Judah Samet has been in history’s crosshairs a few times in his long life. More than seven decades after he survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a young boy, Samet also lived through the October 2018 mass shooting at Tree of Life, the Pittsburgh synagogue he considered his “home.”
Now, the NY Post reports, the retired jeweler — who has addressed students, civic organizations and law enforcement about his experiences in the Holocaust — wishes to once again bear witness: Samet wants to take the stand and identify the alleged perpetrator of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in US history, with whom he says he locked eyes. But at 84, Samet fears that if the process of bringing alleged killer Robert Bowers to justice continues to be delayed, he could miss his chance to testify.
“I want to testify because he has to pay for what he did,” said Samet on a recent afternoon in his Pittsburgh apartment. “If I don’t testify, and nobody else testifies, he may walk. Justice delayed is justice denied. The man did a crime and he should pay. Three years and four months is plenty of delay. Maybe they should give him Bergen-Belsen rations: one slice of hard bread a day and one cup of soup, which was barely soup.” Read more at the NY Post.
{Matzav.com}
Give him a chance
They might deem the shooter “unfit to stand trial”, “delusional”, a “sensitive” soul, full of “empathy”, who is merely suffering from some form of “hallucinatory psychosis”, and who could never, in a thousand years, commit a crime because of any kind of hate in his noble heart.
Usually, such defenses only apply to POC, who, invariably, start off as goochiles, and then the systematic marginalization forces them to commit every sort of crime.
They are also caught and tried right when they are turning their lives around, on the very day, and are about to become lawyers, rocket surgeons, or already are aspiring, promising, and up-and-coming rappers.