From Washington, DC, to Washington State

My Seattle Times op-ed with additional notes.

Here is my op-ed for the Seattle Times, printed in the May 28th edition:

On the evening of Wednesday, May 21, a young couple was shot to death outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.

Nearly everyone quickly and rightly condemned this tragedy. Yet it’s critical to understand the nature of the attack and what it says about anti-Jewish racism.

Too often, attacks on Jews are contextualized in a way that inadvertently blames them for their own deaths. Some initial news reports noted that the murder of the couple came at a time of increased tension in Gaza, as if the ongoing war should provide a helpful backdrop. Stories that led with the fact that they worked for the Israeli Embassy suggested that they may have had it coming.

This phenomenon occurs after every attack on a Jewish community when the attacker does not fit the profile of a classic racist, and when Jews don’t fit the mold of helpless victim. After a white man murdered 11 elderly Jews in their synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, the response was unequivocal: Racism and antisemitism are an intolerable stain on our country.

Elias Rodriguez, charged with first-degree murder in the shooting of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, is as vile and racist as the Pittsburgh shooter. As Rodriguez was being apprehended by police, he shouted the now familiar chant, “free, free Palestine.” This phrase, as well as “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” are not mere pleas for freedom, but rather calls for violence. We’ve been culturally conditioned to interpret these chants as political speech, but in fact they call for the destruction of Israel, which — no matter how the chanters may justify it — results sooner or later in the destruction of Jewish life.

Yet Rodriguez will likely go down as a deranged actor of political violence who, at some point, simply lost his way. An activist group he associated with, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which celebrated the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and has melded ideologically with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has quietly backed away and disavowed him. Self-described socialist groups that have adopted PFLP rhetoric are widespread in Washington state. They were involved in the campus encampments and behind the attacks on University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce’s home. These groups extol violence against Israel but never take responsibility when their supporters kill Jews.

My first thought when I heard about the murder of this young, vibrant couple was, “That could have been me.” After how many Jewish community events in downtown Seattle have I stepped out onto the sidewalk and into the night?

Then it hit me: It has happened here. It happened in 2006 when Naveed Haq was “angry about Israel” and managed to enter the Jewish Federation building and shoot six women, killing one. “It could have been me” is not an expression about the randomness of the universe. When Jews are attacked, it’s not usually because we’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. It actually could be us. We are fully aware of this everywhere we go, and while we are devastated over these deaths, we are not surprised.

This is why Jewish institutions the world over have locked doors, gate codes, guards, security screenings, metal detectors, bag checks, panic buttons, emergency phones, “stop the bleed” workshops, security plans, bulletproof glass, two-way mirrors and the police and FBI on speed-dial.

These protections may mitigate the effects of hate. But to counter the effects of hate, we need to understand what hate is.

Rodriguez set out to attack Jews. It does not matter if he was motivated by the Klan or Hamas. It does not matter if he lost his way. The effect is the same. The only difference is how the story is framed — and how we respond.

I wrote this a day after the shooting, on Thursday. It was accepted by the Times on Friday. By Tuesday, when it came out, new details about the shooter and the victims had come to light, including Rodriguez’s manifesto, which some noted did not contain a word of anti-Semitism.

This fact is probably a big relief to the anti-Israel crowd. They really needed Rodriguez to be a political actor to keep up the idea that Israel and Judaism are not intertwined. If he simply attacked representatives of Israel, then he’s just a garden variety domestic terrorist. See? Anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are completely different. Israel makes Jews less safe. If Israel didn’t exist, there would be no Israelis for a deranged socialist to shoot!

I never assumed Rodriguez hated Jews qua Jews. This is the point I was trying to make: anti-Semitism doesn’t look like some racist uncle from Oklahoma. It looks like a socialist from Chicago who for some reason thinks Israel is such a big problem he’s willing to die or spend his life in prison for it.

Why is that? You could point to the money and support the United States sends Israel, or the media, which seems to depend on content from Gaza as part of its financial sustainability plan. Or, you could look at the deeper issue, the one we’ve been ignoring because we are so committed to free speech. That’s the systemic anti-Jewish racism fomented by the red-green alliance, the intersection of communism and Islam. The propaganda ingested and regurgitated and re-ingested by these groups is soaked in anti-Semitism from historic Christianity and Islam, the former Soviet Union, and the Arab street.

The brilliant scholar Ruth Wisse describes anti-Semitism as political organization against the Jews. This explains the Arab world’s obsession with Israel, an obsession that has been taken up by Western supporters of anarchist tyranny.

Park MacDougald made a similar point this week in The Scroll:

Rodriguez may have murdered two innocent people in protest of a fictive genocide perpetrated by Jews, the narrative of which was fed to him by a global propaganda machine involving every antisemitic actor on the planet ranging from Hezbollah to Jake Shields, but, in his own mind, he didn’t hate Jews as Jews. He didn’t privately joke about the Holocaust, he didn’t deride Jews as “Christ-killers” or allege they were responsible for World War I or the pornography industry, he didn’t use anti-Jewish slurs, and he didn’t talk about how Hitler was misunderstood. So I’m sure everyone reading this is quite relieved.

MacDougald concludes that Rodriguez is, in fact, “a perfectly representative antisemite of our times.”

Young people taking to the streets in keffiyehs chanting about intifada is the left wing-corollary to the Charlottesville tiki torch parade. We need to stop seeing one as a threat to democracy and the other as free speech. Both are organizing their politics against Jews. Both are the new fronts of anti-Semitism that we must face and fight.

Shabbat shalom.

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In other news, Seattle police had to respond to a “disturbance” at the annual Folklife Festival last weekend when a man made a Nazi salute during the Seattle Jewish Chorale’s performance. According to witness Lavina Jethani, “He was even doing the salute while dancing to the music. He was smiling. It was very clear what he was doing, and his friend was even with him filming it as if he was proud of what he was doing.” SPD asked him to leave.

Cover photo by Ted Eytan, Wikimedia Commons

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