Photo Source 燃灯 | CC BY 2.0
On the morning of 28 October 2018 Robert Bowers walked into a suburban Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania synagogue filled with worshippers. He was armed with an assault rifle and several handguns. Bowers proceeded to kill eleven people and wound six. It was the deadliest attack on Jews in American history.
Bowers is a 46-year-old truck driver who lived alone in a small apartment in the Baldwin section of Pittsburgh. Though described by neighbors as “normal,” Bowers was clearly a loner. “He kept to himself and neighbors never saw him with visitors.” Posting an online picture of his three “glock”-brand handguns, he referred to them as “my glock family.”
His social life may have been largely restricted to social media, and there he freely expressed himself. He found his comfort zone on a rightwing websight entitled Gab. Gab promotes a concept of unfettered free speech. In theory this might sound like an admirable aim, but in practice it can just turn into an arena to vent hatred, conspiracy theories and incitement of oneself and/or others to violence. Apparently, that was the environment that attracted Robert Bowers.
Bowers used Gab to express classic anti-Semitic views. He wrote that “jews [sic] are the children of satan [sic],” and asserted that President Trump’s mantra of “making America great again” was impossible to realize as long as there is “a kike infestation.” Bowers hated Jews first and foremost because they…