When verbal antisemitism crossed over into cold-blooded murder

Everyone was shocked by the premeditated, cold-blooded murder of two Israeli Embassy workers in Washington D.C. last Thursday, not only because of their tragic deaths but because the perpetrator laid in wait for Jews at a likely venue to find them.

Whether he knew that one of his victims had “a passion for peacebuilding, religious engagement and environmental work,” probably wouldn’t have mattered, because the “Free, free Palestine chant, which came out of the crazed 30-year-old’s mouth was ample evidence that his brainwashing had overtaken reason and logic. 

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser wasted no time assuring everyone that there was no active threat, but who among us believes that this evil act is not possibly the first of many to follow, paving the way for the vicious verbal assaults, accompanied by angry protesting mobs, to turn into a well-coordinated campaign to hunt down Jews at sites which they are thought to frequent?

This horrendous event sadly marked a depraved crossing of the line from threatening words to the taking of life, in an ultimate attempt to rid society of the race which has been held as unworthy to continue. It is what happens when governments, academia and biased media fuel uninformed swaths of ignorant people who don’t need much to believe the worst about an ethnicity they already suspected of contamination. 

When charges of baby killing, slaughtering of innocents and indiscriminate targeting of Gazans gets thrown around and amplified by news outlets, it is the fertile ground for the type of gross and perverse imaginings which, in the minds of sick and disturbed people, justify cold-blooded murder on the streets of America’s capital.

Sadly, those same charges, based on factual evidence, when they pertain to having been perpetrated upon Israelis, as in the October 7th massacre, are largely ignored or outright denied, despite documentation and eye-witness accounts. That would be too incriminating for the disingenuous side which is highly invested in pushing a one-dimensional narrative that paints Jews and Israel as the aggressors whose goal is to commit genocide.

But it’s really difficult to provide any proof of such motives or desires when taking into consideration that everything began more than 20 years ago, with a well-calculated plan by Hamas terrorists who, rather than create a better life for those whom they aspired to govern, expended their energies in the creation of thousands of tunnels, the rigorous training of young men who became their killing machine and cleverly fooling those who financed their efforts as they naively believed it would lead to peace.

The deranged keffiyeh draped deniers, who appear in NYC or London, still have nothing to say about that fated day, when the worst atrocities known to man were committed. Compassion or tears are absent for the innocent babies, children, elderly and families who truly suffered the horrific wholesale slaughter of their communities, in an actual execution of genocide that took place on Israeli soil, unlike the imaginary charge which is being attributed to the Jewish state and anyone associated with it, by way of ethnicity.

Those victims are deemed to have deserved what they got, whether they were only nine months old or strong and passionate advocates for the Palestinian cause, both categories of who perished. Nothing they could have done or said would have ever redeemed them from the onslaught of hate which took their lives, because, let’s face it, if you were born Jewish, you’re not worthy of any sympathy.

This is the type of warped thinking which leads to the demented act of the taking of life – in this case, the lives of two young people who were about to embark on the blessed event of wedded bliss, following the planned proposal of marriage which was about to take place. The purchased ring will go unplaced on the finger of Sarah Milgrim who never got a chance to say “yes” to 28-year-old Yaron Lischinsky, her prospective bridegroom.

Now, united in death, they will go down as the first of their kind – Jewish Israelis who had the misfortune of attending a Jewish event which became the site of the ultimate act of blind hatred and blood-letting.

Will it initiate a trend where Jews can no longer be certain of coming out alive after attending a synagogue, a bar mitzvah or a Jewish commemoration of any kind? Will every one of these venues require the presence of law enforcement? And what happens when they exit but are followed home? Who will ensure that they arrive unharmed?

This is where society is sadly heading. The intolerance for Jews, which began as verbal criticism of Israel’s right to defend their citizens, after they are brutally attacked, has morphed into the same atmosphere which pervaded Europe of the 1930s, albeit without the yellow star marking on their clothing. But who needs that when it’s just as easy to eliminate Jews by lying in wait for them as they routinely live their lives, attending the events that they always felt were safe and without threat.

All it took was the amplification of lies, innuendo and fear-mongering, coupled with the magnetic pull of following the crowd, being part of what’s trendy and in vogue. The two attractions then become responsible for the insidious lust to act out the fantasy. And why not? Anyone who is that pre-occupied and driven by hatred against another people, clearly lacks purpose, the pursuit of worthy goals and any fulfillment in their lives.

These are the individuals who have no aspiration to create a better world for those around them – not even for themselves, because when you’re willing to pull the trigger on two innocent young people who were just enjoying an event on a beautiful spring day, knowing that you will spend the rest of your life behind bars, never to be free again, you hate yourself enough to inflict that kind of existence on your own life. What a colossal waste of the gift you were given!

Perhaps that is where it all begins – loving one’s self enough to realize that hating others only leads to your own sure demise. If that major revelation can be internalized by all of creation, there may yet be hope that we have not crossed the Rubicon of self-destruction.