Donald Trump is altering an old saw. Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me. Really? In Seattle, we have been given a grisly contradiction. Words do hurt because hurt is harm. Harm is more or less evil, depending on how deep it goes. A hate crime took place, no one denies it. It bears tell-tale marks of a Trumpian ethos.
The hateful act
Seattle police are now on the lookout for suspects in the desecration of a Seattle synagogue. The evidence is a single piece of evil art. The message is concise and chilling. It is a willful human action, not the result of a someone's hasty intuition.
One official on the scene suggested to NBC that what lay beneath the surface before has been allowed to appear openly in the current political season. The President has hardly been a beacon of tolerance.
A Trump connection
'Perish the thought' would be the words running through the Trump ranks, should any dare associate the Seattle event with our president. But there are three clues anyone with a mind can immediately conclude are Trumpian. The form of the message is tweet like. The message employing the word 'fake' is Trump-like. The subtext is seriously evil and evokes the world from which Trump draws intellectual sustenance.
Seattle Police Search for Suspects After Holocaust Denial Graffiti Found on Synagogue https://t.co/FfLXoRJUiZ
— Stephen C. Rose (@stephencrose) March 12, 2017
The message is: Holocaust is fake history.
In the graffiti, each capital 's' is a dollar sign. It does not take a Sherlock Holmes to arrive at a completely plausible deduction. The perpetrator or perpetrators of this hate crime were familiar with the mythology that gives false substance to these hurtful words.
Will the President renounce the mythology?
The message mirrors an alt-right understanding that Trump's lieutenant Steve Bannon well knows.
The understanding says we owe all problems of the world to money-grubbing Jews. We can collapse everything bad into the words, Rothschild and Rockefeller. This is false. We cannot easily count those in the world who buy this. It is as real as anything else not because it is true but because it is out there having an effect on people. It helps to create an atmosphere of fear, hate, resentment and defeat.
Donald Trump has done his usual slow walk when it has come to denouncing anti-Semitism. It is clearly not working.
