The pogrom comes to Washington

Two Israeli embassy staffers gunned down in the prime of their lives. Young lovers shot to death for the ‘crime’ of taking pride in Jewish heritage. He had bought a ring and was planning to propose to her next week in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish people’s homeland. We need to speak frankly about the vile slaying of Sarah Lynn Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky in Washington, DC last night. It was, in President Trump’s words, ‘obviously based on anti-Semitism’. It was an act of racist savagery that speaks to the anti-civilisational delirium that pumps in the veins of Israelophobia. It was the pogrom come to Washington.

Ms Milgrim and Mr Lischinsky were staff members at the Israeli Embassy in DC. Last night, they were shot dead as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. It was a cocktail-fuelled reception for ‘young diplomats’ aimed at ‘fostering unity and celebrating Jewish heritage’. The suspect in this sick crime was reportedly wearing a keffiyeh. ‘Free Palestine’, he hollered as he allegedly put bullets into the embassy staffers. ‘Globalise the intifada’, the drones of the Israelophobic mob have been shouting since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. Well, here it is, being globalised: Hamas-style savagery in the beating heart of the Western world.

America’s politicians are not mincing their words. This was a ‘deadly act of anti-Semitic violence’, says Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives. It’s hard to see what else it could be. If you lurk with a gun outside an event at a Jewish museum devoted to celebrating Jewish heritage, and callously butcher those who come out, it’s pretty clear what your motives are. That the suspect was allegedly wearing a keffiyeh and yelling about Gaza is not surprising: Jew hate comes gussied up in the Palestine colours these days. The fascist imagination disguises itself in faux-progressive talk about Palestine.

We await more information about the suspect. It remains to be seen if he worked alone or with others. So far as we know, one man bears responsibility for this savage act: the person who pulled the trigger. But it would be wrong, catastrophic in fact, to overlook the context in which this crime against the Jewish people unfolded. We cannot close our ears to the mood music in our societies – the screeching surround sound, in fact – that at the very least makes outrages like this one that bit more likely. We are living through the most ruthless, most relentless demonisation of the Jewish State in the entire 77 years of its existence. And it is hard to see last night’s double slaughter as anything other than the militarisation of that fashionable spite, the armed wing of a loathing for Israel that long ago crossed the line from political critique into neo-medieval hysteria.

Ours is a world in which the Jewish nation is continually damned as ‘uniquely murderous’. As barbarous beyond belief. As a pox on humanity. As so wicked it deserves violent erasure, ‘from the river to the sea’. Zionists ‘don’t deserve to live’, activists say. Jews can fuck off ‘back to Poland’, agitators cry. Week after week, the self-righteous beat the streets to libel Israel as a baby-killing machine. Just this week we were told – falsely – that this most bloodlusting state would gleefully oversee the death by starvation of 14,000 babies in 48 hours. Can we really be surprised if in the midst of such hysteria, in the frenzy of these daily defamations, some come to see Israel’s diplomats as demonic and deserving of the ultimate punishment?

An undertone, and very often an overtone, of threat and menace attends today’s orgies of Israelophobia. Activists praise Hamas’s acts of ‘resistance’, essentially dolling up neo-fascism as national liberation. People make excuses for the slaughter of 7 October. Some called it a ‘day of celebration’. Cosplaying as Palestinian militants has become all the rage on Anglo American campuses. ‘Intifada until victory!’, radicals cried in the aftermath of an ‘intifada’ that entailed the rape and murder of hundreds of Jews. Can we really be surprised if in the swirl of such savage urges, in this storm of praise for a pogrom, someone decides to become a one-man ‘intifada’? To bring home to DC some of that ‘glorious resistance’ against the demonic Zionist entity?

This is not to say that the activists and commentators who’ve been defaming Israel and suicidally cosying up to Islamism bear responsibility for last night’s gross crime. They might be lowlife motormouths but they have not killed anyone. It is essential to liberty that we conscientiously man the distinction between words and actions. And yet it would be a deadly folly to ignore the culture of intolerance and outright bigotry that has been stirred up by the myopic animus for the world’s only Jewish nation. Overlooking the cultural setting to last night’s barbarism would be as wrongheaded as ignoring the architecture of hate in which young Emmett Till’s life was extinguished in 1955. Unhinged hatreds birth unhinged behaviour.

Indeed, this act of violence does not stand alone. Since Hamas’s pogrom we’ve seen synagogues in the West attacked, Jews’ homes vandalised, Jewish students roughed up. Anti-Semitic abuse and assaults have spiked. It seems to me that what happened in DC last night was not a break from the post-7 October moment but a continuation of it, a raising of it to a grim new level, an intensification of the sheer unreason that has been unleashed these past 18 months. This is the globalisation of Hamas’s pogrom, a murderous assault not only on Jewish citizens and Israeli embassy staffers but also on our civilisation itself. If this fascistic killing does not open people’s eyes to the moral crisis of the 21st-century West, I fear nothing will.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy