Killing Jews for fun and profit...

..mostly just fun, but it has to be stopped before Brownshirtism spreads any further than it already has.

My wife and I live in Northern Virginia, a few miles from where this happened last night. From an article in the Spectator:

The murder [Wednesday] night of two young Israeli embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, on a street in Washington, DC was horrifying, but not surprising. The couple was gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum. A suspect then walked into the building, accepted water from those who thought he was a victim, and began chanting “Free Palestine.” He pulled a red keffiyeh from his pocket and invoked the old rallying cry: “There is only one solution. Intifada revolution.”

The man now in custody, Elias Rodriguez, was once associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a hard-left political group whose slogans echo in anti-Israel demonstrations across the country. In the hours before the shooting, the group posted: “End the genocide. Israel out of Gaza now.” Rodriguez had marched in their protests and spoken at their rallies. After the shooting, they disowned him with haste, but the slogans remained. The worldview remained. The atmosphere remained.

The whole article is more than worth your time.

I’m delighted to say that, under Trump’s Justice Department, Rodriguez has been charged with death penalty-eligible crimes, as the WSJ reported. You might remember that the Administration the voters ushered out last November had imposed a moratorium on the federal death penalty (without bothering to ask Congress to eliminate capital punishment, Congress apparently being irrelevant to the federal criminal code). (Please remember this the next time some liberal starts in on you that it’s Trump who ignores democratic processes). President Biden, whether aware of what he was doing or not (who knows at this point?) then — but only after the election — emptied out 90% of federal death row. I don’t recall his giving a guarantee that the recipients of his largesse wouldn’t do it again. I don’t recall his caring, either.

This was not the act of a lone figure drifting through conspiracy. It was the collision of ideology and permission. Rodriguez did not invent the language that filled his mouth after the murders. It was given to him – polished in activist workshops, passed around on college campuses, reinforced by social media algorithms and institutional silence. That language gave him certainty. It gave him moral clarity. And then it likely gave him a target.

Yes, “college campuses.” Which campuses, one might ask. The answer is, by now, too familiar. Columbia perhaps first comes to mind, see, e.g., here and here [UPDATE: and, as of tonight, here] but Columbia, top-of-the-line as it is (or was), is not America’s foremost university. That, despite some recent lagging ratings, would be Harvard.

What’s the story at Harvard? Fortunately, Rep. Elise Stefanik gave us a glimpse. But there’s more to the story of Harvard’s Jew-hating, see this article in the Free Press, titled, “Denounced, Cursed, and Ghosted: What Harvard’s Antisemitism Report Found.” A sample:

Nearly 60 percent of Jewish students at Harvard said they had experienced “discrimination, stereotyping, or negative bias on campus due to [their] views on current events,” according to the 311-page report. The report said that 73 percent of Jewish students expressed discomfort sharing their political opinions, while 75 percent believed there was an “academic or professional penalty” for expressing their views at Harvard.

Jewish students also said they had concealed their identity from classmates and been ghosted by longtime friends for expressing sympathy for Israel—or for appearing in Instagram posts with those who did. Jewish students at Harvard also reported choosing to “avoid certain degree programs, classes, and panel discussions sponsored by various departments and centers at Harvard because of antisemitism.”

Last night’s killer was not a Columbia or Harvard guy so far as I know. But that’s not the point. The point is that the culture, led in particular by academia, knowingly fosters antisemitism and only pretends — if even that — to do something about it.

We saw the results last night. We’ve seen them before and we’re certain to see them again. Seeking the death penalty for Rodriguez is a good start and a good symbol, but the spread of antisemitic poison requires more.

The Brownshirts — and that’s what we’re talking about if there were any remaining doubt — could care less about hearings and reports. What they respond to is force, and that’s what we need to give them. The Administration should establish, using officers of the Justice Department and Homeland Security, a task force to position forces, on known sites of antisemitic violence and intimidation — police-like units to respond with force as soon as the Brownshirts show up.

This will bring howls and of course lawsuits from the Left. It will be expensive, and it won’t stop everything that needs stopping. It would not have stopped what happened last night. But it will be a show of seriousness and determination the country desperately needs.

A young man had bought a ring and was planning to propose. A young woman was at his side. They walked out of a museum and were assassinated for being Israeli. Their deaths did not emerge from nowhere. They emerged from an ideological climate that is becoming more fevered, more violent, and more sanctioned.

There is still time to dismantle the structures that produce this violence. But only if we are honest about where they are, and who is building them. The line from campus chants to bullets outside a Jewish museum is not abstract, but direct. It will not be the last if it is not broken.