Two Jews, employees of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, were murdered in a terrorist attack Wednesday night outside the Capital Jewish Museum.
They were young, a couple. The man had bought a ring and was going to propose next week.
Soon, we will uncover more details about the gunman and what drove him to approach two unsuspecting individuals enjoying a night out and fatally shoot them.
But the details hardly matter: The killer already told us everything we need to know.
As he was being detained, he shouted the words that have become the soundtrack to so much American suffering: âFree Palestine.â
The killings serve as a stark reminder, if we needed one, that the slogan “free Palestine” extends beyond the conflict in Gaza. It isn’t focused on Israel’s reactions to Hamas’ brutal actions on October 7, nor is it concerned with the well-being of Palestinians or others.
“Free Palestine” is essentially the slogan of a terrorist agenda, supported by foreign governments, aiming to create disorder, instill fear, and incite violence on the streets of America.
This violence always begins with Jews, but it never ends there. Free Palestineâs real target is America.
Shortly after the grim news broke, President Donald Trump spoke to Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter and promised him to do whatever it takes to fight this deadly hatred.
But serious and committed as the president may be, the fight ahead of us will require greater resources than even the American government has at its disposal.
Because the fight we now face isnât merely against a gaggle of violent radicals; itâs also the fight against all those who worked assiduously to get us to this murderous moment.
It’s a fight against the international organizations peddling modern-day blood libels, as the UNâs humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, did when he went on the BBC earlier this week and argued that unless the world stops Israelâs murderous spree, 14,000 Palestinian babies will die in Gaza in the next two days.
That this, if true, would be the equivalent of 27% of the death toll for the entire war, all babies, and all perishing in 48 hours, didnât seem to trouble reporters and editors in major news outlets, who amplified Fletcherâs outlandish claim uncritically.
Our fight is against them, too: long after it was obvious that the assassination was a terrorist attack targeting Jews, American media outlets, with very few exceptions, still spoke vaguely of a âshootingâ claiming the lives of two unspecified victims.
On college campuses, our fightâs been going on for nearly two years now. We fight it even as university presidents and professors rush to defend thugs who assault Jewish students, disrupt classes, and disseminate terrorist propaganda.
The list of terrorâs witless enablers is long. But there are still many more of us, normal Americans who refuse to accept a reality in which Jews are targeted and attacked by a death cult and in which Washington or New York or Chicago becomes just another Beirut, a bloody battlefield thick with jaunty jihadis.
How might we win this fight, the fight for American and Western civilization?
The answer is as simple as it is urgent.
We win by giving the Free Palestine brigades no quarter.
By rejecting candidates for office who support their cause and make excuses for their brutalities.
By demanding that institutions that foster them be denied any form of public funding and support.
By deporting every foreign national clucking about globalizing the Intifada.
By demanding that our law enforcement authorities treat these keffiyeh-clad thugs as domestic terrorists deserve to be treated.
When a gaggle of rioters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, 6,000 agents were assigned to work the case.
The murder in DC this week is every bit a fundamental, foundational assault on American democracy, and deserves equal or greater resources.
This shouldnât be a hard concept for us to grasp. In 1871, facing another murderous, Jew-hating militia, the Ku Klux Klan, Congress passed the Enforcement Act that gave the government wide-reaching power to do everything necessary, from deploying federal troops to suspending habeas corpus, to defeat these homegrown terrorists.
It did so because Americans could unite behind the elementary idea that the Klan was pure evil and profoundly un-American. The same is true of Free Palestine.
As we mourn the victims, itâs safe to assume that many on the woke left and the woke right alike will unleash a torrent of bad-faith arguments, from laying the blame on Israel to lashing out at Trump.
The rest of us know better: Pro-Palestine is anti-America, and Free Palestine means death. We must fight it with everything weâve got.
Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
