Statement Responding to Trump Decision not to Live-Stream Pre-Hanukkah Execution

U.S. President and convicted felon Donald J. Trump recently decided not to live-stream the military firing squad state-sponsored murder of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people, and injured dozens more, at a medical processing center at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009. The thousands of members of “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty” from across the USA, Israel, and the world still unequivocally reject the fact that this blatant human rights violation is slated to take place at all. Hasan’s inhumane killing will mark the first US military execution in more than 60 years. It is set for 1 pm on Thursday, 3 December, just one day before the start of the Jewish Festival of Lights, Hanukkah.

It is not surprising that a recent survey found that eight in ten Americans opposed the idea of a public execution. Trump perhaps hopes to show the world that he is “in line” with popular opinion on this issue by ensuring a private state killing. His logic, however, is flawed on the global scale, where well over seventy percent of world nations have abolished capital punishment in law or practice. Civilized humanity recognizes that the medieval concept of state-sponsored killing of defenseless prisoners is an abomination of the highest order, whether in full public view or hidden in the shadows.​

A military jury sentenced Hasan to death in 2013, and he has been held at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas ever since. He exhausted his appeals last year, allowing Donald Trump to approve the sentence this past week. That decision came on a recommendation from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who stated of Hasan’s pending execution: “people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” Trump himself, when announcing his decision to reprivatize the execution, wrote: “I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan…”

Trump and Hegseth’s reference to the deterrence delusion that abounds in popular culture regarding the death penalty is one of many reasons why Hasan’s execution marks an insane and dangerous moment for America. L’chaim has publicly stated on multiple occasions how the use of a firing squad, like lethal injection and gassing to death, is a Nazi legacy and ghastly trigger for Jews everywhere in the wake of the Holocaust. The decision to do so only further connects the United States to other regimes, such as the Third Reich, that have glorified death and wielded executions as a political tool.

Trump later added of his decision to privatize the killing: “The execution may be viewed in person by the immediate families of the victims, if they so choose.They deserve to witness JUSTICE!” What they will in fact be witnessing is not justice, but vengeance. This is a fact to which the thousands of family members of murder victims in the death penalty abolitionist group Journey of Hope: From Violence to Healing can attest. Restorative, not retributive, justice is the only true path forward.

To carry out this abject abomination on the eve of the joyous holiday of Hanukkah across the Jewish world is a slap in the face of life-affirming Jews everywhere. Let there be no doubt: that holiday was born of violence and war in Israel millennia ago. Yet, just as Judaism has evolved over the centuries, so too has Hanukkah, which has become the Festival of Lights, focusing on the story of a tiny amount of oil that miraculously lasted long enough to keep the Temple’s lamp lit for eight days and nights. L’chaim members celebrate Judaism’s evolution into the spiritual/cultural tradition that we practice today: a 21st-century Judaism that marches for life and peace and absolutely rejects the death penalty without exception in all forms. The knowledge that the United States government will be extinguishing that proverbial light by mimicking the Angel of Death just before we kindle the first candle of the Hanukkiah is incomprehensible and nauseating. One can only imagine what might have been the reaction of death penalty abolitionist Elie Wiesel, Z’L (1928-2016), who likened state killings to the very same Malakh HaMavet(Angel of Death) when he stated:

“With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don’t think it’s human to become an agent of the angel of death.”​

It is not a coincidence that Hegseth made his initial announcement of the idea of a public execution – a macabre, maniacal public display of death worship – when he did. It came on the heels of Tennessee’s shameful torture and botched execution of Christa Pike. It was intended to represent a doubling down on the policy of state murder for any whose faith in the “machinery of death” might have been shaken by her suffering. Through this timing, it left no doubt where the current American regime stands when it comes to concern for the human right to life. Moreover, for the Jewish world, the trauma of the timing was exacerbated by the fact that the call for public execution occurred during the same week as the third anniversary of the terrorist massacre of October 7th, 2023, in Israel, a country whose own government dishonored that date by distributing noose-themed pins to schoolchildren just days prior. It is also not lost on abolitionists across the globe that this announcement took place just two days before World Day Against the Death Penalty, when Texas executed L’chaim’s longtime Jewish client Jedidiah Murphy in 2023, just days after October 7th.​

Elie Wiesel famously said of capital punishment, “Death should never be the answer in a civilized society.” The fact holds no matter if the killing is public or private. If readers agree with Wiesel, and with all of civilized humanity, please join us in signing and sharing this petition against all federal and military executions in the United States.

May the abiding neshamot/spirits of all the murder victims of Nidal Hasam, and in all cases, be loving guides for us all.​

May their loved ones be comforted among all the mourners of the world.​

May no more blood be shed in their sacred names.

May the cycles of violence and killings end.

–

Cantor Michael J. Zoosman, MSM, BCC​

Jewish Prison Chaplain​

Co-Founder: L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty

​Advisory Committee Member: Death Penalty Action