There should be little doubt that the main takeaways from the murders of those two Israeli embassy staffers by a gunman who yelled “Free Palestine” as they exited Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum are confirmation that words can kill and that security in the Jewish community is woefully inadequate.
While some have wrongly urged that anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitic, they are no longer able account for the fact that the killings took place in front of a major Jewish site after an extraordinary, months-long spike in antisemitic “activism” since Oct. 7th, namely, the leftist targeting and intimidation of Jewish students on college and university campuses, and the fixation of the public protest industry on the Jewish state.
For a change, even some of the establishment warriors against antisemitism were right on the money.
Daniel Rosen of the American Jewish Congress said in a statement that, “Words matter. Just because one person pulls the trigger doesn’t mean they acted alone.”
The ADL’s Jason Greenblatt said after the shooting that, “When antisemitic rhetoric is normalized, tolerated, or even amplified in our public discourse, it creates an environment where violence against Jews becomes more likely. In a climate of relentless antisemitism in the U.S. and globally since October 7, 2023, unfortunately, this tragedy was inevitable.”
We were also struck by Cong. Ritchie Torres last month after pro-Palestinian protesters had clashed with pro-Israel demonstrators in Brooklyn. As reported by the Times of Israel, Torres said the violence was to be expected: “Violence is not a bug but a feature of the so-called ‘Free Palestine’ movement, which has no desire to free Palestinians from Hamas.” And after the Capital Jewish Museum murders he said, “When you repeat slogans like ‘globalize the intifada,’ you are inciting violence against Jews in the United States and around the world. The danger of incitement is no abstraction.”
The NY Daily News also provided some interesting statistics last week along these lines. In an article by Carlo J. V. Caro, we are told that the FBI’s Hate Crime Statistics Program shows that when public discourse turns openly antisemitic, crime data soon reflects it. Between 2022 and 2023, just months after celebrity influencers and political candidates mainstreamed conspiratorial attacks on “globalist” Jewish power, reported antisemitic hate crime incidents in the U.S. jumped 63% – the steepest single-year rise in the FBI’s antisemitic data set.
We loudly applaud President Trump’s full court press against antisemitism and especially his well-publicized funding challenges to shamefully indifferent administrators on Ivy League campuses. But we can’t help wondering though, whether Trump Derangement Syndrome – the delegitimizing of anything and everything Donald Trump does – is turning his efforts into a Catch-22, agony and ecstasy dynamic.
Colleges and universities are surely among the most important venues for the organization and refinement of ideas and opinions. Therefore, it would seem to be a no-brainer that the key to pushing back on rampant antisemitism would be to get institutions of higher learning to tamp down on anti-Jewish hostility on their campuses – especially when Harvard’s leadership insists that things are under control there.
If it’s not TDA, how can one otherwise explain the almost total wall of opposition on the Democratic side to Trump’ efforts to use the cancelling of billions of dollars in federal grants as an incentive to get them to set things right? Even a recent independent internal Harvard investigation concluded that, despite what the school’s administrators were claiming, antisemitism was going largely unchecked there, and needed radical fixing.
Thus, paradoxically, the more President Trump does to address antisemitism and the more he becomes publicly identified with the issue, the alienation of almost half of the country is a distinct possibility.
By proposing this possible conundrum, we are not suggesting that we know how to get our head around it. But one thing is certain. History has shown that antisemitism is not just another issue. And it should be treated accordingly – by all of us.
