In the wake of a shooting massacre at a synagogue and a mail-bomb campaign against prominent critics of President Donald Trump, a former Homeland Security chief said the U.S. currently has a "toxic" political environment in which "deranged" people "feel it's their place" to bring about change.
Jeh Johnson, who was Homeland Security Secretary under President Barack Obama, told “This Week” Co-Anchor Martha Raddatz, “We're in an environment now where deranged individuals feel that it's their place to bring about change in our society with an AR-15 or a series of pipe bombs.”
Johnson said Americans need to pressure their leaders to promote a more civil public dialogue.
“We live now in a very, very toxic environment that includes an incivility in our political discourse among our leaders. The attack yesterday and the attempted pipe bombings over the course of last week should be a wake-up call to all Americans to demand change and change has to start at the top,” he said.
A suspect in the synagogue shooting, 46-year-old Robert Bowers of Pittsburgh, who has been arrested and charged, had allegedly posted anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant messages on social media, including a message that said, “Jews are the children of Satan.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, also appeared on "This Week" and cited research from the Jewish civil rights organization showing a 57 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. in 2017.
"In 2016, we saw a 34 percent increase in acts of harassment, vandalism and violence against the Jewish community," Greenblatt said. "But last year, a 57 percent increase, the single largest surge that we’ve ever seen in anti-Semitic acts in the United States."
“All of this is absolutely unacceptable, and we cannot create a situation or allow ourselves to normalize anti-Semitism and think this is somehow just an average daily course of business," the Anti-Defamation League CEO said. "It's abnormal and it needs to be interrupted and stopped.”
The shooting massacre in Pittsburgh on Saturday killed 11 people and injured at least six more, including four police officers.
Bowers was charged with 29 federal counts, including several hate crimes and 11 counts of obstruction of exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death.
President Trump on Saturday condemned the attack as "evil."
“This evil anti-Semitic attack is an assault on all of us. It's an assault on humanity. It will require all of us working together to extract the hateful poison of anti-Semitism from our world,” Trump said.
from ABC News: Politics https://ift.tt/2Pq9Mgx
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