Los Angeles city leaders continued to speak out Tuesday against hate speech, anti-Semitism and gun violence following a mass shooting at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue, while also expressing fear the violence is potentially being fueled by President Donald Trump.
The City Council held a moment of silence during its meeting in honor of the 11 victims who died in Saturday’s shooting.
City Attorney Mike Feuer, meanwhile, lamented what he sees as a rise in hate-fueled violence. He recalled his time on the City Council in 1999 when a mass shooting at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills wounded three children, a teenage counselor and an office worker. The gunman in that shooting was motivated by racism and hate, but Feuer said the shooting felt like an isolated incident, whereas the Pittsburgh shooting seems to fit into a national trend.
“It was a different moment altogether. This moment requires us to take things to a different level and it requires adults to model behavior for our kids and it requires teachers to engage kids so they can model behavior for each other, because a lot of the activity we see now didn’t just happen, it began years ago,” Feuer said.
The alleged Pittsburgh shooter was reported by police to have expressed hatred of Jews after his arrest. The shooting came after two black people were fatally shot at a grocery store in Kentucky last Wednesday in what officials are saying may have been a hate-motivated attack. Meanwhile, a man was arrested Friday on suspicion of sending more than a dozen packages containing what authorities described as potentially explosive devices to Democratic political leaders, including Los Angeles Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama.
“We talk about tolerance, I’m sick of tolerance. Tolerance is too low of a bar. We need to go beyond that,” Councilman Bob Blumenfield said. “We need to embrace each other, and in Los Angeles, we can be the beacon of hope. We are the most diverse city in the nation, and we need to reverberate our love for each other, because love will conquer, unity will conquer, and we can move forward.”
Blumenfield on Monday evening led a candlelight vigil at City Hall in honor of the Pittsburgh victims that was attended by Mayor Eric Garcetti, Controller Ron Galperin and Councilmen Mitch O’Farrell, Paul Koretz, Paul Krekorian, Curren Price, Gil Cedillo and Marqueece Harris-Dawson,
The hate-motivated crimes making headlines came on the heels of a Commission on Human Relations report that found that hate crimes in Los Angeles County have risen 32 percent increase over the past four years. There were 508 hate crimes reported in the county last year, with 101 religious crimes, of which 72 percent were anti-Jewish.
Feuer and some other city leaders said Trump may share responsibility for the recent wave of violence due to his aggressive rhetoric on immigrants, Muslims and his belief that there were “some very fine people” at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 which included neo-Nazis, a crowd chanting anti-Jewish slogans and a man later charged with purposefully ramming his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing a 32-year-old woman.
“You know no one will ever be able to draw a straight line between any rally or any particular comment by the president and an event like this,” Feuer said. “But there is no question that when you say proudly, `Yes, I’m a nationalist,’ when you say that the people who are chanting, `The Jews will not replace us’ included a number of good people in that crowd, when you consistently wield division as a weapon, when you invoke vocabulary that is a dog whistle to some of the worst possible attributes in American society — when you do take those steps, there are consequences, particularly when it is the president of the United States,” Feuer said.
Trump has pushed back against the notion that his rhetoric is responsible for inspiring any violence, and said the media was to blame.
“There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Monday. “The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame…”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has also rejected suggestions Trump bears responsibility for the Pittsburgh shooting or other hate-fueled crimes.
“I think it’s irresponsible to blame the president and members of his administration for those heinous acts,” she said.
Trump visited the Pittsburgh synagogue Tuesday.
City Councilman Gil Cedillo said he finds no ambiguity in what Trump stands for.
“It’s simple in some ways — hate speech leads to hate crimes. And we constantly have the debate in the chamber about First Amendment rights, but there (are) limits,” Cedillo said. “You can’t shout `fire’ in a crowded theater, and we need to think about that a little more critically as we allow people to denigrate other people and to dehumanize other people.”