When 46-year-old Robert Bowers rushed into the Tree of Life Congregation Synagogue and killed 11 people, wounding six others—including four police officers—he was taken into custody badly hurt. Authorities brought him to Allegheny General Hospital, where he was treated by a team of doctors—including doctors who identify as Jewish. Britain’s Channel 4 interviewed the president of Allegheny, Jeffrey J. Cohen, about Bowers.
Cohen: Yesterday, I went up to meet him. I was just curious about, who is this guy? And quite honestly, he’s just a guy. People say he’s evil, he’s this ... he’s some mother’s son. And how did he get from that to where he is today? That’s going to be a large debate that we have to wrestle with as a society.
Reporter: Effectively, you were sort of at the head of a team that saved his life.
Cohen: It may be a bit of an overstatement, but yes. He was severely injured and he got great care here. Many of the people that attended to him were Jewish. And they’re heroes. They did like the cops did; they did their job. They went and they confronted the problem, and they were true to their core beliefs, and I’m very proud of them.
Reporter: And as a doctor, but also a parishioner of the synagogue, and you looked into his eyes, what did you see?
Cohen: I just looked at him and he’s like a lot of people that come in here. They’re scared, they’re confused. They don’t quite understand it. But once again, my job isn’t to judge him. Other people give that—that’s a pretty awesome responsibility. My job is to take care of him.
There will be a push to explain away this awful person as someone who is simply unhinged, or inherently evil. But as Jeffrey Cohen reminds us, Robert Bowers is just a guy. It’s a mix of hate and stupidity, delusion and desperation that leads someone like Bowers to go from screaming hate online to compiling an arsenal of weapons that allow him to kill people with almost no effort, not some red guy with a pitchfork. The evil isn’t some sneaky demon in the shadows; it’s a collective illness that we all suffer from to degrees, exacerbated by a society of greedy and frightened people who dehumanize others in order to hold power.
This isn’t about going “high” when they go “low.” It’s about knowing what “high” is, and diagnosing “low” in order to ameliorate it.
You can watch the interview with Channel 4 below.