Scorecard Sacrilege

E very attack on Jews is chilling. But there are aspects of the tragedy in Poway, California, that make it uniquely so. The first of these dawned on me when, in the car on the way to Shacharis that morning, I heard the report of the attack and after spending about a minute on this story, the newscaster moved on to other items.

The contrast with the tragedy in Pittsburgh exactly six months earlier, which dominated the news for days, was striking. It’s not merely that this one involved much less loss of life, but that, as the second such attack on Jews at prayer by an armed marauder, the terrifying newness, and hence, uniqueness, of the occurrence was gone, forever. Now, this happens. Here, in America. Or, as a Times of Israel headline put it, “Synagogue Shootings — Now a Thing.”

Chilling, too, was the fact that the attacker didn’t seem to fit the usual mass-shooter profile we’ve come to expect. He was neither a deranged loner nor a longtime white nationalist steeped in violence and Jew-hatred. Coming from an intact family, headed by a father who’s a high-school physics teacher and a church elder, the killer was an excellent student and an accomplished pianist, a church-going young man training to be a nurse.

Moreover, as National Review’s Rich Lowry wrote, the murderer was self-radicalized on a right-wing message board on the website 8chan, posting before he went on his rampage a thank-you to the board’s users: “What I’ve learned here is priceless.” The San Diego shooter attested to how quickly he’d been prepped for mass murder by 8chan, where white nationalists push one another to undertake acts of violence that they call “real-life effort-posting.” He said he never could have imagined killing even a few months ago, and that he planned the attack in four weeks.