Western support, for example by raising the matter of the Iranian regime’s murderous suppression of the protesters to the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council, would have helped to encourage the protesters, might have strengthened their spirits and demoralized elements of the regime, and possibly helped to topple the Islamic Republic at its moment of maximum peril. Instead, there were no words of support from Washington officials, no encouragement on Voice of America’s Farsi channel, no emergency meeting of the General Assembly called to discuss Iran, and no promises of assistance of any kind were made to the protesters. The Tehran regime went about its business of suppressing the protests with extreme violence. The American reluctance to get involved, Ross now admits, was a grievous error. The Iranian regime was going to blame the Americans in any case for being behind the demonstrations, so Washington had little to lose, and much to gain, by actually helping the protesters.
And don’t forget the case of Aaron Miller and the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
In an op-ed in 2010 in The Washington Post, Miller revealed that he was the U.S. State Department official who came up with the plan to have Yasser Arafat visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1998 in order to help Arafat improve his public image.
In the article, Miller acknowledged that his plan would have meant “appropriating the memory” of the Holocaust for narrow political purposes, and therefore was “one of the dumbest ideas in the annals of U.S. foreign policy” (The Washington Post, Aug. 18, 2010)….
Miller’s “bright idea” was to help Arafat burnish his image by having him visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum, so as to assure Jews, and pro-Israel politicians, of his understanding and sympathy. Of course had Arafat taken Miller’s advice, he would have been hailed by the New York Times and the Washington Post for this “generous gesture.” His lifetime of antisemitic pronouncements would be forgotten in this Potemkin visit. Fortunately Aaron Miller’s public relations effort for the world’s then-leading antisemite, a worthy heir of Hajj Amin el Husseini, came to naught. Miller, of course, from his new base at a Washington think-tank, continues to offer his bright ideas for Israeli territorial concessions that, were Jerusalem to follow them, would seriously weaken the Jewish state.
Remember the First, Second, and Third Rogers plans? The Kissinger Plan? The Baker Plan? So many disastrous American plans to force Israeli concessions which Israel, fortunately, has consistently rejected.
Now the Bidenites are continuing with the same anti-Israel folly. In order to win Saudi agreement to join the Abraham Accords, the Americans may be willing to provide the Kingdom with what it most wants: first, an ironclad defense pact; second, American help in establishing a civilian nuclear program in the Kingdom; third, an American willingness to provide the Saudi military with access to advanced American weapons. Those three concessions ought to be more than enough to get the Saudis to agree to join the Accords, but the Bidenites want to sweeten the pot still more for the Crown Prince, by obtaining from Israel a commitment not to annex any part of the West Bank, and to stop all building of new, or enlarging of existing, settlements. These are concessions that no Israeli government, especially the present one, is prepared to make.
Washington officials and American diplomats should stop trying to interfere with what the Israeli government feels it must do in order to defend the people of Israel, stop scolding Israel for its attempts to punish terrorists in their lairs, and instead of minimizing the ever-increasing terrorist threat, the administration should publicly recognize that there were 5000 terror attacks — almost all of them failed — on Israelis in 2022. Washington officials should stop ignoring the Mandate for Palestine’s provisions that give the Jews the right to build their Jewish state on “state and waste lands,” as well as on land abandoned by, or bought from, Arab owners, in all the territory “from the river to the sea.” And the Bidenites should stop interjecting themselves into Israeli domestic policy quarrels, as with the judicial reform that Biden has Insisted on denouncing, pontificating on a matter that is none of his business.
That’s what I’d call a good start. I hope you agree.
Iran: Pro-regime actress arrested for wishing Netanyahu
a speedy recovery
AUG 4, 2023 1:00 PM BY ROBERT SPENCER
The Iranian media is claiming that she criticized government officials and called for protests, and while that is possible, she supported Raisi and the execution of protestors before. This is the gratitude she gets from the mullahs for her support.
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Iranian actress arrested for wishing Netanyahu speedy recovery
by Tzvi Joffre, Jerusalem Post, July 29, 2023:
Iranian actress Shohreh Ghamar was arrested after writing that she was praying for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s health in an Instagram story…
Ghamar was arrested on suspicion of “publishing offensive content and unsubstantiated claims”…
The Iranian Fars News Agency shared screenshots of Instagram stories it said were posted by the actress, including one with a photo of Netanyahu with the text “I prayed a lot for your health.”…
…she criticized government officials for threatening to destroy Iran. Fars News Agency additionally claimed that Ghamar called for protests.
A video of Ghamar starring in a promotional video for Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s campaign was shared on social media as well, after her arrest. According to Radio Farda, Ghamar also expressed support for the execution of a death sentence against three protesters who took part in protests in 2018.
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