Another mass shooting has rattled a synagogue.
Over the weekend, a 19-year-old gunman shot and killed a congregant celebrating Passover at Chabad of Poway Synagogue in southern California. Others were injured. The incident is being labeled by officials as a hate crime.
Joining Boston Public Radio with their analysis were Reverend Irene Monroe and Reverend Emmett Price. Monroe is a syndicated religion columnist and the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail and a visiting researcher in the Religion and Conflict Transformation Program at Boston University School of Theology. Price is a Professor of Worship, Church & Culture and Founding Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of the Black Christian Experience at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
Price said that while the heartache is fresh each time a mass shooting occurs, these incidents follow a pattern of white supremacist violence.
"The context is: As much as we are ripped to the core from all this bloodshed and this horrific activity in sacred spaces, the reality is that white supremacy and white nationalism are rising," Price said.
"These things have been happening for a long time, and we have done an injustice of trying to isolate them as situations where, 'This is a one-off, this is an isolated incident,' where these things continue to happen," Price said.
Monroe criticized elected officials, including President Donald Trump, for not fully condemning the white nationalist worldview at the root of such attacks.
"When you ask the president, 'Do you think there's a problem here with white nationalism, not just with the country but across the globe?' and he says, 'No, not really, just a few people,' or when you have something like Charlottesville and you do this moral equivalent comparing the counter-protestors to neo-Nazis, it signals," Monroe said, referring to the president's comments after a recent mass shooting in New Zealand and his comments after a protester was killed at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
"It gives a signal, and it gives permission for white nationalists to come out," Monroe continued.
