Bernie Sanders Refuses To Blame President Trump For Synagogue Shooting

Unlike the mainstream media, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) refuses to blame President Trump for the horrific mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday, during which a non-Trump supporting white supremacist took the lives of 11 Jewish-Americans.

“I’m not going to sit here and blame the president,” said the senator, according to the Washington Examiner.

Speaking before a crowd in Northern California on Saturday, the senator from Vermont condemned the Pittsburgh shooting as an assault on the practice of religion.

“If this country stands for anything, it’s gotta stand for the right of people — whether they are Christian, Jewish Muslim whatever they may be — to practice their religion, to live their lives, without bigotry without fear and certainly within their houses of worship,” said Sen. Sanders.

It would be entirely unwise for Sanders to blame President Trump for the shooting by a non-Trump supporter, considering that in September 2017, an enraged socialist Bernie supporter opened fire on several GOP congressman in the name of protecting healthcare. As noted by the DW’s Ben Shapiro at the time, Bernie Sanders was not to blame for a psychopath’s horrible actions and it would be entirely wrong for conservatives to do so:

Rhetoric is not directly responsible for violence unless it advocates violence. Radical jihadism advocates violence; the bulk of its supporters know this and support violence; a solid contingent of its followers participate in violence. The same is not true for American-brand political leftism, as vile as it is. For the right to equate verbiage with violence – no matter how inflammatory the verbiage – is to fall prey to the same snowflake syndrome the right condemns on college campuses. There is no logical gap between attempting to blame right-wing speakers for supposed “violent speech” in opposing Black Lives Matter, and attempting to blame Sanders for the sins of a random follower.

Unfortunately, the bias mainstream media has not played by this arguably fair rule and have seized upon the moment to blame President Trump for the Pittsburgh shooting.

“You can draw a direct line from all of the vitriol and hate rhetoric about the caravan that’s some 2,000 miles away from our border and the gunman in Pittsburgh, who referenced that, and somehow turned it into an attack on Jews,” CNN host Alisyn Camerota said Monday.

CNN analyst David Gregory agreed that there exists a correlation between President Trump’s rhetoric on immigration with the shooter’s motivation to kill Jews.

“There’s no question that the president who has waged rhetorical war — and worse, when you talk about family separations on immigrants and suggesting that they’re vermin and infesting they’re country — you cannot ignore how that can be heard by people who hate immigrants, who are afraid of anyone who they think is going to change their way of life, and who hates Jews,” Gregory said.

GQ columnist Julia Ioffe went so far to compare Trump to ISIS. “I think, you know, this president, one of the things that he really launched his presidential run on is talking about Islamic radicalization, and this president has radicalized so many more people than ISIS ever did,” she said on CNN this week. “ISIS had, like 10,000 members. I think the president has far more supporters who espouse an equally hateful ideology.”