The Daily - A Shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue

Episode Date: October 29, 2018

The massacre in Pittsburgh was one of the worst attacks against the Jewish community in the United States in decades. The city’s mayor called it “the darkest day of Pittsburgh’s history.” Guests: Kevin Roose, who writes about technology for The New York Times, and Campbell Robertson, a national correspondent for The Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh was the worst attack on the Jewish community in the United States in decades. The city's mayor called it the darkest day of Pittsburgh's history. It's Monday, October 29th. We begin with yet another terrible day of gun violence in America. This time the attack was at a temple in Pittsburgh.

It has been a frightening week in the United States, and many Americans are worried about the direction their country is taking. Kevin Roos, it feels important to know what was going on in synagogues across the country last week. Well, it was something called the National Refugee Shabbat, which is a sort of annual tradition that was started by this group called HIAS, which stands for Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. And it's an organization that was founded in the 19th century to help Jews who were fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. And since then, it has sort of expanded to become a kind of pro-refugee group of Jewish activists who help people who are seeking asylum,

people who are fleeing persecution. It's a pretty well-known group within the Jewish community, and every year they commemorate a special Shabbat service for refugees in synagogues all around the country. And that feels very much in keeping with the history of Judaism itself, which is that of a people who are stateless and wandering and searching for a home and sympathetic with those who are doing the same. Absolutely. And what connects this to the shooter?

Well, we know that he knew about it because he posted it on a social media site called Gab, which is kind of like a cross between something like Twitter and Reddit. And it's a place where a lot of white nationalists and neo-Nazis and sort of far-right extremists have gathered to communicate with each other. And what did he say about this refugee Shabbat? So he posted the screenshot of the website where the details of this Shabbat were given out and a link to the list of participating synagogues. And he accused Hayes of bringing in hostile invaders to dwell among us. And by that, he meant the refugees.

Tonight, President Trump is doubling down on unsupported claims and scare tactics as a caravan of migrants heads closer to the U.S. border, marching north through Mexico. We know that he posted several messages about the caravan of migrants. Mr. Trump insisting that unknown Middle Easterners, his words, unknown Middle Easterners, are in the crowds as well as criminals without offering any evidence.

And he believed that this was also part of a Jewish conspiracy, that Jewish groups were funding and supporting these migrants trying to get across the border into the U.S. migrants trying to get across the border into the U.S. And he shared a message on his Gab feed that said that the filthy evil Jews are bringing the filthy evil Muslims into the country. And what happened on Saturday? So from what we know, on Saturday morning, he got into his car and drove to the synagogue. And at 9.49 a.m., he went on to Gab and posted a final message.

And he wrote, I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I'm going in. And then we know that about five minutes later, a 911 call came in that was reporting an active shooting in the synagogue. He carried four guns with him, according to police. And as he entered, he shouted that he wanted all Jews to die and began shooting. What do we know about this man? We know that Robert Bowers is 46 years old.

He lives about half an hour south of the synagogue in a kind of rundown apartment. And according to our colleagues at The Times who have talked to his neighbors and gone to his apartment, his neighbors said they don't really know much about him. They don't remember him talking to anyone. They don't remember him having much of a social life at all. He doesn't have a lot of footprints other than online. And most of what we know about him at this point, we know because he had this account on Gab. Time now for our Defending the First series,

where we expose the enemies of the First Amendment, free expression and free thought. If you remember, a few years ago, there started to be this narrative about censorship by Silicon Valley tech companies. The Media Research Center released a devastating report today documenting the censorship of conservative speech by Silicon Valley's tolerant tech giant. And especially sort of Twitter and Facebook being accused of bias against conservatives.

Gab is an ad-free social media platform that operates in a way similar to Twitter. And Gab sort of came out of that controversy. And Gab sort of came out of that controversy. It was started by a conservative programmer in Silicon Valley who was sort of fed up with what he saw as excessive political correctness. So when we founded Gab, we founded it specifically to avoid this purpose. I didn't want to police speech. I believed in free speech for everybody, individual liberty for everybody, and the free flow of information for everybody. But they don't. Correct, yes.

What's happening in Silicon Valley right now is they're using these arbitrary hate speech policies. And as a result of the fact that it had very few rules, there were no rules against hate speech, they weren't doing a ton of censorship, pretty much anything goes. censorship is pretty much anything goes. A lot of the more prominent people who joined were people who had been kicked off of other platforms for being too extreme. Like who? Well, Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing internet troll, used to write for Breitbart. He joined Gab. Richard Spencer, the prominent white nationalist, joined Gab, Jason Kessler, who organized the rally in Charlottesville, Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the Daily Stormer, which is a neo-Nazi website. He was an early member of Gab. And all of these people

flocked there because Gab would allow them to say pretty much whatever they wanted. flocked there because Gab would allow them to say pretty much whatever they wanted. There are other people on Gab, too. Obviously, they have something like 700,000 members. But the most visible stuff on the site was always the kind of shocking, racist, anti-Semitic, far-right content that was being shoved off of more popular platforms. And what about Bowers? What have you been able to learn from his postings on Gab? Well, he joined the site in January, and we've been able to recover some of his posts. They've been taken down, but we have an archive of some of them. And going through them, it sort of gives you the impression that he was obsessed

with anti-Semitism. I mean, substantially all of the posts that he posted and reposted were about Jews, were about conspiracy theories, about Jews controlling the world. He was critical of President Trump because he thought that President Trump was too accommodating of Jews. He used a ton of anti-Semitic slurs and stereotypes. I mean, there was really nothing else of substance on his profile other than anti-Semitism. So this was Bowers, Kevin, really making use of Gab as it was designed to be used as a far more lenient platform than Twitter, than Facebook.

Well, right before this shooting, we had another act of domestic terrorism, which was this mail bombing. Bombs sent through the mail to prominent Democrats and news organizations like CNN. And the suspect in that case, this guy from Florida, Cesar Sayoc, And the suspect in that case, this guy from Florida, Cesar Sayoc, he also used social media to post sort of extreme and divisive content. But he did it in a different way. He was using Facebook and Twitter, which are kind of the big mainstream platforms. And he was using them to get into fights and attack people and engage people who he disagreed with.

And that was sort of the appeal of that service to him was that everyone was there and he could find his enemies and communicate directly with them. Whereas Robert Bowers seems to have flocked to Gab for the opposite reason, because that was where the people who agreed with him were. And that was where he could find a community of people who shared his views, who he could communicate openly with without sort of the watchful eye of the platform getting in the way.

And you can really see the stark divide here if you go to Gab today in the aftermath of the shooting and look at the stuff that's being posted there. And what is being posted there? So we have a lot of posts that are celebrating Robert Bowers. There's a hashtag that's being... Celebrating this mass shooting. Celebrating the alleged shooter. There's a hashtag hero Robert Bowers, free Robert Bowers. I mean, it's just kind of the worst stuff you can imagine.

Are you seeing anyone on this site saying that this was a horrific act, that this was wrong, abhorrent, and that's not what we stand for? I'm looking around. I'm looking at what's popular on the site. I'm looking at what people are posting, and I'm not seeing a lot of that, no. Kevin, you and I have talked about the fact that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter

need to be stronger about policing this sort of speech that we're talking about. But I wonder if you're concerned that what we're seeing here with Gab might be a consequence of that, that any crackdown at all has pushed people with more extreme views onto smaller and less public and more fringy social media sites where inevitably there's less oversight and also more people who hold equally extreme or more extreme perspectives. And is that a problematic outcome? Well, I think one thing that we do know for sure is that when people get kicked off of Twitter and Facebook and other large social media platforms, they don't just stop posting. They don't go away. They find someplace

else that will tolerate them or turn a blind eye. And I think we have to get comfortable with the reality that one of the trade-offs of having our biggest and most influential social platforms be healthier and less toxic is that a lot of the worst stuff is going to get pushed into these smaller, more private enclaves. And there might not be any way to avoid

that, even if it shuts down, even if something else takes its place. So a healthy Twitter and Facebook may mean the existence of sites like Gab. Exactly. Kevin, what have you been thinking as you've been reporting on all this over the weekend, because it feels like for many months, we've been talking about the divisions on social media, mostly in terms of politics, what they meant in 2016, what they might mean for the midterms. But it feels like the events of the past week have sort of exploded that idea,

that the stakes are actually far higher. We're talking not about how this divisiveness might affect people's votes, but about how it's getting into people's psyches and is doing unbelievable real-world damage. Yeah, I think for the last several months, I've been covering social media with a focus on what effect all of this behavior happening on social media would have on one set of elections. And what I'm realizing is that it's far, far bigger than that. Because what we're really seeing is the kind of breakdown of the dividing line between online bad behavior and real world violence. For a while, lots of people thought that because threats or abusive language were happening on the internet, that it was somehow less real, that it was less threatening to receive a death threat

on Twitter than it would be to receive it over the phone or in person. And I think now we know that that's just not true, that often this stuff is one and the same, that the threats and the conflict and the polarization that erupt online and in the media can bleed over into real-world violence and are doing it pretty frequently and in ways that are horrifying. The consequences of all of this, of this stirring up of anger and hatred and polarization, I think are going to be with us for a long time.

It's a terrible, terrible thing what's going on with hate in our country, frankly, and all over the world. And something has to be done. Something has to be done. Over the weekend, President Trump denounced the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, even as the deaths revived questions about what signals he has sent, intentionally or not, to extremists across the country. Have you ever asked him to please not use that type of language when referring to other people for the case

of civil discourse in this country. Look, everyone has their own style. And frankly, people on both sides of the aisle use strong language about our political differences. But those around the president, including Vice President Mike Pence, rejected any linkage between Trump's language and the acts of isolated extremists. But I just don't think you can connect it to threats or acts of violence, Vaughn. And I don't think the American people connect it. The American people believe that those who are responsible

are the people that actually conduct these threats. We'll be right back. Words from Psalm 90. Kamel, who are the people inside this synagogue on Saturday? the door of our door the term harim yuladu Kamel, who were the people inside this synagogue on Saturday? Well, Tree of Life was a very prominent conservative synagogue. The congregation itself goes back over a hundred years. Oh God, you have been our refuge in every generation.

And the gunman came in just about five minutes after services were to begin. Turn to us at this hour, O God. At the beginning of services, it's often the older folks who come in. I mean, these are older folks in congregations anyway, which is generally true in big urban houses of worship. And particularly at the beginning of service, because the younger folks might kind of trickle in later. So these were the most dedicated folks.

You hear all the time the people who came year in and year out for decades as members of these congregations. Campbell Robertson is a national reporter based in Pittsburgh. There was a woman who was 97 years old. There were people in their 80s. There was a man who was 88 who got shot when he walked out of a storage room. And the younger end of the spectrum were two brothers who were developmentally disabled. They'd meet people at the door, hand out the prayer books, wish them a good Shabbat.

They'd meet people at the door, hand out the prayer books, wish them a good Shabbat. They would be the first people to meet anybody, including the gunman, when they came to the front door. And how old were the brothers? David Rosenthal was 54, and his older brother Cecil was 59. And people in all the congregations knew them well. They were, you know, arguably among the most familiar faces in the place. 35 years ago, long before I was ever interested in public life, my wife and I wanted to pick a place where we wanted to live and raise our family.

We decided to pick Squirrel Hill because it's a special place. The community is so tight. I think it is kind of unique. Jews and Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and atheists and Sikhs and every faith can come together, work together, pray together, play together. They're orthodox, reform, conservative. I'm Rabbi Ron Simons from the JCC. Rabbi Danny Schiff from the Pittsburgh Federation. Tonight at a vigil. Grace and peace to each and every one of you. There were...

Assalamu alaikum, everybody. May peace and blessings be upon all of you. Speakers who were Catholic. There was a Muslim speaker. If you need anything at all, if you need food for the families, if you just need somebody to come to the grocery store because you don't feel safe... And so there's really a sense that they're emphasizing this is first and foremost an attack on tree of life also the jewish community but also pittsburgh today all of us everyone in pittsburgh walks the mourner's path as together we seek strength for all of the tomorrows that lie ahead. I want to address my fellow members

and let you know what happened yesterday will not break us. It will not ruin us. We will continue to thrive and sing and worship and learn together and continue our historic legacy in this city with the friendliest people that we know. And as you're talking to people in Squirrel Hill and around it, what are you hearing now? Well, I mean, people are still in shock. It's early. But the move to what is going wrong that leads to something like this is pretty quick. I mean, sometimes you cover tragic events and people want to keep the outside world

as far removed as possible for as long as possible. Let's just focus on this. But in this case, people are pretty quick to say, what's gone wrong in this country that allows this kind of hatred to happen? And what can we do about it? And I'm not sure that there's an answer, but the question is asked in a lot of conversations.

It takes leadership to stop this, and our leaders are not stopping it. It's too much. We're a civilized society. We have to stay civilized. I mean, that's what I hear. A general sort of darkness, nastiness in the national psyche right now that is allowed to keep going. That's what I hear a lot about. On Sunday, police released the names of the 11 victims of the shooting inside the Tree of Life synagogue.

Joyce Feinberg, 75. Richard Gottfried, 65. Rose Mallinger, 97. Jerry Rabinowitz, 65. Rose Mallinger, 97. Jerry Rabinowitz, 66. Cecil Rosenthal, 59. David Rosenthal, 54. Bernice Simon, 84. Her husband, Sylvan Simon, 86.

Daniel Stein, 71. Melvin Wax, 88. And Irving Younger, 69. See you tomorrow.