To My Fellow Jews: What Will It Take???

After the events of this week, it should be clear to all of us that we can NOT continue like this.

The Capital Jewish Museum, at which the horrific events of this week took place.

My editor is on vacation, so my apologies in advance for any typos.

When I heard about the murders of the two young Israeli embassy staffers last night in Washington D.C., like everyone else, I was upset, very sad, and angry. I wanted to write something but decided to wait until I calmed down a little.

That never happened.

I also don’t want to contribute yet another article to the countless others that have appeared since that night - unless I had something original to say.

I hope that this will be that.

My initial reaction, after the burning anger, was that this should make it obvious that terrorism/pogroms/jihad have come to the United States, and that this shooting could have been prevented if the political climate had been different.

I was furious at the completely predicable flurry of virtue signaling “statements” and social media posts by politicians who obviously feel like they have to pretend to be outraged (no one believes that Israel hating Alexandia Ocasio Cortez was “devastated” as she absurdly claimed), or who exploit the murders of two Jews by using them as an opportunity to campaign.

I am furious that the obvious danger of allowing almost two years of “protests” in which it is acceptable to call for the murder of Jews, genocide of the Jewish people (G-d forbid), and threats against us, was allowed to continue for this long.

Officials of the indoctrination centers educational institutions where many of the demonstrations were/are held did absolutely nothing to stop them. In fact many joined faculty, and thousands of people off the street, and participated in these festivals of Jew hate.

At the same time, there was what was deemed a “pogrom” in Los Angeles, two other Jews were murdered for being Jewish (Paul Kessler in Los Angeles and Samantha Woll in Detroit), again in Los Angeles the home of the head of AIPAC was attacked on Thanksgiving, and the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro was firebombed a few weeks ago as his family was sleeping upstairs.

Not the America I grew up in, and I can go on, and on, and on….and on.

The murders of the young people murdered Wednesday night came weeks after the murder of an Israeli woman, Tzeela Gez, who was on her way to give birth with her husband, who was also shot.

At what point is this more like the 1930s than not like that period?

In almost every case there were no serious consequences for the actions of the perpetrators, and in some cases they didn’t even bother to arrest anyone.

In the case of Samantha Woll’s murder, her blood was found on the jacket of the suspect. The jury still didn’t convict him of first-degree murder, and charges of felony murder and home invasion were dropped. He was eventually only convicted of “lying to police.” Apparently, lying to police is worse in America than murdering two Jews.

In the case of Paul Kessler, his murderer plead not guilty and still hasn’t been tried. He was murdered in November… of 2023.

You can murder Jews, harass Jews, and target Jews in the United States and there will be no marches, no hand-wringing by the media and….no justice.

I (“for some reason”) doubt that Muriel Bowser, the Mayor of Washington D.C., will have “Jewish Lives Matter” painted down 16^th street, culminating in “Jewish Lives Matter Plaza,” as she did with “Black Lives Matter.”

The names of the two young people murdered on Wednesday were Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. Lischinsky’s last social media post condemned the ridiculous United Nations lie that 14,000 babies would starve to death in Gaza during the next 48 hours.

As Melanie Phillips points out in her recent article “Blood On Their Hands,” that claim is exactly the kind of thing that encourages Jew haters to murder. It IS also what they mean “Globalize the Intifada” means. She goes on to blame the same list of suspects that I would blame:

“The politicians who have allowed the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Iranian extremists to spread their influence throughout western civil society; the media and all those who relentlessly demonize Israel with blood libels and murderous lies, including the British, French and Canadian governments that this week threatened to punish Israel for defending itself—these all bear responsibility for what happened in Washington.”

The claim about the babies in Gaza was just the most recent in a very long line of blood libels that have spread globally, nearly unopposed, for years. This did not start on 10/8, it just became socially acceptable to be this open about hating Jews since 10/8.

It is even amazing that we are using words like “pogrom” and “blood libel” in the modern era. When I was growing up, these were words that applied to the distant past.

Milgrim was born in Kansas. She encountered antisemitism in high school. That experience only strengthened her Jewish identity. She eventually went to the University of Kansas, where she was active in Jewish life. She lived in Israel for a time, then moved back to the United States. She got a job at the Israeli embassy just before 10/7. Her story is heartbreaking for a reason I haven’t heard a lot of people site: she was clearly proud of her Jewishness, cared about the Jewish community, and wanted to make it better.

I have no words for how the loss of a young Jewish life makes me feel.

Politically, both sides share blame, although the left has been fanning the flames of Jew hatred harder, longer, and more efficiently than the right. But I want to be clear, by “blame” I mean for not doing enough to quell the situation; the only people responsible for the murders of Jews are the murderers.

However, while his supporters loves to minimize it, this is exactly why I was horrified that Dondald Trump would accept a plane from Qatar – a country that is one of the chief funders of Hamas. The $400 million dollar value of the plane is the part that bothered me least. Quatar is the single most onerous foreign entity in terms of its influence on multiple important aspects of American society. It buys politicians both right and left. Yet many conservatives (of which I am one, and have been for many years) immediately began the excuse making as soon as Trump said that he would accept the gift. It is unfathomable to me that a Jewish conservative would defend such an action, just as it is unfathomable that liberal Jews so often bend over backwards to support anti-Jewish policies and the politicians who create them.

The “it’s just a plane” excuse makers, which include prominent conservatives who should know better (respected historian Victor Davis Hanson is a great example) would never tolerate a democrat president taking a car, or even a set of golf clubs from Qatar. Trump claimed that “it would be stupid not to take a free gift.” Somehow the denialists miss the fact that all gifts are transactional, and you don’t accept gifts from our enemies. You know why? Because that would be stupid.

Moreover, while Trump has done far more than Biden to quash the seemingly endless Jew-hating demonstrations on campus, he has not applied the same enthusiasm for deporting campus agitators as he has illegal alien criminals. It is often pointed out to me that left-wing judges have blocked some of these deportations. That is not the point - at all. The point is that the demonstrations are clearly not significantly decreasing in number or intensity. So whatever Trump is doing isn’t effective. But after Wednesday, if there isn’t an immediate, and massive, crackdown, it ought to be clear that the administration’s actions thus far have been more for show than a genuine attempt to permanently end the problem.

I’m definitely not holding my breath though after the Obama-like tour of the Middle East, and Marco Rubio’s recent statements that Israel isn’t giving the Gazans enough aid (poor babies), and that Israel’s obviously necessary military blockade of Gaza is “hurting Israel’s security.”

Rubio was supposed to be one of the staunchest Israel supporters in the administration. When conservatives sound identical to liberals, and I know that this is hard for some people to understand - they are not actually conservatives. In fact, his rhetoric is identical to that of anyone in the Obama or Biden administrations. Add to that the fact that Trump is trying to reach a “nuclear deal” with the Middle East’s other most antisemitic regime, Iran, and had nothing but compliments for the former Al Qaeda member Syrian president – you have to be willfully blind to not see that things are not going well.

Then there are the circumstances of the shooting itself. The event was at something called “The Capital Jewish Museum.” I had never heard of it either. You can see that it is a typical, left-wing institution by taking even a quick look at their website (the mention of the “Freedom Seder” and the multiple uses of “LGTBQ+” tell the story).

It should have been obvious a very long time ago that the left’s agenda and Judaism are two completely separate ideologies, and what the left demands, and what is good for our people, are always diametrically opposed. (I am referring here to the left in terms of the far left, not liberals, who are increasingly a tiny minority in contemporary left-wing politics.)

Wednesday’s event was hosted by the American Jewish Committee. It was not specifically Israeli. That didn’t stop the from press immediately and predictably going into “the Jews had it coming” mode by repeatedly referring to the victims as “staffers in the Israeli embassy.” Obviously, absurdly implying that the motivation for the murders was political, and that his motivation wasn’t to murder as many Jews as possible.

While they did work at the embassy, they were murdered outside, on the street, by a leftist scumbag with a history of everything that entails. He had no way of knowing that they worked at the Israeli embassy.

He brought along his Nazi armband, I mean Klan hood, I mean keffiyeh, and pulled it out while shouting that little annoying, smug “free Palestine” chant so beloved by these people.

He was targeting Jews. Any Jews. It could easily have been any one of us.

Where was the security? How were there no security guards outside? How does a Jewish organization that takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year not provide the best, most effective security possible? I’ve worked for Jewish organizations and have been at many of their events. I’ve been on the inside and I know that there is usually security everywhere (and I mean, everywhere).

I’ve written about it before, and I am going to say it here: we deserve better leadership. Every secular Jewish organization is a total joke. Ironically, while rejecting most of our 3,500-year-old culture, values, and religion, they still tend to be incredibly old fashioned.

They are also cowardly and naïve.


At the AJC event they discussed “humanitarian diplomacy,” multi-faith responses to crises, and included a discussion about aid to Gaza. Because the poor, poor Arabs who animalistically attacked us on 10/7 should be our focus. Clearly, the billions in aid that they’ve received leading up to that day, and even more ridiculously since then, aren’t enough for the sad little terrorists. And yes, very few of them (VERY FEW) are “innocent civilians.”

I get that it’s all very nice and idealistic. But NONE OF THAT is what we need right now.

The majority of the Jews murdered on 10/7 were also left-wing, and strove to actively accept, and “celebrate” having Palestinians as their neighbors, and actually brought many of them into their lives and their homes.

Again: sounds nice (I guess). But this is the real world. What will it take to get people to realize that it is adult time, and that the people who hate us will never “like us” because we are nice to them? Or humane. Or fair. Or whatever. The “world” actually likes us, and more importantly, respects us, a lot more when we act as proud Jews.

How many wakeup calls do we need?

Perfectly illustrating this kind of naïve, childish stupidity (and I am being kind here), is the ”Jewish” publication “The Forward.” They had a headline asking “Was the D.C. Jewish museum shooting antisemitic?”

Really “The Forward”? Were the Nazis antisemitic, or no?

Could you imagine a left-wing, black publication in 1957, in Mississippi, after two blacks were murdered by white Klan members having a headline that read: “The Klan Attack, Racist or Not?”

Even if our lives weren’t at stake, this would not be funny.

We always said “never again.” Then we said after 10/7 that “never again is now.” That was 17 months ago.

It is time to grow up. We should not tolerate this any longer, no matter what it takes.

As long as there are no consequences for our attackers, they will keep attacking us. That has been true in Israel since 1948, and it is true in America right now. If the government and law enforcement will not make that happen, we will need to figure something else out.

This can’t continue.

Shabbat Shalom.

Never be afraid. Never give up.

Am Yisrael chai, all day – every single day.